Matthew 0:00
One thing I learned when making this series is that predicting the future of China's food system is notoriously difficult. Few people anticipated the pace and scale of China's transformation. A common refrain from people visiting China is that "they've seen the future". The high-speed rail. Tens of millions of electric vehicles. Food delivered to your train seat as it pulls into the next station. It's a future that has already arrived — at least for some people, in some places. Today we're looking further ahead, exploring some possible seismic shifts in China's food production, and what they might mean for the rest of the world.
Anna 0:48
What if China does what it did in solar and EV and other green technologies in food? Is anyone thinking about this? Is this an overlooked disruption that might come upon us as quickly as some of these other transformations have?
Matthew 1:06
This is a bonus episode of Feeding 1 in 6, a TABLE podcast series. I'm Matthew Kessler. Across four episodes, we traced how China's food system got to where it is today. This conversation is a chance to step back and look ahead — with people who've been asking similar questions, but from a different angle. Earlier this year, Systemiq published a consultation paper called China's Food Future. Its central argument is that China - currently the world's largest importer of agricultural products, buying 60% of globally traded soy - may be approaching a turning point. The paper projects soy imports could fall 25 to 50% in the coming decades, driven by feed reformulation and the early stages of alternative protein development. And by the 2040s, China could shift from net food importer to net food exporter of animal proteins. If that happens, the implications for global food systems would be profound. Today we're joined by two of the main authors, Anna Morser and Alex Andreoli from Systemiq, and Fengwei Liu, director of FOLU China — the Food and Land Use Coalition — who was consulted for the paper and joined us in an earlier episode. As a starting point, why this consultation paper? Why now? What's the gap you were trying to fill?
Anna 2:47
This paper actually arose out of some futures work that we were doing with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, kind of imagining plausible futures that might unfold based on emerging drivers rather than the drivers that shape our food system that we have today. So what we're looking for is those signals that something could change, whilst recognizing that the scale of China and the scale of China's transformations make this worth considering, even if it's a plausible future, not a prediction of the future.
Matthew 3:22
Yeah, I think that's a helpful distinction that we'll just hold throughout the conversation.
Fengwei 3:26
I might also share the report has really sparked many conversations across my network in China's food system space. I think it may be one of the most discussed reports in this field recently because it gives us structure and evidence to a question that many of us were carrying in our heads, but hasn't had a chance to prove. I think it fills what I would call an imagination gap about the future of the China food system. It challenges the linear growth narrative that rising income must inevitably mean more animal protein, more feed demand, and more soy imports. And it also creates a serious space to discuss a future that is not yet mainstreamed in China's food system debates. It helps to bring several issues together like diet, alternative proteins, feed, soy imports, land use impacts. And these topics are often discussed separately, but the report shows that they are actually deeply connected.
Matthew 4:38
Looking at systems, they're complicated and they're unpredictable. And China has a history of shifting priorities, of making new priorities, which have led to predictable and then contradictory outcomes, as well as unintended consequences. There are these kind of moments in time like African swine fever that just pivots an entire sector. So what I'm trying to say here is future-oriented analysis is difficult and naturally involves a lot of assumptions. So with that in mind, what do you see as the most useful and the most risky about projecting or speculating on China's food future?
Anna 5:13
I think the most useful thing about doing these kind of exercises is as I said before, we think this is really an overlooked potential future. What we're trying to do is really just highlight that this is plausible. It's not necessarily going to play out this way, but because the implications are quite far reaching and quite deep as well as broad, what we're trying to do through this is highlight that for people. I mean, it's risky in that if you took any of our numbers as gospel truth and made specific investment decisions around those, for example, we wouldn't necessarily recommend that because as you say, we're kind of running analytical scenarios and making our well-informed projections on that basis. It doesn't mean it you can use them for something like planning, for example, but as an as a view of where things could go, it I think it's a useful exercise to engage in.
Alex 6:16
Yeah, and building on that. To kind of help us triangulate the outcomes. The scenario based analysis that Anna mentioned involved stretching and underweighting or weighting different levers that we tested in the model, different solutions that could be adopted at scale in China to shift food systems and really played with both the ambition with which Chinese leadership and food system actors were chasing these targets or solutions – and the speed at which they would roll them out, adopt them, implement them at scale. And doing so gave us a range of nine plus different solutions that that played with that kind of ambition: low, medium, high. Speed: slow, medium, fast. And in the report we talk about the baseline kind of middle of the road one, which is the one where we see the most evidence for. But obviously it could sit on either side of that.
