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China s soaring demand for meat is straining the capacity of thecountry s traditional farms, as authorities try to ramp upproduction while keeping safety high and prices low. In 1978, Americans consumed three times the amount of meat thatChinese did. But by 2011, Chinese consumers turned the table,eating 71 million tons of meat, more than double the amount thatAmericans consumed. As the producer and consumer of more than half of the world's pigs,Chinese have so far maintained an almost complete self reliance onmeat, with 97 percent of the animal s produced at home. Instead of direct pork imports, China has traditionally opted forimports of feed. Sixty three percent of the world's traded soybeansare bought by China for its domestic farms. They do not have enough land to produce the feed for the meat,but they want to develop a agribusiness sector that does handlethat meat, says Mindi Schneider, a PHD candidate at CornellUniversity who studies global agricultural markets and agriculturaldevelopment. To keep up with demand, China is now engaged in a structuraltransformation of its meat industry. In 2011, fewer than a quarter of China's pigs were raised inindustrialized farms with more than 500 pigs. Smaller scale backyard farms and specialized household farms account forthe majority of the country's pork output. Beijing's aim has beento consolidate production by subsidizing large scale farms, andpromoting collective management of small enterprises. Chinese economists have pushed for the creation of dragon-head firms, large scale farms that involve smaller enterprises in theirsupply chain and provide them guidance on production practices. The idea, says Schneider, is that by subsidizing thosecompanies and requiring that they contract with small-holder farms,that they are sort of leading the agribusiness sector and alsoleading rural development by having this responsibility tosmall-holder farmers. While Beijing is engaged in modernizing its agricultural industry,experts are trying to gauge how the growing appetite for meat inChina will impact global markets. Joel Haggard, Asia Pacific vice president of the U.S. Meat ExportFederation, says that before 2008 the Chinese meat market wasalmost completely divorced from the rest of the world. What happened in China had no influence on the global market, andwhat happened in the global market had no influence in China, hesaid, But that changed, he added. In 2008 a decline in pork supply, partly due to a disease outbreak,drove up the price of pork produced domestically. China compensatedby importing unprecedented amounts of pork, thus driving up theglobal market price. If China comes in and just orders a hundred thousand tons extrapork, it has tremendous influence on the market, Haggard says,and adds that anybody that is producing pork in the world islooking at what is going to happen in China over the next couple ofdecades. Cornell University's Mindi Schneider has conducted field researchin the Chinese pig industry, and says that with the government'spush to develop China's domestic industry, she is skeptical of thecurrent international rush to supply China's meat market. I would be really reluctant to advise anyone; to say 'Yeah,rescale your whole production so that you can ship meat to China,'because I am just not sure that it's as big as people areprojecting.". The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Aluminum Blind Rivet Manufacturer , Multigrip Rivet Manufacturer, and more. For more , please visit Pop Blind Rivet today!
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