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What China's Growing Appetite For Pork Means For The Environment

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China has an astounding appetite for pork. By some estimates, the country is home to 723 million hogs, about 60 percent of the world’s total.

As a recent article by journalist Christina Larson in Science magazine showed, those hogs are creating new and ominous threats to the environment. China's hogs excrete an estimated 618 billion kilograms of manure each year, as well as tens of thousands of tons of antibiotics, says Larson. That has led to the proliferation of bacteria with antibiotic resistant genes in Chinese waterways. If those genes find their way into pathogenic bacteria, the result could be a highly dangerous superbug.

Chinese consumers are enjoying more choice at the supermarket than ever before. But the new appetite for meat does have a destabilizing effect on the environment. Since China began opening its borders to the world in 1978, its per capita GDP has increased by a factor of 43, from $150 per person per year to almost $7,000. With that growth has come bigger houses, new appliances, and changing diets. More than a quarter of all the meat consumed in the world is now eaten in China.

Traditionally, most Chinese consumed meat sparingly. Until the late 20th Century, Chinese obtained over 90 percent of their calories from carbohydrates, and famine was never far from memory. But Chinese diets today are shifting radically. The country has gone from eating one-third as much meat as the U.S. in 1978 to twice as much as the U.S. today.

This is in large part because of China’s huge population: Per capita, the Chinese still consume only half as much meat as their American counterparts (the average American eats a stunning 235 pounds of meat per year, equivalent to more than one burger a day). But even eating half the amount of meat as Americans has affected Chinese health. Levels of diabetes and obesity have skyrocketed; according to a recent study, 23 percent of boys and 14 percent of girls under 20 are overweight or obese.

China’s changing eating habits also have big implications for global agriculture and trade, and in turn for the environment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country’s enormous hog industry.

Pork is usually the meat of choice in China. Whether it’s made into moo shu, wrapped in dumplings, or braised like Mao Zedong liked it, pork accounts for nearly three-quarters of Chinese meat consumption. China raises most of those pigs domestically.

Raising pigs was traditionally a backyard enterprise in China. The pig served as a low-tech garbage disposal, gobbling up left over scraps and in return supplying manure and meat for the farm. The Chinese character for home, jia, even depicts a (stylized) pig under a roof – apparently, a house wasn’t a home without one.

That way of farming is disappearing fast, as people depart rural areas for cities and the agricultural industry modernizes. To meet higher demand and enforce quality standards across the meat industry, the Chinese government is trying to consolidate small farms into larger, more efficient entities. By doing so, the government hopes to quell the disease epidemics and product quality scandals that have shaken the food industry and frightened consumers.

China has became notorious for a string of stomach-turning food scandals: melamine-laced infant formula that killed at least six infants and sickened hundreds of thousands; a cottage industry in “manufacturing” eggs out of paraffin, gelatin and other chemicals; cooking oil fished from drains outside restaurants and recycled into the normal oil supply; and rice fields irrigated with wastewater from mining operations and paper plants.

The Chinese meat industry had its share of scandals. Media reports in 2011 revealed that some Chinese vendors were using coloring and chemicals to turn pork into “beef,” which sells for a higher price. In 2014, an investigative report showed that a supplier to KFC and McDonald’s had been selling chicken and beef that expired up to one year earlier.

But the biggest eye opener came in March 2013, when thousands of diseased pigs were discovered floating in a river that supplies Shanghai’s water. That kind of incident is not uncommon: In early 2014 alone, hundreds of pig carcasses were found dumped in waterways in Qinghai, Sichuan and Jiangxi province. But it was by far the largest, with at least 16,000 dead pigs discovered, and it was only 60 miles from Shanghai.

China’s livestock industry has given birth to deadly strains of bird and swine flu, and it threatens to spawn antibiotic-resistant superbugs. China uses 150,000 to 200,000 tons of antibiotics a year, about 10 times as much as the U.S., about half of those antibiotics go to livestock. As Larson wrote for Science magazine, the result has been an ominous increase in bacteria with antibiotic resistant genes.

Beyond inculcating disease, raising livestock uses lots of arable land, water, grain, and (in today’s farming methods) fossil fuels. Per calorie, pork requires about five times as much water as cereals or starchy roots. Producing one pound of pork, for example, requires about six pounds of feed and 576 gallons of water.

And livestock produce a lot of waste, including manure that can be laced with antibiotics, nitrates and disease-causing pathogens, and greenhouse gasses like methane and carbon dioxide. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock industry is responsible for 18 percent of global carbon emissions – more than cars, planes, ships, and trains combined.

For Chinese consumers, the ability to eat more meat is a good thing in many ways. But it carries with it an ecological burden that shouldn't be discounted.