The Chinese diet is increasingly becoming more Westernized, potentially at the expense of global food stability.<\/b>
\nThe 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\u00a0has left the country short of\u00a0land on which to\u00a0grow 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.
\u00ab\u00a0The rapid rate of industrialization in China is really chewing up crop land at an alarming rate, \u00a0\u00bb Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Institute, told Reuters . \u00ab\u00a0China is now losing cropland.\u00a0\u00bb
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\u00a0as importing\u00a0more food from abroad \u2014 unless the world begins accommodating food production for 9 billion people. Instead, t he Chinese\u00a0government has started\u00a0leasing farms in North and South America, Australia, and Africa. In some\u00a0cases, 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. These efforts help\u00a0 improve the quality of China’s\u00a0food production, which has been an issue in the past \u2014 the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration has had to shut down meat-processing factories \u00a0on numerous occasions because they were using expired products.
But even that strategy has its limits.
Population experts predict that an additional 2 billion people will live on the planet by 2050. Many of the biggest spikes in population will be in areas\u00a0outside of China \u2014 developing regions in\u00a0South America and Africa, in particular\u00a0\u2014 where the country\u00a0has set up offshore factories for food production.
In solving its own problem, China may inadvertently put\u00a0much greater strains on the global food supply. Some evidence suggests this is already the case \u00a0with the\u00a0grains the country imports to feed cattle, according to USDA research. Producing one pound of beef requires seven pounds of grain, the Earth Institute finds.
Of course, China isn’t the only country adopting a Western diet \u2014 it’s merely the latest superpower to do so. The most straightforward way for people around the world to ease\u00a0the global burden this diet creates is to consume less of the animal protein that requires so much land and water\u00a0to produce. Even eating other livestock, such as poultry or pork, would ease\u00a0the demand for feed.
But as\u00a0China expands its international food operations, the risks of a widening food crisis only continue\u00a0to build.<\/p>\n