Anna 7:23
You asked about China's previous transition stop start and I guess kind of level of confidence around direction of travel. And I think where we are coming from on this one, beyond obviously "the playbook" that we set out in the report, is that we think given the geopolitical context and how things have changed in the last five years or so globally, we think that it's providing kind of an external push for the Chinese leadership's focus on food security beyond what they already had that we we think kind of bolsters our hypothesis that that we are at that year zero of of transformation.
Matthew 8:09
Yeah. In this series we covered, since the sixties, roughly, about how priorities have shifted, but food and food security have remained at the top. And what I'm excited to speak with you here is because we didn't touch on recent events. We didn't touch on projecting forward. We also didn't really talk about alternative proteins in the four episode series. And one of the reasons is highlighted by this quote from my interview with Michelle King, Chinese food historian at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Michelle 8:39
Have you heard of tofu? There's an alternative protein that's been around for hundreds, thousands of years at least. And why do they need alternative protein? They got tofu and it comes in 10,000 varieties. They have a long tradition of Chinese vegetarianism that comes from Buddhism, where they make all kinds of mock meats that taste just like meats, and they've done it already for centuries. Why do they need some kind of like, I don't know, Western scientific lab-based protein? What's the need for it?
Matthew 9:12
So first, how do you respond to this? Since it was a pretty central focus of the paper including the estimate that by 2050, 35 to 55% of domestic animal protein demand could be met by alternative proteins.
Alex 9:25
I mean it's a really great challenge. but I think it's something that im actually gives us more confidence that this could be adopted, these solutions could be adopted at scale in China as a market that has already adopted these solutions before is part of the cultural diet, it's part of what people expect and love as as part of their diet in in China. And so where for us substituting meat and us, I speak UK focus, but where we think substituting meat for an alternative might be less desirable, it's something that is kind of normal practice potentially in China already.
Matthew 10:06
So can you walk us through the alternative proteins' landscape? Alternative proteins are actually a very big category. So what's available on shelves now? And can you give us a sense of what's being explored or pursued? And not just in direct meat replacement.
Alex 10:23
Yeah, absolutely. I think in our work we assessed five different types. The first is your traditional or or your kind of new plant-based meat and dairy substitutes. The second biomass fermented alternative proteins, again meat and dairy substitutes, and that takes microbial single cell organisms and grows them in a vat essentially to produce a high protein output that can then be texturised and flavoured to produce something that is meat or dairy equivalent. The third are precision fermented ingredients, which involve taking again a normally a microbial organism and encouraging it to express a particular protein that you might then extract and use as an ingredient elsewhere. Something that we already do for things like insulin, for example, but now moving that technology to food. The fourth are cultivated meats, and so often the kind of headline grabbing version of alternative protein where you take an animal cell and it's a very similar process to the biomass or the precision fermented. You take an animal cell, you grow it in a vat and encourage an actually genetically identical product to the meats that we currently eat, to grow in these vats in these conditions. And then again texturize and flavour where necessary. And the last alternative protein that we look at is actually for feed. So substituting soy in particular for alternative varieties, be they fermented plant based ingredients, or for the case of fish meal or fish oil, more novel like algal oil proteins that might be able to substitute the kind of nutritional requirements for those livestock species. When you ask about what the landscape of alternative proteins in China is and what's on the shelves right now, I think it's similar to what you would find in European, US, UK supermarkets in that it's dominated by plant-based varieties. That is the most mature technology. It's what we found in our analysis as well. And in particular, plant based milk. So that's something that has now kind of reached price parity in many places, i.e., a liter of plant based milk is the same price or less than as a liter of cow's milk. And they're also taste and kind of suitability are 'like for like' replacement in many cases. With biomass fermented ingredients, in the UK, you can think Quorn, for example. In China, we actually found that these are still somewhat novel, despite tofu and tempeh being a fermented version of of plant-based foods. Biomass ingredients and proteins are somewhat are still somewhat novel. And I think that comes back to Anna's earlier point that this is the start of a food system transformation, it's still very much in the early stages of this progression. And cultivated meat we haven't seen that on kind of readily accessible, available in markets yet.
Matthew 13:56
Yeah, and just to both push back a little and support what you're saying, China holds eight of the twenty patents on cultivated meat currently, so it's clearly something that the research labs are looking at. I think one of the reasons that I've heard from other people as well is that these biomass plants haven't been as successful, is because they are trying to meet a one-for-one match, but they're creating an inferior product and the Chinese market is not having it. I think there's been a number of attempts including into kind of the Western fast foods that have tried these products and then they've moved them out of rotation because they weren't so successful.
