China hoards over half the world's grain

Result of PRC ramping up grain imports to rebuild pig heard lost to ASF. Also some of it is Phase One obligations to US. Article argues Chinas has "heavier" responsibility resolving maldistribution of food vs west. I mean sure, would be nice if people got grains before animals, but ensuring adequate pork supply to Chinese nationals is significant to PRC interests. Or west bread baskets can just grow more.

Reality is, PRC is nominally food secure, can produce enough staples by calorie to feed 1.4B domestically. But sustaining appetite for meat requires imports, and until better feed tech, better someone else waste their water and drain their soil to feed PRC hogs. Obviously solution is to embrace artificial meats, but current offerings are far from acceptable substitutes for Asian countries each part of animal is used in local cuisine.

As for fear mongering that it's hoarding for war - more useful to monitor strategic oil reserve, silo buildups and rocket force developments.

Does anyone have an idea of what percentage of China's total gain imports (and I guess net consumption) the "increased hoarding" represents?

Eyeballing the graph in the article, it looks like since 2016, China has increased its share of global wheat stocks from like 40% to 50%. Combined with a claim that China has enough wheat stocks to feed itself for a year and a half, that seems to indicate that on average China's "hoarding" increased its overall wheat "consumption" by roughly 10% per year?

That's obviously a significant chunk of wheat, and since, all the prices are interconnected, it obviously has a role to play in global food inflation, but I find the connection made in the article to be unsatisfying. Like it's an obviously true statement, but it also lacks any sense of magnitude of contribution.

I also wonder how the population vs stock share comparison would look like if you limited to say G20 nations. Obviously richer countries have more capacity to stockpile relative to population. Re-scaling that way would put China's behavior in (I think) better context.

China is reliant on food imports and as such is extremely vulnerable to blockade. It'd be more surprising if they didnt hoard food.

This is alarming because Chinese dependence on foreign food is a deterrent against foreign adventurism, such as invading Taiwan.

"And the world's second largest economy now faces food uncertainties due to factors such as its deteriorating relations with the U.S. and Australia, which could drastically alter the import environment. In fact, this could be what is prodding China to boost its calorie reserves." and "Less than 20% of the world's population has managed to stockpile more than half of the globe's maize and other grains, leading to steep price increases across the planet and dropping more countries into famine." - TLDR for the whole article, also seems like lately parts of the world including China is experiencing food uncertainties:

https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/rising-uncertainties-from-covi...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/15/floods-coronavirus-create-mo...

Is there an option without a pay wall?

Perspective: Before 2018, the top US export to China was soybeans, which was “appropriated” from the Middle Kingdom ca 1764.

If they'd start strong-arming the world's nations into taking drastic climate action soon, they might just have enough time to transform their recently acquired territories in Africa into a food factory before their current stores run out.

Edit: I wasn't being entirely serious by the way

Why shouldn't China convert its Foreign Reserves to commodities like grain?

Grain is worth more than fiat paper that's due to lose its value overnight, sooner or later.

(The US will NEVER repay its more than 30 trillion dollars of debt. It WILL default, probably sooner rather than later. On that day, the USD will be worth less than the paper it's printed on - just like happened to the Zimbabwe Dollar.)