“Every country has a particular responsibility to combat these challenges to further increase efficiency in agricultural production, and at the same time to ensure the conservation of natural resources,” he added during the event co-hosted by the German Agricultural Society, German embassy in China and China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Chinese representatives from more than a dozen German companies in the agricultural sector attended the conference, which was held in tandem with the annual Lanzhou Investment and Trade Fair, together with numerous firms from across Gansu province and local officials.

“[Such exchanges are] especially important as the Covid pandemic in the past three years has blocked human exchanges and disrupted supply chains. And because of Russian aggression in Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters is cut off from the world,” said Barkeling.

“And that’s why in Germany there is increasing discussion about de-risking, there is the same discussion in Europe,” Barkeling said.

He said China’s rising focus on security and self-sufficiency – which is not limited to the agricultural sector – shares similar logic, and the key is to raise the reliability of future economic relations between the two countries.

Germany has been trying to persuade China to accept the “regionalisation concept”, which stops imports only from the region where the disease has been detected instead of a blanket ban on the whole country.

“Germany would like to export to China again,” Barkeling added. “The outbreak has been successfully contained.”

Friederike Dorfler, agriculture and food counsellor at the German embassy in Beijing, said that China is one of the most important countries for German exports outside the European Union.

Germany exports around a third of its agricultural products, while China faces the challenge of feeding almost 20 per cent of the world’s population with less than 10 per cent of the arable land, she added.

“This shows us that trade is important, that we have to share our resources, share our work and trade goods,” she also said during the conference in Lanzhou.

President Xi Jinping has repeatedly made strong calls for China’s food self-sufficiency in recent years, especially after the Ukraine war.

07:58

Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security?

Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security?

Xi said that, since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, over 30 countries have limited food exports, and some have experienced social turmoil or even regime change.

“Containment from the rest of the world has escalated, and there’s an obvious increase in all kinds of uncertainty and unpredictability,” he said, according to a full transcript of his speech released in March.

“Once something’s wrong with agriculture, our bowls will be held in someone else’s hands and we’ll have to depend on others for food. How can we achieve modernisation in that case?”