APEC Ministers Back AI-Driven Farming in Landmark Food Security Pact

Hangzhou Ministerial Puts Digital Agriculture at the Center of Regional Food Security

HANGZHOU - Asia-Pacific economies have signed off on a new blueprint for regional food security that places artificial intelligence and digital agriculture at the center of the agenda. The 11th APEC Ministerial Meeting on Food Security, held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province on August 25, adopted a joint declaration alongside a dedicated set of principles on innovation and digitalization, signaling a coordinated push to modernize agri-food systems across the region.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong opened the meeting with a keynote address urging the 21 APEC economies to strengthen the foundation of food security, deepen cooperation in agricultural science and technology, and keep trade flows smooth to protect supply chains. Around 200 delegates from APEC member economies, the APEC Secretariat, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Food Programme attended the gathering, which China hosted as a flagship event of its APEC "China Year."

What the 11th APEC Food Security Ministerial Produced

The meeting, chaired by Zhang Zhu, China's Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, produced a joint statement that reaffirms the APEC Putrajaya Vision 2040 and the 2026 theme of "Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together." Ministers endorsed the Principles for Strengthening Food Systems Resilience in the APEC Region through Innovation and Digitalization, a companion document that encourages science- and evidence-based, technology-enabled agriculture, including artificial intelligence tools and advances in agricultural biotechnology.

The declaration also underscores sustained investment in agricultural research and development, cooperation on reducing food loss and waste, and the role of fisheries and aquaculture in regional food security. On trade, ministers recognized that open, transparent and resilient agri-food markets are critical to stabilizing supply chains, and they committed to concrete action on digitalization, technical services and science-based standards for animal and plant disease prevention.

For the host economy, the ministerial was an opportunity to showcase China's own agricultural technology ambitions. The meeting featured policy dialogues on rural development, technological innovation and digital agriculture, with Chinese officials and researchers presenting practical examples of how AI is already reshaping farm management.

Feiniao: A Chinese University's AI Answer to Crop Protection

One of the showcased systems was Feiniao, a smart agriculture platform developed by researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong. Professor Shi Qian, who heads the team, told CGTN that the system acts as an "intelligent steward of the orchard," handling everything from daily patrols to disease control and yield forecasting.

Built by the School of Geography and Planning, Feiniao is described as the world's first application-level smart orchard management platform for lychees. It integrates more than 120 crop growth algorithms built on years of remote sensing data and agronomic modeling, and the team has published over 20 academic papers and filed eight invention patents related to the system. On its first patrol flight, the system digitizes the orchard, assigning a unique geolocation point to each tree so it can track growth status daily. Feiniao currently achieves up to 95 percent accuracy in detecting phenological changes and signs of pest or disease infestation.

The results in the field are measurable. According to a 2024 People's Daily report, Baiqiao Village in Gaozhou, Maoming, adopted the Feiniao system to inspect 750 mu, or 50 hectares, of lychee orchards daily, boosting patrol efficiency by 500 percent compared with manual rounds. The system now covers all 6,800 mu of orchards in the village, and participating orchards have cut fertilizer and pesticide use by an average of 35 percent while raising average yield by 20 percent and average selling price by another 20 percent. For a crop as labor-intensive as lychee, the economics matter: growers can plan sales earlier because the platform estimates production as far back as the inflorescence stage.

Why APEC's Digital-Agriculture Push Matters for Japan

The Hangzhou outcome lands at a sensitive moment for Japan's own food security debate. Japan's calorie-based food self-sufficiency rate fell to an all-time low of 37.11 percent in fiscal 2025, according to Nippon.com, dragged down in part by domestic rice shortages that forced higher imports of the staple grain. The figure sits far below the government's target of 45 percent by 2030, and the farm ministry has acknowledged the difficulty of closing the gap quickly.

Japan has pursued its own technology-led path since 2019, when it launched the Smart Agriculture Promotion Framework to integrate robotics, AI, IoT and data analytics into food production. Yet adoption remains uneven, especially among the small-scale and aging farms that dominate domestic agriculture. The APEC principles adopted in Hangzhou offer a regional template that Tokyo can use to benchmark its programs, and the ministerial's emphasis on trade facilitation directly touches Japan, which relies on imports for the majority of its calories.

The Japan angle also runs through the regional division of labor. China is scaling AI-driven crop management at a pace few economies can match, while Japan retains strengths in robotics, precision machinery and post-harvest logistics. APEC's digital-agriculture agenda creates a formal space where those capabilities can be combined, either through joint research or through investment in third-country agri-food systems across the Asia-Pacific.

Regional Cooperation: Malaysia's View on China's Smart Farming

The ministerial's cooperative spirit was echoed by participants from across the region. Tan Han Wei, Managing Director of Sustainable HRvest, a Malaysian company focused on agricultural solutions, told CGTN that China's advances in smart agriculture and Malaysia's expertise in tropical agriculture complement each other, offering a practical path to stronger regional food security.

That pairing points to the broader logic of the Hangzhou declaration: no single economy can solve food security alone, and the region's diversity is an asset rather than a problem. Malaysia's tropical crops, Indonesia's plantation agriculture and Vietnam's rice and aquaculture sectors each face different climate and supply-chain pressures, and the APEC framework encourages sharing best practices on mutually agreed terms rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all model.

For Chinese technology providers, the ministerial also opens commercial doors. Systems like Feiniao, developed in Guangdong's orchard country, are increasingly relevant to other APEC economies growing tree fruits, and the declaration's emphasis on voluntary technology access and public-private collaboration provides cover for companies seeking to export agricultural AI services alongside hardware.

From Declaration to Practice: What Comes Next

Declarations are only as strong as their follow-through, and the APEC food security agenda now moves into implementation. The joint statement directs relevant APEC forums, including the Policy Partnership on Food Security, the Agricultural Technical Cooperation Working Group and the High Level Policy Dialogue on Agricultural Biotechnology, to carry the digitalization principles into concrete work programs.

China, as host of the 2026 APEC cycle, has a direct interest in keeping momentum. The food security ministerial is one of several sectoral meetings in a year that also includes a Digital and AI Ministerial in Chengdu, and the run-up to the APEC leaders' meeting in the fall gives Beijing a platform to showcase its approach to technology-led development across multiple policy domains.

The next formal checkpoint will come in 2027, when Vietnam hosts the 12th APEC Ministerial Meeting on Food Security. Between now and then, the practical test will be whether the principles translate into measurable cooperation: shared data standards, cross-border pilot projects in digital agriculture, and investment flows into rural infrastructure and agricultural research.

What to Watch For

For readers in Tokyo and across the Asia-Pacific, three signals are worth tracking. First, whether Japan's own digital-agriculture programs adopt any of the APEC principles in domestic policy, particularly on AI and data standards. Second, whether Chinese smart-agriculture companies begin announcing APEC-market partnerships or pilots over the next two quarters. Third, how the food security agenda interacts with the broader trade environment, since the declaration's emphasis on open supply chains will be tested if tariff tensions in the region escalate again.

The Hangzhou ministerial has set the region's direction: food security is now an innovation agenda as much as an agricultural one. The economies that act on that shift, by investing in AI-driven farming, open data and regional cooperation, will be the ones best positioned to feed their populations when the next shock arrives.

By Kenji Tanaka, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: APEC, CGTN, Xinhua, gov.cn, Sun Yat-sen University, Nippon.com.