Can China Reduce Soybean Import Demand? Evaluating Soybean Meal Reduction Efforts

By Jilang Qing and Joe Janzen

China relies heavily on soybean imports to meet domestic livestock feed demand. China imports around 100 million tons of soybeans each year, more than 90% of which come from the US and Brazil. For the US, China typically accounts for more than half of US soybean exports, equivalent to roughly one-quarter of total US production in recent years. For Brazil, the dependency is even more pronounced: about 70–80% of Brazil’s soybean exports are destined for China. Changes in China’s demand therefore have substantial impacts on global soybean prices.

Because global soybean production and use are concentrated in a relatively limited number of countries, China, Brazil, and the US are all relatively exposed to soybean market risks stemming from geopolitical tensions, logistical disruptions, and shifts in trade policy. Governments and industry in each country are actively trying to manage this trade-related risk. Policy discussions in this area often focus on making soybean supply chains more ‘resilient’, often through greater self-sufficiency. Brazil and the US, as exporters, try to boost domestic demand, for example using subsidies and mandates for biofuels.

For importers like China, efforts to increase soybean self-sufficiency include strategies to reduce soybean meal use (Cao and Thukral, 2025) and expand domestic soybean production. We focus this article on soybean meal use. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) estimated the soymeal inclusion rate, the share of soybean meal in domestic feed, to be around 17% in 2017. Following the implementation of a soybean meal reduction policy described below, the official government-estimated inclusion rate fell to below 13% in 2023. This article reconciles this apparent success in reducing soybean meal demand with other data sources on soybean imports and use.

China’s soybean self-sufficiency trajectory has significant implications for the structure of international soybean trade and the dynamics of global oilseed markets. We find China has made limited progress toward self-sufficiency: soymeal inclusion rates have declined but not as sharply or smoothly as official figures suggest and China’s overall soybean import demand remains high. Consequently, impacts of China’s soybean meal reduction policy on major soybean exporters like the US and Brazil is likely to be small in the near term, though the possibility of longer-run demand adjustments cannot be ruled out.

The Path to China’s Soybean Import Dependence

The self-sufficiency rate, or the ratio of domestic production to domestic consumption, describes the degree to which imports and existing inventories are necessary to fulfill commodity demand. Persistent imbalances reflect import dependence. In figure 1a, we describe China’s self-sufficiency since 2010 for select grains and oilseeds according to USDA Foreign Agricultural Service data. It shows China is close to self-sufficient in staple grains such as corn, rice, and wheat. Self-sufficiency in oilseeds is lower and more variable. China is basically self-sufficient in sunflower seed and has a canola self-sufficiency rate around 80%. For both staple grains and some oilseed crops, imports may be required in some years, and those imports may be significant relative to global trade, but China’s production and consumption are of similar magnitude.

The major exception to China’s relative self-sufficiency in agricultural commodities is soybeans, whose self-sufficiency rate has been just around 20 percent. This level has persisted for a decade or more. China’s import dependence for soybeans originated in the period of rapid economic growth and demographic expansion that began in the early 1990s. At that time, domestic production largely covered domestic use, and the self-sufficiency rate exceeded 100% as shown in Figure 1b. As the Chinese economy boomed, demand for soybeans rose while production did not. Population growth increased overall food requirements, while rising incomes and urbanization triggered a well-documented “nutrition transition” toward greater consumption of animal-source foods (Delgado et al., 1999). This shift sharply raised the need for feed in general, and for soybean meal as the primary protein ingredient in livestock production (Gale, 2015). This created persistent domestic shortfalls, transforming China from a self-sufficient soybean producer into the world’s largest soybean importer.