Alex 14:37
I would just say I completely agree, but you're also seeing a move to using these as ingredients to supplement, not necessarily to replace. And so there are huge investments now in factories producing high protein yeast that might be used to supplement flour in bread and make a high protein variety of that, or also to to kind of reduce meat content, not to replace meat content in other products.
Matthew 15:05
And I find that especially interesting because that's also part of the feed replacement strategy or the Feed Protein Reduction Action Plan. Because then you might not be seeing these catchy headlines, but behind the scenes this is becoming a more significant part of production. And I see in your model too, that's accounting for not a small portion of the growth.
Alex 15:24
Exactly.
Matthew 15:25
Fengwei, why do you think a transition to these products might be successful or what type of barriers might they meet along the way?
Fengwei 15:34
I think whether this new technology will be successful also depends on how it can be accepted, affordable or commercially viable. I think around 2019 to 2021, those companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods created huge excitement in Western capital market. And at the same time, many people saw China as the next big market. As it has huge population that has high meat consumption. And there were also a wave of plant-based meat startups and brands in China. I could remember my first try of plant-based meat in China. It was the plant-based lasagna in Starbucks back to 2019. But after the early hype, the sector slowed down and never really broke into the mainstream market. Many reports later trying to figure out why alternative protein did not take off in China. There's quite simple answer is that Chinese consumers have very high expectations for meat, the texture, the flavor, the cooking performance. The Chinese cuisine uses meat in many different kinds of ways. So one product cannot be easily replaced. And there's the very common argument that I want to echo just from you that, well, I say that China has real tofu and why would Chinese want to have fake tofu? So I think the industry still needs much more innovation. It's not enough just to copy the Western plant-based burger model. The products need to feed Chinese cooking, the Chinese taste, the Chinese price expectations and some real eating and cooking occasions. For the commercial viability, I want to take the example of Muyuan alternative feed. So Muyuan is China's largest pig producer and maybe by some measures probably the largest in the world. It is also one of the most ambitious reformers in the feed sector. And for years, the Muyuan has been using alternative feed ingredients to replace part of the soy meal in its feed, mainly to improve the feed efficiency and reduce cost. So some reports show that Mu Yuan's soy meal ratio is not fixed. There were 6.9 % in 2021, dropped to 5.7 % in 2023, and then back to 7% in 2024. So the movement is very closely linked to the soybean prices. When the soy meal is expensive, Muyuan uses less of it. When soy meal becomes cheaper, it uses more. So I think it shows that at least the alternative feed ingredient has not yet achieved absolute cost advantage. And in the future, the soy meal reduction will only become stable when the low-soy feed formulas can consistently beat the conventional soy meal-based formulas on both cost and animal performance.
Matthew 18:42
That's really interesting. And I want to focus more now on the production side of alternative proteins. And this is a story that's happening around the world. But what might give China a genuine competitive edge here?
Anna 18:57
I think the thing that gives China a competitive edge on an overall kind of macro level is the playbook that we've identified. So obviously in other locations you'll have some level of government support, some level of coordination in some places. but a lot of times you've got individual innovators funded by VC and they'll often produce amazing technology. But what we see in China and what we saw with the solar and the EV transitions that we highlight in the report is that when China puts resources towards something at scale and with a real purpose, that it can accelerate beyond what people outside of China can imagine is possible. So I think that's a kind of overarching competitive advantage that we would see. Alex, do you wanna pick up on the specifics around biomanufacturing?
Alex 19:54
Yeah, I think this is something Anna and I have discussed at length, but it's kind of the ability of Chinese industry to leverage general purpose technologies and apply them to specific use cases across different industries. And so I think you can see this in the electric vehicle and solar transition that we pick up on in the report and how like semiconductor manufacturing, chip manufacturing, battery experience from maybe phones and personal equipment into cars. The technology might look very different, but the knowledge, the experience of working with these materials and production processes, the R and D infrastructure that's needed to then accelerate adoption and innovation in these industries is a learned skill that can be applied across different industries. And I think we're starting to see and we can see the same thing happening in food. And in particular with these biomanufactured ingredients. China has already become the world's leading amino acid producer. It has a large pharmaceutical industry, it leverages many of the same kind of skills, much of the same knowledge, much of the same experience and expertise in those industries and can leverage them for novel food industries. And I think that's where again this competitive edge kind of comes out.
