China’s Record Harvest Embarrasses Climate Crisis Movement
By Vijay Jayaraj
This fall China celebrated a harvest festival against the backdrop of record summer grain output of more than 150 million metric tons, although this notable accomplishment did not make most news.
A harvest of such unprecedented size by the world’s most populous grain producer does not fit the fable of a dying planet. Crisis merchants dominating the media have invested decades in a story of scorched fields and starving millions. A nation of farmers celebrating abundance is an embarrassment. Here’s the truth:
On September 23, the autumnal equinox, villagers in Dongjiao, a farming community on the edge of Xiangyang in central China, set out crayfish, peaches, and banquet bowls for the country’s ninth Farmers’ Harvest Festival. They had earned the feast.
With more than a fifth of the autumn crop area already harvested, Agriculture Minister Zhang Zhu said the country was on track for another bumper harvest for the full year. In 2025, annual grain production exceeded 700 million tons for a second straight year, giving every Chinese citizen more than 500 kilograms of grain, well above a benchmark for food security.
The science behind the harvest is not mysterious. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the raw material of photosynthesis. Wheat and rice, the staples of China, respond positively to elevated CO2.NASA reports that up to half of Earth’s vegetated lands greened significantly over a 35-year period, with 70% of that greening attributed to rising atmospheric CO2 acting as a plant fertilizer. Another NASA analysis showed that China and India dominate this planetary greening. China alone accounts for a quarter of the global increase in leaf area despite covering but a fraction of the world’s vegetated land.
Warmth has helped, too. Longer frost-free seasons in the northeast have allowed rice and corn to spread across Heilongjiang, China’s largest grain-producing province. It is fitting that three driverless harvesters opened this year’s festival in Harbin, the provincial capital. China saw more flooding than drought this year, with the worst confined to local pockets, but overall conditions favored farming.
But where are the headlines? Had the harvest fallen by a few percentage points, a dozen stories would have linked the decline to a “climate breakdown.” Positive reports get a shrug. The industrial emissions of carbon dioxide elevating the gas’s atmospheric concentration are producing undeniable benefits that those demonizing CO2 refuse to acknowledge.
The human consequence of this agricultural ascent should end claims of a planet in terminal decline. China’s per capita food supply rose from 2,328 kilocalories a day in 1980 to 3,029 in 2000, a 30% jump, with average intake near 2,830 kilocalories by the early 2010s. Meat consumption quadrupled between 1980 and 2009, from 14.6 kilograms to 58.2 kilograms per person.
Behind those rising calories stands affordable energy. About 70% of the ammonia produced from natural gas and coal is used to make fertilizers that help to make possible China’s crop yields. Tractors, pumps, and combines run on diesel. This is the production chain the net-zero lobby and crisis propagandists pretend does not exist.
Western lenders and diplomats addled by climate dogma are urging governments of developing nations to reduce the use of fertilizers and fossil fuels. Sri Lanka tried a version of this when it banned synthetic fertilizers in 2021. Rice output collapsed within a season, and the country slid into economic crisis. China took the opposite road and now celebrates record harvests.
The media’s silent treatment of these facts is a necessary tactic of keeping alive the apocalyptic climate narrative. Every acre of global greening, every rising calorie, every record harvest chips away at the claim that humanity faces a climate emergency requiring the surrender of affordable energy and industrial agriculture.
The climate industrial complex depends on the specter of a failing biosphere and is threatened by grain-production records and thriving ecosystems. So, editors skip the hopeful stories and gin up ones about receding glaciers that have been melting since the end of the last great glacial advance more than 10,000 years ago.
Originally published at American Thinker, October 19th, 2026.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.