China's farm imports outpace exports

China is a natural importer of many agricultural products. Urbanisation is gobbling up farm land. Water is in short supply throughout much of the area north of the Yangtze river and the cost of several other farm inputs is also rising. On the demand side, rising levels of wealth and a shift towards higher protein diets is combining with a growing middle class insistence on healthy, quality foods. All this adds up to manifold opportunities for companies that export farm goods to China stretching decades into the future. Consider, for example, that the consumption of vegetable oil in China was only 7.54kg per capita in 2005, compared with Japan's 14.19kg, Korea's 14.84kg, and the US's 31.87kg.