Transforming the Northeast Granary into a "Big Kitchen"

The grain industry in Northeast China has ushered in new opportunities for development.This has pointed out the direction for the development of grain processing industry in Heilongjiang and even Northeast China.

Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Jilin, and Inner Mongolia provinces and regions bear the heavy responsibility of ensuring national food security, always putting ensuring national food security in the first place, accelerating the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, continuously improving the comprehensive production capacity of grain, ensuring sufficient production and supply in normal times, and being able to withstand and rely on extreme situations. In 2022, the grain production of the three provinces and one region in Northeast China accounted for over 26% of the total national production. Among them, Heilongjiang's total production accounts for 11.3% of the country's total, ranking first in the country for 13 consecutive years. Specifically, for soybeans, the production of Heilongjiang province has reached 9.535 million tons, accounting for more than 47% of the country's total production, indicating Heilongjiang's strategic position in maintaining national food security.

However, the three provinces and one district in Northeast China still face problems such as low on-site conversion capacity of grain, low economic benefits of grain, and "grain finance inversion". The Northeast actively promotes the development of grain processing industry, effectively promoting the transformation and value-added of grain processing. However, the overall scale of the processing industry is small, the industrial structure is not optimal, the integration level is not deep, the deep processing is insufficient, and the processing conversion rate is not high, which is still prominent and does not match the status of the "ballast stone" of grain security in the Northeast. In 2022, Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia experienced high yields and harvests of soybeans, but once again faced the problem of difficulty in selling beans, which affected the enthusiasm of farmers to grow beans. Therefore, it is imperative for Northeast China to accelerate the development of grain processing industry.

Developing the grain processing industry can find a breakthrough for the high-quality development of the grain industry in Northeast China, promote the transformation from "selling raw grains" to "selling products", from "big granaries" to "big kitchens", and from a major grain production province to a strong grain industry province. As the largest grain producing province in China, Heilongjiang's grain processing industry has set off from a high starting point this year. The recently released "Three Year Action Plan for Accelerating the High Quality Development of Agricultural Product Processing Industry in Heilongjiang Province" pointed out that it is expected that by 2025, the operating income of the province's agricultural product processing industry will reach 450 billion yuan, and the conversion rate of major agricultural product processing will reach 75%, reaching the national average level. Heilongjiang plans to focus on the five major processing industries of corn, soybeans, rice, dairy products, and meat, create a cluster area for corn processing and soybean food industry, develop a green organic rice industry and dairy product processing cluster area, build a cluster area for beef cattle processing, pig processing, and poultry processing industry, and promote the clustering of processing capacity towards agricultural product main production areas, advantageous areas, and logistics nodes. Industrial clusters can unleash multiplier effects, enhance the added value of grain, promote rural revitalization and regional economic development in Heilongjiang.

Grain production has weak quality, low economic benefits, and industrial development often faces industry challenges such as "strong rice and weak rice". Grain is full of treasures throughout the body, which can be used as rations, feed ingredients, and industrial raw materials. For example, corn can be processed into over 3000 industrial products. Transforming grain into products, improving the utilization rate and added value of grain resources, also requires technological innovation. As the core carrier of technological achievement transformation, enterprises can improve the landing and transformation rate of technological achievements, enhance the technological content and market competitiveness of products. For example, Yihai Kerry uses one grain of rice to process rice, as well as more than 20 products such as lecithin, rice bran wax, gluten, and rice selenium powder. Zhongyu in Binzhou, Shandong uses one grain of wheat to transform into more than 500 products, and Henan misses using a handful of flour to produce more than 400 products... For Northeast China, grain processing enterprises also need to rely on technological innovation, develop initial and deep grain processing, achieve quality and efficiency improvement in the grain industry, transform grain resource advantages into industrial advantages, and transform industrial advantages into development advantages.

It should be noted that although China has achieved the goal of basic self-sufficiency in grains and absolute food security, the supply and demand of grains have been in a tight balance for a long time, and the supply of feed grains is insufficient. The development of grain processing industry in Northeast China must serve the national food security strategy, and must be developed on the premise of ensuring food security and feed safety. Economic benefits cannot be obtained at the cost of sacrificing food security.