China is currently the world’s largest producer and consumer of agricultural products. As its rapid economic expansion has allowed more and more Chinese to enter the new middle class, meat became part of their daily meals. In Yuan terms, meat is the second largest segment of China’s retail food market. Western-style meat culture became mainstream.

China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s top producer of meat chickens and pigs. It also raises two-thirds of the world’s domestic ducks and 90 percent of geese used for meat. While its cattle herd is still relatively small, demand for beef is rising and China expects to increase its beef output by three percent in 2008.

In addition to meat, dairy too is an expanding industry (an average of 20 percent a year over the past decade), while, since 2000, consumption of milk products in China has tripled.

In the past 10 years China’s meat consumption kept on growing and feed demands are growing with it. The question “Who will feed China?” has been changed into: “Who will feed China’s pigs?”
Grain requirements for farmed animals are expanding rapidly in many parts of the world. China, for instance, now allots 28.5 percent of its grain for livestock feed, up from 13.3 percent in 1980.

Similar to the pattern in the U.S., animal agriculture in China is becoming more vertically integrated, with large corporations increasingly owning not just factory farm facilities, but also slaughterhouses and feed companies.
Larger-scale operations which increasingly rely on automation in production, packaging and transportation —a process which ultimately will create significant meat supply companies. Although still in its earliest stages, this trend will develop as growers become actively involved in supplying to the fast-growing supermarket and hypermarket chains rapidly expanding outside China’s largest cities.

Source : Brighter Green


1. China’s 12th five-year plan (Agricultural section)
2. Top 10 Provinces Poultry Meat Out Put 
3. China’s animal health sector
4. Food safety