The Bacon Uprising: How China's Top-Secret Strategic Pork Reserve Is Burning Down The Amazon

[The Straight Story]

The Bacon Uprising: How China's Top-Secret Strategic Pork Reserve Is Burning Down The Amazon


The Strategic Pork Reserve

Since Deng Xiaoping, China’s leaders have been obsessed with “food security” the same way America’s are haunted by not having enough oil. And as Chinese diets become more meat centric, fears of the dangers in the fluctuation of pork prices led China to establish a top-secret “strategic pork reserve” in 2007, the only one of its kind. But maintaining all those pigs has led to a massive dependence on corn and soybean imports for animal feed, which in turn is leading China’s agribusinesses to fan out abroad in a quest to control the means of production. China's attempts to control the means of production in other countries just rising out of developing world is causing tension with its natural allies, and could be just the first step in an ever-escalating series of resource-based conflicts.

....

China’s strategic pork reserve is the direct consequence of an emerging, meat-eating middle class and a government determined to feed them. As the sociologist Mindi Schneider points out, Deng’s economic reforms in the late 1970s privileged industrial farms over small plots to guarantee a steady supply of cheap pork. As a result, the average citizen’s meat consumption has quadrupled since 1980, while pork consumption has doubled in the last two decades. And China’s meat packers are just getting started--only 22 percent of China’s pork production takes place in industrial feedlots, compared to 97 percent of America’s. In the future, it will always be the Year of the Pig.

...

The Politburo’s solution was to command state-owned enterprises to “go out” and buy or lease farmland by the millions of acres. Last fall, Heilongjiang Beidahuang Nongken Group--China's largest state-run agricultural conglomerate--agreed to develop almost 500,000 acres of farmland in Argentina, followed by another 200,000 hectares this year. A month later, Chongqing Grains’ announced a $2.5 billion deal to produce soybeans in Brazil.


http://www.fastcompany.com/1766646/and-bacon-for-all-how-chinas-craving-for-pork-is-burning-down-the-amazon-and-leading-to-a-ri

[somone]

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[WheelWalker]

3. This will not end well.