Agricultural partnership shows great potential

China and the United States are agricultural powerhouses, and what happens on their farms can ripple far beyond their borders affecting food security, the climate and the health of the land.

Across both countries, degraded soils are losing their ability to sustain crops and store carbon, while climate change brings greater risks of droughts and floods. Ensuring enough food for the world while protecting the land is becoming one of the defining challenges of this century.

China and the US have different agricultural systems, but that is why cooperation — from restoring soil health to using fertilizer and water more efficiently and adapting to a changing climate — could benefit not only both countries, but the world.

In this context, China and the US must protect, restore and sustainably manage soil health to strengthen ecosystem services that benefit both humans and nature. Important among these services, generated through management of soil health, are the production of nutritious and healthy food, renewal and purification of water, maintenance of above — and below-ground biodiversity, adaptation and mitigation of anthropogenic climate change, and enhancement of aesthetic value of the landscape. Management of soil health is also essential to promoting world peace and tranquility, which requires China and the US to work together.

China and the US should expand their focus from traditional grain security to a broader food/nutritional security concept by building a new cooperative relationship. The widespread adoption and upscaling of regenerative agriculture (RA) practices in China and the US can serve as a global model for achieving net zero emissions in the future. Farms that use RA practices are examples of nature-based climate solutions, producing more food grains with fewer inputs of fertilizers, pesticides and other energy-based inputs. These RA practices follow a simple principle: "producing more from less". They can also help remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soil and other land ecosystems. Examples of these RA practices include conservation agriculture, cover cropping, drip-sub fertigation and complex farming systems based on integration of crops with trees and livestock.

These practices, leading to emission avoidance and soil carbon sequestration, are called "carbon farming".

The concept of carbon farming involves growing carbon in land-based sinks which can also generate another income stream through payments for ecosystem services. Upscaling of nature-based approaches in the US and China can be a global model for making agriculture a solution to mitigating anthropogenic climate change and achieving food/nutritional security. China-US cooperation can also help identify global hot spots of land-based carbon sinks for promoting carbon farming.

Some of the best opportunities for carbon farming are found on damaged or degraded land — including depleted soils, desertified areas, eroding hillsides, abandoned or heavily disturbed mines, overgrazed pastures and polluted floodplains. With the right management practices tailored to local conditions, agricultural soils can store meaningful amounts of carbon each year, and both China and the US have considerable room to expand this potential across their croplands.

Sequestration of atmospheric CO2 in land-based sinks (soil, trees, wetlands) is a win-win option. Sequestration of atmospheric CO2 in degraded lands creates another income stream for farmers, enhances agronomic productivity and nutritional quality of food and forage to help end hunger, promotes good health and well-being, increases clean water availability and renewable resources, supports climate action, enhances life on land, and promotes peace, justice and equity.

As productivity improves, some farmland could be spared for nature, allowing soils and ecosystems to store more carbon and provide essential ecosystem services. Both countries could also expand carbon farming, giving farmers a financial incentive to store carbon, while strengthening soil-health policies and making the restoration of degraded soils and desertified land a priority.

Negative emission technologies could further help reduce the carbon footprint of food production and support both countries in pursuing their respective climate goals. But food security should not be measured only in tons of grain output. Improving the nutritional quality of staple crops including their protein, fiber, vitamins and essential micronutrient content is equally important. Taken together, these efforts could turn China-US agricultural cooperation into a model for making farming more productive, sustainable and resilient, and advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, benefiting both people and nature. The two countries could then work together to identify regions with the greatest potential for carbon sequestration, helping restore carbon to degraded land and, ultimately, to the wider biosphere.

China-US cooperation in agriculture and food systems can pave the way to global peace while advancing the SDGs under the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is a win-win strategy for both countries and all humanity.

The author is a laureate of the 2018 GCHERA World Agriculture Prize, the 2019 Japan Prize, the 2020 World Food Prize and the 2024 Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity, and a distinguished university professor of soil science at Ohio State University.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.