The Chinese diet is increasingly becoming more Westernized, potentially at the expense of global food stability.
The Western diet could be to blame.
Over the past two decades, China’s prevailing diet has shifted away from grains like rice and wheat in favor of richer animal proteins and a wider variety of exotic vegetables. As Bloomberg reports, this change has left the country short of land on which to grow produce and raise livestock.
While the Western diet typically demands about one acre per person, China has only 0.2 acres to devote to feeding each citizen. Meanwhile, the country consumes 50% of the world’s total pork supply.
“The rapid rate of industrialization in China is really chewing up crop land at an alarming rate, ” Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Institute, told Reuters . “China is now losing cropland.”
In an effort to meet the growing appetite for new foods, the country has turned its attention outward. But the solution isn’t as simple as importing more food from abroad — unless the world begins accommodating food production for 9 billion people. Instead, t he Chinese government has started leasing farms in North and South America, Australia, and Africa. In some cases, it has bought the land outright.
Launching factories in more industrialized countries has also allowed China to capitalize on newer technology and higher standards for storing perishable items.