Matthew 21:21
I think it's also something that can turn the dial quite quickly. Like there can be a sea change in a shorter period of time because of this level of coordination. And as I've been having conversations around it, the thing that comes up most is like what can people from the outside learn from China's food system. And I mean, on page 13, "the playbook" of your report, I think this is one of the most interesting things, which is this diagram, which we'll share on our episode webpage about this strategic and coordinated vision and how industry, research and central government and provincial government are all talking to each other rather than everyone else doing these separate projects. And there's a lots of things you can kind of critique, but you could also be kind of impressed by how quickly things can change and get done and they've very much proven it. So China's EV and solar panel story is extraordinary. Each now controls over seventy percent of global market share. But there is an argument that is being made that this is an addition to the energy sector, not a transition. That fossil fuel use hasn't fallen, renewables have just been added on top. I wonder if you can comment on this and also if you see a similar dynamic playing out with alternative proteins where they would be added to the high environmental impact of meat production rather than replacing it.
Anna 22:44
I mean, yes, we haven't seen a replacement of fossil fuels yet. However, those renewables are meeting demand that without renewables would have been met by fossil fuels. So it is still contributing to overall a lower impact energy system than a system without EVs or solar would have been. So just because it hasn't fully replaced things doesn't mean it's not doing a huge amount of good already. and I think we are now, I mean, we're kind of 15 years into those transitions. I think we're only going to see it grow and hopefully we will start to see the replacement start to happen. I think remembering that we are still in the grand scheme of things relatively early into this transition and it is pulling achievements forward. When we see food, I think we will likely just see something similar where it comes online alongside traditional before playing a bit more of a replacement role. And I think food is interesting also because as Alex said, there's potential to use it as an ingredient alongside meat as well. You don't have to be all or nothing. So I think there are a number of ways that we'll see this enter the food system and it won't fully replace for quite a while, we would expect.
Fengwei 24:10
I think the goal on energy transition can only be reached if the other parts of the energy system also move. Like using energy more efficiently, building more grid infrastructure and those practice on demand-side management. And I think food system is similar. If alternative protein is the only change, it may just simply meet the new demand on top of the existing meat consumption as an addition. But to make the transition happen, the other parts of the food system also have to change, like reducing food loss and waste, shifting diet, et cetera.
Matthew 24:52
Yeah, China is, you know, very politically attuned to not having anything run out, right? There needs to be energy abundance, there needs to be food abundance. These are deeply politically, culturally sensitive topics. So in 2040, you project 14% of beef protein demand to be met by alternative proteins and 16% of fish demand and then a steeper increase in the coming decades. You've already talked a little bit about like where you arrive at those estimates, but I'm also curious, what does that actually mean in practice? Does that lead to fewer animals? Does that change soy as a feed demand? How do you see that kind of actually playing out?
Alex 25:36
On the projections, I think one of the things to keep in mind as we worked through this was we have an understanding of how kind of adoption of these technologies might happen and the and the things that influence it based on work that SystemIQ has done with Exeter and other work that other institutions have have done on tipping points. And there are three things that kind of surface as critical to enabling a change in behavior and a tip into a new kind of system norm. One of them is accessibility. Can you go and find these products in an easy way where you used to find the alternative? Another is attractiveness, do we want to use them and are we capable of using them? And in the case of food, that essentially means can we cook with them in the same way that we used to cook with the conventional protein? And the last one is affordability. How expensive is the new technology compared to the old? Has it met price parity? Is that the threshold at which mass consumer adoption happens? And we bear these in mind in the analysis when we're projecting the production and adoption of these alternative protein technologies. And so you rightly point out that by 2040 it's a 14 to 16 percent increase for beef and seafood, and kind of eight or nine for other animal proteins. But then there's a big jump to twenty fifty. and that's essentially because it takes a while. For cultivated meat technologies to mature. So that it's a really novel industry today. The prices are quite high. Whereas biomass and plant-based, the prices are near price parity today, if not in some cases they've reached it. Which means that that's a lower, much lower barrier to adoption. And in fact, instead, it's the attractiveness that we think consumers struggle with both in terms of taste and texture but also in ability to use. Whereas cultivated it kind of gets around that limit because it is identical genetically speaking to the animal-based equivalent. Now, there's a lot of work to do in the cultivated industry on the texture of these proteins, the taste, because there are other parts to a steak than just the meat cells or the fat cells. But they're not insurmountable problems. And so the jump from 2040 to 2050 is due to that technology coming online becoming price competitive and price parable. On the "what does that mean in practice?" It's a really big question, and I don't think one that we can answer really now. I mean, these are kind of 15-25-year projections or or estimates, scenario imaginings, right? And I think one of the critical factors will be whether the alternative protein replaces domestic livestock production as well as consumption. And what I mean here is that as Chinese consumers reduce their meat intake and replace it with alternative protein, there will be a surplus, a gap left where they used to consume domestically produced pork and now they're consuming domestically produced pork alternative. Whether pork producers respond to that by reducing the amount of livestock they stock and produce, or whether they see that as an opportunity to switch from selling domestically to selling internationally is a great question. And it depends on trade relationships at that point. It depends on kind of competitiveness in an international market. There are so many factors in this that it's a really hard question to answer.
