China\'s Taste for Meat Prompts Industry Transformation

China's soaring demand for meat is straining the capacity of the country's traditional farms, as authorities attempt to ramp up production while keeping safety high and costs low.

In 1978, Americans consumed thrice the quantity of meat that Chinese did. But by 2011, Chinese consumers turned the table, eating 71 million a whole bunch meat, greater than double the quantity that Americans consumed.

As the producer and consumer of greater than half the world's pigs, Chinese have to this point maintained a virtually complete self reliance on meat, with 97 percent of the animal's produced at home.

Instead of direct pork imports, China has traditionally opted for imports of feed. 63 percent of the world's traded soybeans are bought by China for its domestic farms.

“They should not have enough land to provide the feed for the beef, but they would like to develop a agribusiness sector that does handle that meat,” says Mindi Schneider, a PHD candidate at Cornell University who studies global agricultural markets and agricultural development.

To stay alongside of demand, China is now engaged in a structural transformation of its meat industry.

In 2011, fewer than 1 / 4 of China's pigs were raised in industrialized farms with greater than 500 pigs.  Smaller scale “backyard farms” and “specialized household farms” account for almost all of the country's pork output. Beijing's aim have been to consolidate production by subsidizing large scale farms, and promoting collective management of small enterprises.

Chinese economists have pushed for the creation of “dragon-head” firms, large scale farms that involve smaller enterprises of their supply chain and supply them guidance on production practices.

“The idea,” says Schneider, “is that by subsidizing those companies and requiring that they contract with small-holder farms, that they're kind of leading the agribusiness sector and in addition leading rural development by having this responsibility to small-holder farmers.”

While Beijing is engaged in modernizing its agricultural industry, experts try to gauge how the growing appetite for meat in China will impact global markets.

Joel Haggard, Asia Pacific vice chairman of the U.S. Meat Export Federation, says that before 2008 the Chinese meat market was almost completely divorced from the remainder of the arena.

“What happened in China had no influence at the global market, and what happened inside the global market had no influence in China,” he said, “But that modified,” he added.

In 2008 a decline in pork supply, partly because of a disease outbreak, drove up the cost of pork produced domestically. China compensated by importing unprecedented amounts of pork, thus driving up the worldwide market price.   

“If China is available in and just orders 100000 tons extra pork, it has tremendous influence available on the market,” Haggard says, and adds that “anybody that's producing pork on earth is calling at what will happen in China over the subsequent couple of decades.”

Cornell University's Mindi Schneider has conducted field research inside the Chinese pig industry, and says that with the government's push to develop China's domestic industry, she is skeptical of the present international rush to offer China's meat market.

“I can be really reluctant to advise anyone; to claim 'Yeah, rescale all your production with the intention to ship meat to China,' because i'm just unsure that it's as big as persons are projecting."

From WhatNewsToday.net

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