China's diet revolution threatens the environment

Hangzhou Letter:The neon sheen of fast food restaurants in this thriving city south of Shanghai told its own tale about new dining habits in boomtime China.

Groups such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's have come here in droves to take a share of the vast Chinese market as life in the economic fast lane brings prosperity to many millions of its people.

But even without the burger craze, diet has changed radically in a country that has 1.3 billion mouths to feed every day. China provides no exception to the rule that rising incomes lead inevitably to higher consumption of meat and poultry products. According to local research cited by the British Medical Journal, Chinese people increased their energy intake from animal sources to 25 per cent in 2002 from 8 per cent in 1982.

Experts warn that this food revolution poses grave and immediate environmental dangers for China and the world at large because of its link to a huge increase in global livestock production.

In a new report titled Livestock's Long Shadow (available on www.virtualcentre.org), the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says the sector is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems.

Its contribution to land degradation, climate change, air and water pollution, water shortage and loss of biodiversity is on a "massive scale", the report says.

"The most striking part is certainly the rapid expansion of demand and production of livestock products, which is mainly driven by Asia. Within Asia, it's China that is the major emerging player," says Dr Henning Steinfeld, an agricultural economist with the UN and lead author of the report. "If you look at the developing countries as a whole, three countries dominate the scene. Apart from China, that would be India and Brazil . . . You're actually talking about three major emerging players that weren't on the scene 20 years ago."

Annual global production of meat will more than double to 465 million tonnes in 2050 from 229 million in 1999-2001, the report says.

"The environmental impact per unit of livestock production must be cut by half, just to avoid increasing the level of damage beyond its present level."

While hundreds of millions of farmers in China continue to produce livestock on a modest scale, the sector is increasingly industrialised and moving away from "backyard" production. Dr Steinfeld sees huge potential for environmental damage.

"When you talk China and meat you're talking about pigs. Pigs are a difficult thing to deal with, particularly in terms of waste, because the way in the modern system the waste is handled is using water or so-called flush systems," he says.

"That's basically an issue because the large concentration of units near cities or near ports, where feed is available, leads to an overload of nutrients in these areas, because they have no ability to dispose of the waste on surrounding land. The land is just too far away and it is simply then discharged into surface waters.

"That goes further downstream. Eventually it reaches the sea where it has all kinds of negative implications on biodiversity and marine ecosystems."

There is more. The growth in livestock production means more grain is needed to feed animals. With China no longer able to provide enough grain for internal purposes, the inevitable consequence is that livestock producers must go abroad for supplies.

"What our study tries to do is trace these impacts and attribute what can be attributed to the livestock sector. So if there is crop area expansion and if that arable land which was previously forest is now used for feed crop production, we attribute that to the livestock sector because that's where the expansion occurs," Dr Steinfeld says.

The UN report calls for "sustainable" intensification livestock and feed crop production to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and pasture degradation.

Among other recommendations, it says animal nutrition and manure management should be improved to cut methane and nitrogen emissions. To counter water pollution, it calls for better management of animal waste in industrial units and better use of processed manure on croplands.

So are the authorities in China listening? Dr Steinfeld says they have acknowledged environmental problems in their official statements, but indicates that enforcement of standards is lax.

"There seems to be a whole host of regulations and standards that have been issues. But I think the point really is that much of that is not enforced as yet," he says.

"What's complicating the issue is actually the pace of change, which makes it very difficult for a public policy response to catch up."

He points out that it took 25 years for the authorities in Europe to put a functioning system of waste in place "and still there are problems, still there are lots of things that need to be remedied".

Up to 40 per cent of the Chinese may depend on agriculture for a living. The UN body sees livestock production is "an expression of the poverty of people", who have no other options.

While many of the rural poor are taking flight for the cities, the authorities are keen to arrest that trend. At the same time, industrialisation on a grand scale is supplanting small producers.

"Enforcing standards on smallholders is almost impossible, because you're talking about huge numbers of them and you're also talking about substantial investments that need to be made in order to reduce the waste load," Dr Steinfeld says.

"It's a continuing issue. It's not going to go away any time soon. It will be with us for the next 20 years at least."