Matthew 29:38
So let's shift to this import-export reversal. Thin Lei Win, the journalist and writer of the Substack Thin Ink, covered this series in May and she wrote something that really struck me, which was in the wake of African swine fever, there was a real demand for pork to be imported into China. And in a relatively short period, there was a region in central Spain that scaled up its industrial pork production in a massive way to help meet that demand. And it changed this area's entire economy. And what that illustrates, given the scale of China, is that when China decides to stop importing or begin exporting, it can have a huge impact on global markets. So I really paused what I read in the future scenario in your paper that said, China is projected to become a net exporter of animal protein products in the 2040s. So I'd like to unpack a few of the big global implications of this. And perhaps we could start with soy, which was something that we closely tracked in the pork episode. So you suggest that we've hit peak soy today, with an expected decline of 25% by 2030, and possibly followed by a very steep decline of 25 to 50% in the coming decades. So what has to hold for that to happen and maybe also what part of that projection is most fragile?
Anna 30:56
So the numbers, the near-term projections, Matthew, are based not on any assumptions around alternative proteins. They're actually based on the composition of feed. So China set targets about soy inclusion in feed and bringing that down to 10%. And what we know from Muyuan, who Fengwei mentioned earlier, this is already being done, is already possible. They're well below 10% soy inclusion already. So what we've assumed to get to the estimates that we've got in the paper is that we assume that the government targets are hit. So this is one of these what we're calling conventional strategies, and the way we've modeled those is essentially achievement of targets by the time frame the government sets out. So that's not assuming anything particularly radical given that we're not relying on new technology growth to deliver that impact. Beyond that, we do start to then get into the impact of alternative proteins in the food system to get to a further reduction in soy. So that's where those numbers come from. In terms of global implications, I think it's a great question. And it's one we I'd say we raise in the paper, but we don't deep dive on. What we've done in the paper is really say, here's where China's food system could go, given the drive to food security and these strategies that we've identified as high impact, high probability. We compare that - we kind of dimensionalize that versus today's trade flows. But what we didn't do is we didn't say we think it will mean this percent reduction in trade from Brazil or from Argentina, from the US. And actually we know people are super interested in what might be the implications for their country or geography. We've already done some additional modeling on Brazil specifically. And what the implications might be in more detail there. But it can be a hard one to model and predict because as you say, Matthew, these are trade flows and I think we see even in times of big shocks like COVID or the Strait of Hormuz, like things get interrupted, but then they do find ways to flow around. And so we didn't extend our plausible futures thinking into really the specific impacts on trade flows beyond what we think China's demand shifts will be.
Matthew 33:40
I appreciate what you said too about trade flow are dynamic, so you're careful not to draw a straight line from reduced soy imports to reduce deforestation in Brazil.
Anna 33:51
One of the things we looked at - we talked to a lot of people through the course of this paper and we're very grateful to everyone who provided their expertise. And some of our commodity experts said basically somebody else will buy it if China doesn't. And on soy specifically, we don't believe that would hold true, because soy is very specifically grown as animal feed. I mean, the soy that China consumes for human consumption is largely grown in China today. and so we are very much talking about soy being produced for animal feed. And when we looked at other animal protein production systems around the world, we don't think there are that many that could absorb the excess soy that would be created if you maintain soy production as it is today. We actually - we did think hard about it because it was one of the main challenges we got early in the work. And we did come to the conclusion that we do think the Chinese demand won't be for soy specifically, won't be easily replaced. What that means for deforestation, is that there is potential to use this to move towards more sustainable way of producing it, particularly in Brazil and places where the rainforest is at risk, but it's not by any means a default or a given. So what we think this should encourage producers and funders of ag in these nations is to look at the implications of this playing through and to start to think about where would it make more economic sense to say restore degraded land and protect nature rather than continuing to expand the agricultural footprint? But it needs to be considered and chosen. It's not just gonna default that way because there are substitute crops. We still think even with an increase in maize that we project from China that it would still save a huge amount of land.
