China-Farming overveiw with Mia McDonald.

CHINA- A NICE STORY ON FARMING.

Old MacDonald had a farm -- one resounding with oinks and moos and squawks. By today’s standards, the old man’s farm would count as a model of biodiversity. Researcher Mia MacDonald points out that across the planet, old ways of farming are giving way to the environmentally devastating factory farms we’ve pioneered in the West -- typically housing a single species of animal, confined by the thousands in conditions that would be alien to Old MacDonald’s pigs and cows and chickens. For modern industrial-scale animal farms, the proper literary form is the scathing environmental report, not the children’s ditty.

At Brighter Green, an action think tank that helps advocacy groups take informed action through research and analysis, MacDonald is currently at work on a series of case studies on the spread of factory-style farming across the globe. She’s cutting straight to the chase: China, the world’s biggest nation, is the subject of the first case study.

I caught up with Mia to discuss Brighter Green’s new report, "Skillful Means: The Challenges of China’s Encounter with Factory Farming" [PDF], which delves into China, meat, and the connection with our climate.

Anna Lappe: Last year, I spent a couple of weeks in rural China and was struck by the relationship between communities and their pigs. Can you talk about the traditional relationship between Chinese communities and livestock animals and how that’s changed through industrialization of farming?

Mia McDonald: As in most rural parts of the world, small farmers often tend crops and have a few farmed animals to provide milk, eggs, meat (on special occasions since the animals have more value alive than dead), and also manure to fertilize fields. This work is often the province of women, particularly when the farming operations are small-scale.

What the industrial model does, in China, the U.S., and everywhere else where it’s dominant, is to cut the link between the animals and the land and the animals and people. In industrial systems -- factory farms -- large numbers of animals are confined inside. They produce so much manure and the facilities are often located near cities far from where crops are being grown, so the manure is often just dumped, without treatment, into nearby waterways. Or it’s stored in large "lagoons" that can leak into groundwater and that bring with them a stench that can be smelled for miles.

Such facilities are largely mechanized, so they require very little labor or farming skill, and the jobs are tough, repetitive, and usually poorly paid.

So the landscape is transformed, as is the agricultural system and millions of people’s livelihoods. It seems like the Chinese government is keen to continue the urbanization of China and also to intensify and industrialize the agricultural sector, which means even larger changes are ahead -- and the further severing of relationships between the Chinese people and farmed animals and the people and the land.

A.L.: What are the trend lines about meat and dairy consumption in China? How does this compare with our diets? Is China becoming a "fast food nation"?

M.M.: Since 1980, meat consumption in China has risen four-fold. It’s now about 119 pounds per person a year, just over half the average American’s per capita annual meat consumption of 220 pounds.

In 2007, China raised and slaughtered 700 million pigs. That’s about 10 times the number in the U.S., although pork is China’s most popular meat and China’s population is more than four times as large as the U.S.’s, dairy consumption is rising even faster; the dairy industry in China has grown 20 percent a year over the past decade, and consumption of milk products in China has risen three times since 2000.

Whether or not China becomes a fully fledged "fast food nation" is an open question, but the trends suggest it will. Or will try to be. Whether there is going to be sufficient ecological space and climate space for such an expansion of meat and dairy consumption isn’t fully clear.

A.L.: What’s driving these changes in diet?

M.M.: There are many factors at play. It is the case in most of the world’s societies that as people get more urban and more affluent, they want to consume more animal products.

Historically, meat was expensive and therefore reserved for the wealthy and the elite. With a growing middle class and agricultural economies designed to allow production of meat on an industrial or near-industrial scale, the demand and supply factors interact and the result is more meat and more people eating it more often.

Certainly globalization and trade have played a role: U.S. agribusiness corporations have been looking for new markets and China is a hugely attractive one, due to the sheer size of its population and economic growth that has given many Chinese, although not yet a majority by any means, a place in the middle class. Meat and dairy have become part and parcel of the process of globalization, and trade rules allow the movement of vast numbers of live and dead animals around the world each year. Even today, China, while largely self-sufficient in food production, exports millions of pigs each year (both alive and dead), imports pork and chicken parts from the U.S. and the E.U., and is the primary destination for soy grown in Brazil (much of it in the Amazon) -- destined to feed China’s billions of farm animals.

A.L.: What role have U.S. food companies played in the changing Chinese diet?

M.M.: A significant one. Thousands of KFCs, McDonald’s, and Pizza Huts now operate in China, and leading U.S. agribusinesses like Tyson, Smithfield, and Novus, an animal feed manufacturer, have made multi-million dollar investments in China. U.S. agribusiness has played a major role in intensifying China’s meat and dairy sector and has now been joined by state enterprises and Chinese entrepreneurs.

U.S. agribusiness brands are now being used to market animal products in China. Just one example: Tyson Foods entered into a joint venture with China’s Jianhai Poultry Industry Group to establish a new poultry processing operation that will, when at full capacity, produce a million chickens per week that will be sold under the Tyson label.

A.L.: The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has cited the livestock sector as "one of the two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." Can you help connect the dots between meat consumption and climate change? Is all meat bad, or just factory-farmed meat?

M.M.: The FAO estimates that 18 percent of global greenhouse gases come from the livestock sector. CO2 is produced by the use of fossil fuels in facilities that raise and process the animals, as well as in transporting them to slaughterhouses and to markets. Significant additional quantities of CO2 are released when forests or grasslands are cleared to graze livestock or produce feed grains for them to eat, as well as in the production of nitrogen-based fertilizers.

Even more climate-intense are methane and nitrous oxide, which have, respectively, 23 and 296 times the global warming impact of CO2 on the climate. Methane is produced by "enteric fermentation," the process by which ruminant animals digest food, as well as from animal manure. Animal waste also emits nitrous oxide.

Other analysts suggest an even higher figure, attributing between 38 percent and 52 percent of GHGs to the livestock sector, if all the factors are considered. A prime one not included in the FAO analysis is farmed animals’ respiration, which releases (as does ours) CO2.

Is all meat bad? Research<