China has overtaken the US as the biggest consumer of food, industrial commodities and - with the exception of oil - energy, according to a report that erodes the perception that the US is the world's biggest consuming nation.
The report, released by the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, provides a catalogue of China's growing appetite for food and commodities and, although the report's data are not new, gives a snapshot of the scale of the country's recent economic growth.
The report shows that China consumed 382 million tons of grain in 2004, compared with 278 million tons by the US, while it also consumed 63 million tons of meat last year, against 37 million tons in the US.
The report also notes that China was already consuming twice as much steel as the US in 2003, and is set to surpass the US in aluminium consumption this year.
Data in the report show that China had already outstripped US demand for grain in 1973, fertiliser in 1984, meat in 1991 and had edged ahead of US demand for coal in the late 1980s.
Chinese consumers, however, now also collectively own 50 per cent more television sets and 66 per cent more mobile phones than Americans, the report says.
Although the mainland's population of 1.3 billion is 4.5 times that of the US, China's average per capita annual income last year was just one-seventh of the $38,000 (€29,200) in the US.
China still trails the US in motor vehicles, having a total of just 24 million, not even one-10th of the 226 million in the US.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)