A vendor arranges pork at her stall in a Beijing market. With its new affluence, China is consuming much more meat, which is causing grain prices, for feed, to shoot up as well. (Greg Baker/Associated Press)
REPORTS FROM ABROAD: CHINA FILE from Anthony Germain
The world's fastest growing appetite
May 9, 2008
What happened to all those starving children in China?
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Canadians of my generation remember our mothers resorting to guilt trips when confronted by our fussy faces at the dinner table.
"Do you know there are starving children in China who would love to eat that," we were told in no uncertain terms.
Guess what? Those starving children have all grown up and they — and their children — are stuffing their faces.
I see them every day at noodle stands and dumpling shops, as well as in the growing number of Western fast-food outlets. Restaurants are cashing in on the world's fastest growing appetite and as a result the Chinese are eating meat and poultry like never before.
Chinese food
China's growing appetite for Western-style, meat-based meals is now considered to be one of the driving factors in the worldwide increase of food prices.
Sure, the Americans have done their bit by taking large amounts of corn out of the food chain and turning those cobs into fuel for cars. Plus, the weaker U.S. dollar does produce an inflationary effect on a number of products right now, including food.
But in a casual conversation with an economist here who knows his numbers, I learned that China's new prosperity is revolutionizing the country's diet at the same time as it is shaking up world food prices.
Zhuo Jianwei teaches at the Antai College of Economics and Management in Shanghai. According to his data, the average Chinese is eating 22 kilos of meat per year, which is double the amount of the early 1990s.
The same holds true for poultry. Milk, which was never really part of China's diet in the past, is now being guzzled in large quantities, almost triple the amount from 1990.
As economic development here is lifting millions after millions out of poverty, tastes and food preferences appear to be undergoing an equally fundamental change, one that producers from around the world are gamely trying to satisfy with ever more meat.
Shifting grains
One of the reasons the world is seeing such high prices for grain is that 15 years ago it was being used to feed the Chinese people.
Today, human consumption of grain here is down 25 per cent. But much more grain is being sown in order to raise animals for meat production, which, scientists agree, is a much less efficient way, from an energy and land-use perspective, for humans to get their daily calories.
Grain provides about twice as much food energy when it is consumed directly by people than when it is fed first to cows to produce meat and dairy products. But the shifting use of all that grain to feed all the new cows, pigs and chickens for the Chinese table is not likely to change. In fact, most here believe it is only going to increase.
The number of KFCs and McDonald's restaurants continues to mushroom around Shanghai and most other Chinese cities, attesting to the shifting taste buds. From Australian beef and lamb producers to Canadian margarine makers, the Chinese have their mouths wide open.
So foreign companies are cashing in, too, which is what globalization is all about. But as officials from the UN's World Food Program observed recently, this kind of trade has turned basic foodstuffs such as wheat, rice and corn into commodities destined for the highest bidder, not necessarily the neediest mouths.
Iron rice bowl
In a sign of Communist central-planning foresight, the price of rice in China has been kept stable. While people panic in the Philippines, protest in Indonesia and hoard in Vietnam, the Chinese enjoy a state-controlled pricing system for rice.
Peasant farmers can't make any extra money selling rice on superheated world markets right now, but then they are not being deprived of their traditional staple. The Communist party knows what happens when the Chinese people can't afford their rice: Hungry peasants have overthrown emperors before.
Here, rice usually comes at the end of every meal. As this new generation of Chinese meat eaters finish chowing down on their expensive cuts of beef and boneless chicken breasts, they satisfy their palates — and their pocketbooks — with bowls of highly subsidized rice.
Raw capitalism has enriched so many Chinese, allowing them to eat foods they could not even have dreamt about 30 years ago.
As their chopsticks click and clack against their rice bowls, the Chinese enjoy the best of both worlds: They can buy meat they never used to be able to afford and it comes with a side dish of government-protected rice.
Nobody here seems to notice the irony. They're all too busy eating.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Biography
Anthony Germain is the CBC News correspondent in Beijing, having previously been based in Shanghai. His reporting career spans two decades from local radio in New Brunswick to CBC Radio's Parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. During that time he also covered conflicts in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia. More recently, Anthony hosted CBC's The House as well as the local Ottawa morning show. He also co-anchored CBC Radio's election night coverage and was a frequent guest on other CBC programs including The Current.
