Carnivorous habits threaten food security

By James Palmer Source:Global Times Published: 2012-10-17 22:20:03

 

Illustration: Liu Rui
Illustration: Liu Rui



For most Chinese, hunger is a thing of the past. Rotund children and a thriving restaurant industry testify to the astonishing achievement of a country which was haunted by the threat of starvation for centuries, and which experienced the worst famine in history as recently as 1961.

Yet growing prosperity is putting pressure on agricultural triumph. Environmentalists and agricultural scientists point to the threat to farming from urbanization and industrial development, a worrying factor given China's per capita volume of arable land is among the lowest in the world.

According to official statistics from the National Development and Reform Commission, China has lost around 10 million hectares of arable land in the last 15 years.

But another habit of wealth may be even more threatening to the country's food security. As people get richer, they're inevitably eating more meat. Meat has always been a sign of wealth in China, and the country's banquet tables have been piled high as bank balances rise. 

This process has been accelerated, according to a 2011 study by Kansas State University, by the growing numbers of heavily meat-based Western chain restaurants like McDonalds.

Recent reports show China's meat consumption is now 71 million tons a year, double that of the US, after first overtaking it in 1996.

This is a sixfold rise from 1978, and makes up a quarter of the global total of meat consumption. And the demand continues to grow rapidly.

The problem is that meat is costly, and not only to the wallet. Animals need to be fed, and the amount of land needed to produce the grain to sustain a meat diet is three to seven times higher than for a vegetarian one.

As Wen Tiejun, dean of the School of Agriculture and Rural Development at Renmin University of China, told the Telegraph, "It is not possible to feed everyone so much meat. People must simply eat less."

China's agriculture is already feeling the pinch. The volume of grain that goes to feed livestock has risen nine times since 1978, and a third of the country's crop now goes to animals.

China has become a food importer for the first time in decades, unnerving older agriculturalists who heroically fought for the country's ability to feed itself.

One mitigating factor is that Chinese diners still prefer pork, which makes up over 70 percent of all meat consumed, to beef.

Pigs can happily live off marginal land and are easy to manage, making them attractive to China's smallholders. Critically, it takes only three pounds of grain to produce a pound of pork, compared to seven pounds for beef.

 US diners, who consume nine times the volume of beef per capita that the Chinese do, thus still have a significantly greater impact on global food resources.

Despite the preference for pork, though, China is the fourth biggest consumer of beef in the world, with an accordingly weighty environmental footprint.

All this takes place against a background of growing global food insecurity. Food prices have more than doubled since 2000, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization indexes, and sharply increased around 2010.

There are two main causes for this; the growing appetites of developing countries, especially China, and the uncertainty of changing weather patterns.

US meat consumption has been falling, albeit very slowly, in the last few years, thanks to efforts to make people more aware of the ecological cost of their diet. 

With a rich and varied history of vegetarian cuisine, China is capable of making similar changes.

Traditions of self-sufficiency, personal sacrifice for national benefit, and environmental awareness, which stem both from China's socialist heritage and its historical religious and philosophical ideas, could be drawn on to make people think about what they eat.

But the odds are that the lure of meat, and the status and wealth it represents, may still leave Chinese hungry for more.



The author is a copy editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn



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