Rising Soyabean Meal Import in China Hits Self Sufficiency
Targets
Beijing sees soybeans as the
agricultural industry’s biggest vulnerability, while plans to cut their use in
animal feed have little success
·
Target Missed:
China failed to reduce soybean meal usage in animal feed in 2025, with the
ratio stuck at 13.4%,
unchanged from the previous year.
·
Policy Goal Under Pressure:
Authorities had aimed to cut soybean meal use from 14.5% (2022) to below 13% by 2025, and
further to 10% by 2030—targets
now at risk.
·
Strategic Vulnerability:
Soybeans are seen by Beijing as the biggest
weakness in China’s agricultural sector, with imports meeting over 80% of domestic
demand.
·
Rising Import Dependence:
China, accounting for about 60%
of global soybean trade, imported a record 111.83 million tonnes
last year, mainly from Brazil
and the United States.
·
Limited Success of Substitutes:
Efforts since 2023 to replace soybean meal with alternatives like biosynthetic amino acids
have had minimal impact due to high
costs and scalability challenges.
·
Technology and Cost Barriers:
New feed technologies require advanced equipment, capital and skilled labour,
making adoption difficult for small
and medium feed producers.
·
Continued Demand Growth:
Analysts expect China’s soybean demand to grow 2–5% annually, driven by rising protein
consumption and improving living standards.
·
Government Diversification Efforts:
Beijing is promoting alternative feed sources, including microbial protein, processed food waste,
and high-quality forage.
·
Industry-Level Success Stories:
Muyuan Foods has reduced soybean meal content in its
feed to 7.3%
using amino acid substitutes, claiming potential savings of 20 million tonnes of
soybeans if adopted industry-wide.
·
Scale Remains the Challenge:
Despite pilot successes, most companies surveyed are not using substitutes at
scale due to economic and operational constraints.
·
US Trade Deal Complication:
The potential soybean savings roughly equal the annual volume China committed to buy from the US until 2028,
highlighting tension between trade commitments and self-sufficiency goals.
·
Pragmatic Industry View:
Feed producers remain open to alternatives only if they are cheaper and do not compromise animal
health or productivity.
·
Outlook:
Without cost-effective substitutes, China’s ambition to sharply cut soybean
dependence is likely to remain elusive in the near term.
China
has been working to cut the use of soybean meal in animal feed – the primary end-use
of imported soybeans – as part of its strategy to reduce external dependence, but
the latest industry data suggests these efforts have made limited headway.
Last
year, the proportion of soybean meal in domestically produced feed stood at 13.4
per cent, unchanged from the previous year, according to data released by the China
Feed Industry Association (CFIA) last week.
This
indicates that the goal set by agricultural authorities three years ago – reducing
soybean meal usage in feed from 14.5 per cent in 2022 to below 13 per cent by 2025
– remains unmet, adding pressure to a longer-term target of lowering the ratio to
10 per cent by 2030.
Beijing
views soybeans as the biggest vulnerability in its agricultural sector, with imports
consistently accounting for over 80 per cent of total demand. These imports, primarily
from Brazil and the United States, are mostly used to produce soybean meal for feed,
supporting the country’s massive and growing demand for meat.
Despite
efforts to find other protein sources to replace soybean meal since 2023, newly
developed substitutions – mainly biosynthetic amino acids – have yet to be utilised
at large scale, thereby making limited impact on China’s growing demand for soybeans,
Wang Wenshen, an analyst from bulk commodity consulting service provider Sublime
China Information, said.
“It’s
meaningful for cutting import reliance and safeguarding national food security,
but in practice, the new technologies are still too costly,” he said.
Contributing
around 60 per cent to global soybean trade, the world’s largest buyer has been increasing
its imports over the past few years, reaching a record high of 111.83 million tonnes
last year, according to Chinese customs data.
In
the meantime, the government has already been diversifying feed formulations, encouraging
the use of other feed resources for substitution, such as microbial protein feed,
table leftover food processed into feed products and high-quality forage.
A
plan from the agriculture ministry in April last year, required that by 2030, the
proportion of soybean meal in feed consumed by the national livestock industry be
reduced to around 10 per cent.
Earlier,
in 2023, the ministry’s three-year action plan for soybean meal reduction and substitution
in animal feed proposed an annual decline of more than 0.5 percentage points in
the soybean meal proportion, aiming to bring it below 13 per cent by 2025.
“A
handful of big companies are exploring, but none of the companies I surveyed in
recent years are actually using substitutions,” Wang said, citing the high requirement
for equipment, capital and talent that are beyond the reach of medium and small
businesses.
He
said China’s demand for soybeans would continue increasing at an estimated rate
of 2 to 5 per cent each year as domestic demand for protein increases with rising
living standards, while there was also an overcapacity in domestic crushing.
Muyuan Foods in Henan province, a leading player
in pig farming, believes that its ongoing development and application of low-soybean-meal
diets – replacing soybean meal with biosynthesised amino acids – could save 20 million
tonnes of soybeans if rolled out across the entire industry, official newspaper
Chinese Animal Husbandry and Veterinary News reported in June.
That
is close to the amount of soybeans the White House said
China had promised to buy annually till 2028 from the US as part of a trade deal
reached late last year.
Having
invested 143 million yuan (US$20.6 million) in 2024 to advance the application of
such diets, Muyuan has reduced the portion of soybean
meal in its feed down to 7.3 per cent, the report said.
Other
industry players are open to alternatives, as long as they are cost-effective, said
a manager at a medium-sized feed enterprise, who declined to be named as he is not
authorised to talk to the media.
“It
would be nice to replace soybean meal if there are less expensive options, but we
must consider the output – after switching to new feed, will the animals be as healthy
and robust as before?” he said.