China and Industrial Animal Agriculture: Prospects and defects

Mia MacDonald and Sangamithra Iyer | 04.01.2009

Food First Backgrounder, Spring 2009, Vol. 15, No. 1

Much has been made about rising meat consumption in China as one of the causes of the world food crisis. However, little mention is made of the way China is now producing meat, and the direct involvement of U.S. and Brazilian agribusinesses that profit from industrial meat production. The spread of the corporate-driven industrial agrofoods model to China may have a much larger and negative social and environmental impacts on China—and the rest of the world—than the increase in Chinese meat consumption in and of itself… [editor’s note].

China is now the world’s largest producer—and consumer—of agricultural products. As its rapid economic expansion has allowed more and more Chinese to enter the new middle class, meat has moved from the side of the dinner plate to the center. In the past ten years, consumption of China’s most popular meat, pork, has doubled. In 2007, China raised about 700 million pigs. Since 1980, meat consumption in China has quadrupled to its current level; about 119 pounds per person each year (just over what people in the U.S. eat), and is rising. For many Chinese, meat and dairy products signify wealth, status, modernity, freedom, and a welcome escape from hardscrabble lives in the countryside. “When I was a child, every person was allotted one pound of pork a month,” recalls Peter Li, who grew up in southeast China and now teaches political science at the University of Houston. “Now, though, more people have access to more meat and want to eat a lot of it.”

The spread of the corporate-driven industrial agrofoods model to China may have much larger and negative social and environmental impacts on China—and the rest of the world—than the increase in Chinese meat consumption in and of itself.

In recent decades, China has opened its doors to investments by major multinational meat and dairy producers, as well as animal feed corporations, including Tyson Foods, Smithfield, and Novus International. These corporations, joined by the International Finance Corporation (the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank), and the Chinese government are championing the intensive systems of raising farmed animals commonplace in industrialized countries: small cages for egg-laying hens; metal stalls for pigs; sheds holding thousands of meat or broiler chickens; and feedlots for dairy and beef cattle.

Already, Western-style fast food is a $28-billion-a-year business in China. McDonald’s has nearly 1,000 outlets, and Yum Brands, with 2,500 KFCs and Pizza Huts in China, estimates that within a decade, 40 percent of its profits could come from its Chinese operations. Even though it’s not yet a fully-fledged “factory farm nation,” the strains from China’s fast-growing livestock sector, and burgeoning appetite for animal protein, are showing—in massive water pollution, soil degradation, rising rates of obesity and chronic disease, risks to food security, and declining farm animal welfare. Given that China has 1.3 billion people, even small increases in individual consumption have enormous collective environmental, climate, and agricultural impacts. More than 50,000 factory “farms” operate in China today; three times the number in the U.S.