Food security has always been a major concern for China's government. Up until recently that meant ensuring that enough food was produced in China to feed the entire population, and this task fell almost entirely to China's peasant farmers.

Over the past couple of decades, however, the government has shifted its approach to food security, gradually breaking with the old food self-sufficiency policies. Part of the impetus comes from the government's embrace of trade agreements that oblige China to allow imports of certain foods into the country. But the government has also pursued its own domestic policies aimed at shifting food production from peasant farms to larger commercial farms and shifting agriculture extension and procurement from public programmes to agribusiness and food corporations.