~ Linn Maung ~
China has intensified its efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in agriculture production, but the fast ageing population, urban migration, and absence of a skilled workforcehave become major obstructions. China’s population fell for the third straight year as it reduced by 1.39 million to 1.408 billion in 2024. This is going to have a direct negative impact on farming operations and output.
Notably, China has targetted 700 million tonnes of grain output in 2025 as it seeks to reduce its dependency on farm imports. To attain the goal of food security, it has come up with measures, including efficient agricultural land management, better agricultural insurance coverage, and the adoption of biotechnology applications.
Yet, these efforts and strategies may struggle to work out due to a lack of adequate and skilled manpower. The agricultural labour force in China is ageing, which means a significant share of farmers are old. Those below age 40 were just 19 percent in 2020, as per the official census data. And it is likely to fall further amid a deepening demographic crisis.
New births in China have been declining in China while the number of senior citizens in on the increase. The share of people aged above 60 was 10.3 percent of the population, which reached close to 19 percent in 2021. It has had its impact on the agriculture labour force. The average age of farm labour increased to 57.34 in 2020 from 47.25 in 2003.
While China’s agriculture is embracing capital and technology intensive farming, the shortage of labour is proving detrimental to agricultural production. “The shortage of labour makes the price of labour rise, and thus the cost of labour inputs increases, and the constraints on the inputs of agricultural factors of production for farmers are tightened,” reads the report by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
According to the UN population estimates, the share of old people will cross 30 percent of the total population by 2035. It may have a negative impact on agriculture production and food security. “The level and rate of ageing in rural areas are much higher than in urban areas, and the ageing of the agricultural labour force poses a significant challenge to agricultural production,” reads research by Chinese scholars led by Chaozhu Li of China Institute for Rural Studies, Tsinghua University.
China managed to improve the farm output with the help of modern crop inputs but it caused environmental degradation. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides has caused soil degradation, water pollution, and damaged bio-diversity, as per a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Things are expected to worse, negatively impacting agricultural production, in the wake of climate change, it added.
Chinese researchers asserted that ageing would make it difficult to meet the needs of modern agricultural production. “With the ageing of the elderly labour force, their physiological function will continue to decline, and their physical health status will gradually deteriorate, reducing their ability to bear high-intensity agricultural production activities,” they wrote.
Another research report by Beijing and Yangling-based researchers asserted that the ageing of the agricultural labour force was inevitable due to the migration of labourers to urban areas. “At this stage, the ageing of China’s rural population is fast and deep, the loss of young and strong labourers is serious, and the effective agricultural labour force continues to decline,” reads the report led by Guifang Su.
About 280 millions of farmers migrated from rural areas to cities in past few decades thanks to industrial growth that began in 1990s. So many farmers abandoned their lands in order to earn better income in cities. Beijing has the massive responsibility to feed about one-fifth of the world’s population.
If there are more migrants in any farmer family, more difficulties will arise in farm operations in the wake of adverse weather conditions, plant growth, and natural disasters, said a group of Chinese researchers. “Migration can decrease farm technical efficiency by reducing labour available for agriculture production on the one hand,” said the researchers led by Guangcheng Ren of Nanjing Agricultural University.
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