"1. The Strategic Pork Reserve
Since Deng Xiaoping, China’s leaders have been obsessed with “food security” the same way America’s are haunted by not having enough oil. And as Chinese diets become more meat centric, fears of the dangers in the fluctuation of pork prices led China to establish a top-secret “strategic pork reserve” in 2007, the only one of its kind. But maintaining all those pigs has led to a massive dependence on corn and soybean imports for animal feed, which in turn is leading China’s agribusinesses to fan out abroad in a quest to control the means of production. China's attempts to control the means of production in other countries just rising out of developing world is causing tension with its natural allies, and could be just the first step in an ever-escalating series of resource-based conflicts.
In 2006, a fatal outbreak of PRRS (aka porcine blue-ear disease) devastated China’s swineherds, killing millions of pigs. The losses comprised just a tiniest fraction of its total herd of 660 million--more than the next 43 largest producers combined--but even the slight shortfall led to soaring pork prices a year later. Hence, the pork reserve, which would allow Beijing to move quickly to keep its citizens in ribs should there be another interruption in production.
China’s strategic pork reserve is the direct consequence of an emerging, meat-eating middle class and a government determined to feed them. As the sociologist Mindi Schneider points out, Deng’s economic reforms in the late 1970s privileged industrial farms over small plots to guarantee a steady supply of cheap pork. As a result, the average citizen’s meat consumption has quadrupled since 1980, while pork consumption has doubled in the last two decades. And China’s meat packers are just getting started--only 22% of China’s pork production takes place in industrial feedlots, compared to 97% of America’s. In the future, it will always be the Year of the Pig.
2. Soybeans: They’re Not Just For Tofu Anymore
Until a few years ago, however, the pork on ice was American--60 million pounds purchased from Smithfield Foods. Vowing porcine independence for its meat-eating middle class, in 2009 China began massively scaling up its own pork production, which required turning to other countries for the farmland necessary to feed the pigs.
Once the Politburo decided to feed China with pork, the question then became: What would China’s pigs eat? One answer is corn. Last week, China purchased 540,000 metric tons of U.S. corn for delivery after August, according to the USDA, more than agency’s forecast for the entire year. About 70% of that order is bound for making feedstock, mostly for pork, which last year required 74.5 million tons of corn--up 20% from 2009, according to China’s Agriculture Ministry.
But China’s corn imports--1.5 million tons last year--pale in comparison to its reliance on foreign soybeans. China imported more than 50 million tons of soybeans in 2010, mostly from the U.S. and Brazil, accounting for more than half of the global soy market. They also comprised almost three-quarters of China’s soy consumption, according to Schneider, and were used exclusively for animal feedstock and cooking oil. The USDA expects China’s soybean imports to rise more than 50% by 2020. It hasn’t helped that China actually lost 20 million acres of farmland between 1997 and 2009 due to natural disasters and rapid urbanization. Rather than guaranteeing its food security, China’s hunger for pork has made it utterly dependent on farmers in the Midwest and Minas Gerais instead"...............READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment