December 21, 2014

 

China's appetite for pig contributes to climate change, magazine report says

 

 

Pork consumption in China has increased almost seven times since the late 1970s when the government liberalised agriculture. Today the world's second-largest economy produces and eats nearly 500 million swine annually, or half of the world's pigs, according to a report by The Economist.

 

In the '70s pig farms as big as 10 hectares were unknown as almost all Chinese pigs came from small-time raisers each with fewer than five animals. Today only 20% come from backyard farms, according to Mindi Schneider of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, the report said. The rest are raised in big state-owned or multinational facilities, with some of them producing as many as 100,000 swine yearly.

 

The average Chinese now eats 39 kilograms of pork a year, or five times more than in 1979.

 

Since it is the preferred meat of the Chinese, the country has established the world's first pork reserve, which comprises both the frozen form and the live ones, with the aim of keeping pork reasonably priced. To ensure adequate supply, the government has adopted other pro-pork policies such as grants, tax incentives, cheap loans for farms and free animal immunisation.

 

The report said the Chinese government subsidised pork production by $22 billion in 2012, or about $47 a pig, in 2012, citing data from Chatham House, a London-based think-tank.

 

The Chinese demand for pork is so great that meeting it now depends on other countries that have the required land and water that China is short of. While most of the pigs in China are home-grown, Chinese swine, which previously ate household scraps, increasingly rely on imported feed.

 

According to Ms Schneider, over half of the world's feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. In 2010, China imported more than 50% of the total global soy market, the The Economist report said, adding the US Grains Council predicted that by 2022 China will need to import 19 million-32 million tonnes of corn, or a fifth to a third of the world's entire trade in corn today.

 

The The Economist also reported that in Brazil, more than 25 million hectares of land were being used to cultivate soy with "entire species of plants and trees... being sacrificed to fatten China's pigs."

 

"Argentina has chopped down thousands of hectares of forest and shifted its traditional cattle-breeding to remote areas to make way for soyabeans. Since 1990 the Argentine acreage given over to that crop has quadrupled: the country exports almost all of its whole soyabeans--around 8m tonnes--to China. In some areas farmers harvest two or three crops a year, using herbicides that have been linked to birth defects and increased cancer rates", the magazine report said.

 

As these imports have made China more exposed to global commodity prices, it has bought land in other countries, some of which is used to grow feed crops or to raise pigs that are sold onto the domestic market at preferential prices, according to the report. The Canadian think-tank International Institute for Sustainable Development calculates that China has bought 5 million hectares in developing countries. The The Economist said that when China's largest pork producer, Shuanghui, bought American firm Smithfield Foods last year, it acquired huge areas of Missouri and Texas. 

 

Besides feeding the pigs, The Economist cited other farmers' concerns including disease. The report said farmers routinely add small doses of antibiotics to their feed, a practice associated with the emergence of "superbug" bacteria in animals and humans that are resistant to most antibiotics. In 2009 pigs exported from China to Hong Kong were discovered to harbour such bug. 

 

Another concern is the billions of tonnes of waste China's livestock produce each year, which pollute the country's water and soil, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. "The 16,000 dead pigs that were dumped in the tributaries of the Huangpu river, a source of Shanghai's tap-water, after a virus outbreak in 2013, were a lurid indicator of a seeping national problem", the The Economist report said.

 

Porcine waste also contributes to emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, according to the report, adding Chinese pigs contribute to global warming more directly.

 

The report said that greenhouse-gas emissions from Chinese agriculture increased by 35% during the period 1994-2005, leading a few people in China to "question the benefits of eating more and more pork".