New Quality Productive Forces, Factor Levels, and Food Security

Food security (FS) is central to China’s economic development and social stability. Accelerating the development of new quality productive forces (NQPFs) provides an important pathway for safeguarding FS. Existing research on agricultural NQPFs, however, has largely remained conceptual or theoretical, with limited systematic evidence on the relationship between NQPFs and FS and insufficient attention to the internal transmission mechanisms, particularly those related to factor levels (FLs). Using panel data for 29 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in China from 2013 to 2023, we employ the entropy-weight method to measure the development level of NQPFs and a two-way fixed-effects model to estimate their effect on FS. We further examine the mediating roles of technological progress, rural human capital, and financial support for agriculture. The results show that NQPFs significantly improve FS, and this finding remains robust across a series of robustness and endogeneity checks. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect is significantly positive in grain production–consumption-balanced regions and in central and western China. Mechanism analysis shows that NQPFs strengthen FS by promoting technological progress, improving rural human capital, and enhancing financial support for agriculture, thereby optimizing the allocation of key production factors. By incorporating FLs into the analysis, this study extends the theoretical framework linking agricultural NQPFs to FS and provides policy implications for improving factor allocation, fostering agricultural NQPFs, and strengthening the capacity to safeguard FS.