Matthew 35:59
Fengwei, I want to bring you in here too to ask about what this means for Chinese farmers.
Fengwei 36:06
Yeah, I think we all know that alternative feed has a quite high technical bar and I want to take Muyuan as another example. Muyuan has its own feed research institute with 200 staffs. So I think for the big companies, they use nutrition science data system to reduce their dependence on soy, but for the small livestock farmers, replacing soy may just mean higher feed cost and losing competitiveness in the market. And another point I want to mention here is Chinese government cares deeply about rural income. We know that poverty alleviation is one of the biggest political achievements in China. And in the recent years, the farmer's income, the risk of falling back into poverty became very clearly policy red line in China. So I don't think that the government will just simply let the agri-food sector to be reshaped by the market force alone, especially when it affects food prices and farmers' livelihoods. So I think it means that the alternative protein or feed sector could win strong policy support if it can show that it won't bring farmers back to poverty and it might somehow create new opportunities to the rural income.
Matthew 37:35
Let's just zoom out for a second and then follow these trends forward. So China is closing the yield gaps. They're improving nitrogen efficiency, investing in producing more high value food products. It's not that hard to see how China becomes an even more significant global exporter. I wonder if there are other things you'd like to highlight about what the geopolitical implications of this shift might mean for the countries that are currently feeding China or the ones that are maybe threatened by the competition of its entrance into the market.
Alex 38:10
It's a great question. I think to my mind there are maybe three strands to the answer. The first and one that is really hard to predict or or opine on is how it will affect relations between nation states. Especially today with the volatility that you see in the world. The other two strands I think one is how should kind of policymakers, nation states, industries think about export markets of the future and how they position themselves best to ensure access in perpetuity. And it's something we touch on in the report, but I think it deserves real thought in how, what standards are you applying to food production whether that be environmental or welfare or nutrition to ensure that your products are the best possible products in the market and allow you the kind of broadest consumer adoption possible. And the other question I think on my mind is on what technologies are potentially unlocked in this transition that's happening in China? And how could other international or other national markets adopt those technologies off the back of this? China's move is to make their food system more efficient. And policymakers, decision makers in food systems around the world could look at their own domestic production and say, okay, how could such a move, such a strategy, benefit our country as well? And I think there's a critical question across all of this of how countries are preparing their people for this transition. And it's a "just transition" question. And are they getting ahead of the transition before it's disruptive or waiting for it and only being responsive?
Anna 40:24
One of the things we've been kind of imagining or plausible futures we've been imagining is if if China delivers what we sketch out in the report in terms of biomanufacturing and accelerates globally the capabilities to say produce cultivated meat that that is a sub a true substitute for for animal protein today combining that with the solar transition and what they've already done to to reduce the cost of electricity. What new production footprints does that open up? I mean think of the Middle East for example heavily heavily dependent on food imports. If they can, using the abundant sunshine they've got, run these biomanufacturing facilities for next to nothing. Obviously there'll still be some feedstock imports required. But what are the possibilities that that opens up? And if you play that kind of thinking through, the implications get even broader and even deeper than just the commodity flows that we've been talking about already in this conversation. So I think that's another interesting thing to start to imagine.
Fengwei 41:42
And I think I can add that understanding linkage is very important and it gives us a chance to act before the system locks into the new high land use pathways. If we wait until the new capital has already gone into those high new risk commodities, it will be just much harder to change direction later. But if we see the risk early and we can help to redirect the finance, procurement and policy signals before they become locked in. So that's how I see the value of the report. It's not only in prediction a possible shift in China's soy demand. It is in giving us an early warning system and a window to shape the next set of incentives.
Matthew 42:34
I think this is a great place to wrap. Fengwei Liu, Alex Andreoli, Anna Morser, thank you so much for joining us.
Anna 42:43
Thank you.
Alex 42:44
Thank you so much.
Matthew 42:47
Thanks for listening. We'll link to the SystemIQ's paper China's Food Future in our shownotes and our episode webpage. Have comments or questions on the series or the paper - send us an email to podcast@tabledebates.org And if you're thinking, hmm they didn't talk much about smallholders or the countryside, where hundreds of millions of people live. Our next bonus episode will cover that. This series is a collaborative production between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust. Produced, edited and hosted by me, Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you soon.