China’s low agricultural labor productivity has become the key weakness of its agricultural competitiveness and sustainable development, and strategies for improving China’s agricultural labor productivity lack clear and consistent theory and empirical support. To address this issue, the current study uses the methods of convergence index, correlation coefficient, and nonparametric test, to analyze the characteristics and influencing factors of agricultural labor productivity among 32 major agrarian countries during 1961-2013. This analysis shows that the development gap among countries has been narrowing. The USA takes the leading position among all the countries, while some countries with scarce land like Japan have succeeded in achieving transcendence, and other countries like India have experienced relatively slow speed. The agricultural labor productivity is significantly driven by agricultural labor surplus, agricultural product processing, and agricultural industrial structure. The effects of land resource endowment, agricultural mechanization, and biochemical inputs have been declining and in some cases are no longer even significant. It is therefore necessary to shift attention to marketization, diversification, and high quality, instead of the former focus on agricultural intensification, concentration and large-scale operations, and this shift is probably more closely aligned with current practices. There are more people and less land in China, and the agricultural labor force in China still accounts for nearly 30% of the total population. Considering these national conditions, it is very important to simultaneously improve the efficiency of agricultural production of small farmers and promote the successful urbanization of the agricultural labor force. In the medium and long term, it is imperative to improve the competitiveness of Chinese agriculture by adopting related policy arrangements such as induced agricultural technological innovation, production factor substitution, and multifunctional agriculture development.

Further utilization of global agricultural resources and the expansion of potential international cooperation space are necessary measures to promote a new level of China’s national food security and optimize the structure of domestic food consumption. This study measured the global potential cultivated land area and national grain self-sufficiency. Based on the two-above measures, the authors made a classification of China’s foreign agricultural cooperation countries and depicted the spatial pattern of cooperation based on the grain trades of those countries with China. The grain exporters include Australia, North America, South America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia; and the target countries for “going abroad” of Chinese grain enterprises are mainly located in Sub-Saharan Africa and northern Latin America. This study proposes that China’s policy of cooperation on grain should be shifted to non-traditional partners alongside the “Belt and Road Initiative” region. Specifically, China could expand grain imports from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other East European and Central Asian countries, and the direction for China’s agricultural enterprises “going abroad” should shift to Sub-Sahara Africa.

One of the aims of the recently initiated land fallow policy is to encourage winter wheat abandonment in order to recover the groundwater environment of the North China Plain (NCP); although this also threatens a national secure supply of this crop, as the NCP is the major wheat producing area in China. It is therefore necessary to consider regional wheat reallocation in order to meet the twin challenges of production and water conservation. An evaluation of spatiotemporal changes in wheat area and production across China in recent years may shed light on the regions that have the potential for reallocation; such trends are analyzed in this study using agricultural statistical data. Three over-arching principles are proposed that reallocation must be naturally suitable, economically feasible, and socially acceptable, and together with the result of the spatiotemporal analysis, two continuous areas are recommended as potentially suitable for wheat reallocation—alongside the Huai River and the cold region of northeastern China. We also present strategies to improve wheat yields as well as policies for farmers, aiming to encourage the reallocation of wheat to the regions highlighted in this study.