How crayfish raised in desert are nipping away at China’s food security fears

On the edge of western China’s Taklamakan Desert, in a county where sand covers 90 per cent of the land, an unlikely harvest is heading to market: Australian freshwater crayfish.

As China begins its National Day “golden week” holiday, a farm in Maigaiti county, in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region’s Kashgar prefecture, is pulling 250 to 300kg (551 to 661lbs) of the premium crustaceans from its ponds every day.

Native to Australia’s rivers and streams, freshwater crayfish are now being raised in one of the most remote and arid corners of China.

The project is part of a broader government push to develop saline-alkaline aquaculture and inland fisheries, diversify food supplies and put abandoned land and water to use. As a result, aquatic foods once rare in southwestern Xinjiang are increasingly appearing on local dinner tables.

Wu Zhijun, who co-runs the farm with his brother, said it was his fourth year trying to breed freshwater crayfish under the “East Crayfish Move West” technology-transfer programme, which had brought know-how from Rizhao, a modern marine aquaculture hub in eastern China’s Shandong province.

“At first, a local official assigned to support Xinjiang noticed a lot of abandoned saline-alkaline pits and ran an experiment to see if they could be used,” he said. “Once they managed to keep the crayfish alive, we started learning how to do it.”

The introduction of recirculating aquaculture systems, greenhouses and techniques for regulating saline-alkaline water has made it possible to raise shrimp and fish in parts of arid Xinjiang where it had once been considered impractical. Wu was among the earliest participants.

This year, he stocked his ponds with 400,000 crayfish fry and said he expected output to approach 8 tonnes (8.8 short tons). Wu said most were sold in Kashgar prefecture, with a small amount shipped to major cities elsewhere in China, including Zhengzhou and Shanghai.

“Health-conscious, upmarket consumers would pay more for my products than for crayfish from other parts of China, as Xinjiang has little industry and relatively clean water, giving the crayfish a healthier environment,” he said.

But farming was made more difficult by wide day-night temperature swings, slightly alkaline water and long, costly logistics – with the shipment of feed to his farm costing an extra 1,000 to 2,000 yuan a tonne (US$135 to US$271 a short ton).

Known for its cotton, Xinjiang has frequently made headlines in state-controlled media in recent years for turning idle saline-alkaline land and water resources into niche aquaculture facilities, farming species ranging from red swamp crayfish and Chinese mitten crabs to trout and silver cod.

The aquaculture area across Kashgar prefecture now spans 1,733 hectares (4,283 acres), with total aquatic product output of 13,600 tonnes, valued at 208 million yuan (US$31 million), the prefecture government’s publicity department said in a report last month.

Relative to its population of 1.4 billion, China is short on arable land and water resources – a continuing source of insecurity amid intensifying global geopolitical risks. In response, Beijing has been promoting the development of previously abandoned land and water resources in recent years as one means of ensuring self-sufficiency.

The agricultural goals outlined in the nation’s latest five-year plan, released earlier this year, proposed “steadily advancing the comprehensive utilisation of saline-alkaline land” and said China would “develop aquaculture on saline-alkaline land in suitable areas in the west”.

Xinjiang accounts for one-third of China’s saline-alkaline land, according to Zhang Jiasong, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences’ South China Sea fisheries research institute.

By conducting aquaculture in the region, the soil’s salt and alkali content could be biologically absorbed, making the land available for future agricultural and livestock use, he told state broadcaster China Central Television last month.

Doing so allowed China to “maintain land-based aquaculture ponds in the east, while turning barren saline-alkaline land into production bases for high-quality protein”, Zhang said.

When its aquaculture industry grew big enough, Xinjiang, sitting on the eastern edge of Central Asia, could not only supply other parts of China but also see its products reach landlocked countries along the China-Europe Railway, he said.

But Wu, the crayfish farmer, said that while the sector had attracted widespread attention by exploiting its geographic niche, it had also been affected by China’s weak consumer sentiment over the past couple of years.

When the first large batch of crayfish was harvested in 2023, 2 tonnes sold out over the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, he said. Sales the next two years were not as brisk, he said, adding that “this year demand is even weaker than last year, because the whole industry is doing poorly and consumption is sluggish”.