Chinese Farms a Growing Challenge

The Worldwatch Institute published an opinion piece about the environmental and health implications of the rise in meat eating in China:

In the past ten years, consumption of pork, China’s most popular meat, has doubled. China has surpassed the United States as the world’s top pork producer, raising and slaughtering 700 million pigs a year. It also tops the United States in meat chicken production and has a farmed animal population in the tens of billions.

[…] Fast food is now a $28-billion-a-year business in China. McDonald’s, a major sponsor of the Beijing Olympics, has nearly 1,000 restaurants nationwide, including four that operated at Olympic venues alone, serving athletes, spectators, and the press. China’s government has opened the doors to investments by major multinational meat and dairy producers and animal feed corporations, including Tyson Foods, Smithfield Farms, and Novus International.

But with every fifth person in the world a Chinese, even small increases in individual meat and dairy consumption will have broad environmental, climate, health, and food security impacts. What China eats, and how it produces its food, affects not just the country, but the world. And while China is not yet a bona fide “factory-farm nation” like the United States, the strains of its fast-growing livestock sector are becoming harder to ignore. China may already have as many as 64,000 factory-type farms, compared to a U.S. total of nearly 18,800.

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