OPINION: Chinese Farms A Growing Challenge

By Mia MacDonald, Worldwatch Senior Fellow 

pig farmFor decades, researchers and policymakers have raised a worrying question about the world's most populous country: "Who will feed China?" Today, while concern about reaching 1.3 billion mouths remains paramount, the phrasing has changed slightly: "Who will feed China's pigs?"

China's phenomenal economic growth has lifted millions of Chinese out of the hardscrabble rural poverty that was a central feature of the Mao Zedong era. The country is now not only "factory to the world," but also the world's largest producer and consumer of agricultural products-particularly meat.

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.

Western-style meat culture has gone mainstream. In the past, "children looked forward to the spring festival, partly because it was fun, but also because it was a chance to eat meat," Zhang Xiuwen, a farmer-turned-tennis coach in Beijing, told a UK newspaper recently. "But," he continued, "now we can eat meat every day if we want. It has become part of our lives."

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.


Meat and dairy production have a direct impact on global climate change. Fully 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions stem from the livestock industry, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. That's more than the entire world transportation sector. And in 2008, China surpassed the United States to become the world's leading emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2). Per capita CO2 emissions in China have more than doubled, from 2.1 tons of CO2 equivalent in 1990 to 5.1 tons today. As the country's farmed animal population expands, emissions from this sector will only rise.

Animal waste is also a concern. China's farmed animals produce 2.7 billion tons of manure every year, nearly three and a half times the industrial solid waste level. Xu Cheng, a professor at China Agricultural University, estimates that only 3 percent of China's large and medium-sized livestock operations have facilities to treat animal wastes. Runoff from livestock operations has created a large "dead zone" in the South China Sea that is virtually devoid of marine life. In northern China, overgrazing and overfarming lead to the loss of nearly a million acres (about 400,000 hectares) of grassland each year to desert.


Other negative consequences of the industrialized-nation factory farm model are becoming embedded in China as well. The World Health Organization warns that many "first-line" antibiotics, such as penicillin, are no longer effective against more than 90 percent of certain bacteria in Asia due to the drugs' overuse in farmed animals. Just before the Olympics, China's chief veterinarian in the Ministry of Agriculture, Jia Youling, indicated that some Chinese farmers were still using banned growth-enhancing drugs, food coloring, and other chemicals, while feed additives with high concentrations of metals were polluting water and crops.




"The present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable," wrote Robert P. Martin, director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, in the group's final report. "[It] presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals raised for food."

So far, the Chinese government's path seems set. But a small and growing number of non-governmental organizations, academics, and even policymakers in the country are raising questions. To them, food quality, not quantity, is what matters, along with food safety, sustainability, environmental protection, and animal welfare. China's government and people can-and should-undertake a critical examination of the consequences of industrial animal agriculture, before it's too late for a more sustainable, humane, and secure system to take root.

Mia MacDonald is a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and the executive director of Brighter Green, a public policy "action tank" working at the intersection of environment, animals, and global development. Brighter Green recently published a study on the issues raised in this piece, Skillful Means: The Challenges of China's Encounter with Factory Farming (also available in Chinese).