December 4, 2014

China's dairy industry "utterly stagnant," economic report says

China's dairy industry remains stagnant despite some improvements following the toxic baby formula scandal several years ago, according to Want China Times, the English news website of the Taiwan-based China Times News Group.

Quoting the Chinese-language Economic Information publication, the online report says development of the Chinese dairy industry has been derailed "due to various constraints, including inadequate breeding operations, lack of talents, difficulty in securing banking loans, and high distribution costs, according to the.

The relatively inferior quality of the country's milk cows, whose per capita annual output reaches only 5 tonnes, half of its US counterpart, is one of the industry's major problems.

The online report says high-output cows account for only one fifth of China's total number of milk cows,

In order to augment the overall quality of their milk cows, major domestic dairy farms have been importing quality milk cows, as well as frozen cow sperm, at cost of some CNY180 (US$29.32) each, for mating. "Our dairy farm would be undermined, should we embrace frozen domestic cow sperm, whose quality is unstable, due to prevalence of forged documents and lack of lineage testing," said Wang Zhaohui, manager of a dairy farm in Inner Mongolia that boasts 3,000 milk cows.

One unnamed manager from another dairy farm in Inner Mongolia admitted that the use of domestic frozen cow sperm has yielded milk cows, but only with a 20kg daily output, half of their imported mothers.

Zhang Wan, vice chairman of the China Dairy Industry Association, said that failure to establish a quality breeding network for milk cows, including testing and documentation of breeds, has put a damper on the development of the local dairy industry, according to Economic Information.

Li Minxing, an official in charge of the husbandry industry in Liaoning's provincial government, urges the local dairy industry to foster its own breeding cattle, so as to become self-sustainable, as Australian breeding cows now fetch US$2,500 each, up from US$600 several years ago.

Economic Information reports that there is an urgent need for cultivating local dairy-industry talent, including those in the fields of breeding, epidemiology, feed processing, and marketing, as a rough statistics show that there is a shortfall of over 70% annually for workers in the husbandry and veterinary trade.