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Pork consumption 2016 in metric tons: China 54,070,000 America 9,452,000 Brazil 2,811,000 It's estimated that the supply gap will be 20,000,000 tons in 2020,

• nroets 7y ago
  I was in China for 3 months this year. Both rural and urban areas. People said "You will never be hungry in China" and they are right. They are enough substitutes for pork, many of them just as delicious.
  • anthony_doan 7y ago
    I'm not entirely sure your statement can offset the fact that many Chinese dishes use pork. While they won't get hungry there should be some sort of anger and resentment for having to change their diet.
  • AFascistWorld 7y ago
    I believe that's not how economics works, it's like you can't just close your eyes to rocketing condo prices and expect evetything else to remain the same like salaries. Every animal protein source will be driven to raise prices coz it's not like China could produce vastly more but refrained, arable land is not enough, it imports 30% of it's food, they just can't produce the cheap feed crops needed not to mention the amount. It is only in the recent 15 years that the average people could afford to put meat in their daily dishes (and aboslutely not in the sense as Ameicans eat cheap meat as a staple), that's why Chinese dishes are so heavy in carbs and veggies and soy. To take that away from many is the difference of have and have not.
    • whoevercares 7y ago
      >Recent 15 years Impressive how arrogant and ignorant this statement is. 15 years ago is 2004 and fk how superior am I to eat meat since 80’s in a third tier city
      • AFascistWorld 7y ago
        In the 80's the Chinese navy was using warships to smuggle insanely profitable sedans, coastal cities have secret private workshops which was punishable by the law until 2009, students marched in Beijing to protest againt crony speculatiors including sons of party high officials, city population is 20% of the country, farmers need application and strickly controlled permits to work in cities. Even in the early 2000s farmers aka "blind migrants" were still being rounded up in Shenzhen and arrested. So I don't really know if you are fk superior.
      • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        I agree. When I lived in China in 2002, meat wasn’t that rare, even in tier 88 cities I travelled to. The cafeterias in Beijing’s universities definitely had no problem finding it. Maybe in the 70s and early 80s?
        • AFascistWorld 7y ago
          The rate of urbanization in 2002 is 39.09%, note this includes small towns which are much poorer than cities, that means the majority of the population was still very poor and the trend to work in coastal factories barely began, so could you really see average people's daily dishes as a guest? I'm not saying it's rare to eat pork, what I’m saying is eating pork almost everyday like it's a super normal thing, not just every now and then or even ocassionally. I don't doubt there were many people who can afford to tho it's 1.4 billion afterall. In my mid-sized town eating pork was a treat back then, especially when there were guests or holidays, definitely not everyday, it was soy products, fish (near a big reservoir) and eggs, people's wages were 50 to 100 dollars, farmers were even poorer coz it was all susbsistence farming. _ There's no reply button. http://finance.sina.com.cn/x/20040908/07101007244.shtml http://finance.sina.com.cn/x/20040908/07101007244.shtml Do the math, pork was fluctuating around 1 dollar per 500g back then. Yunnan is mountainous so it probably doesn't even qualify as susbsistence farming, but it's warm and has fruit industry and tourism now, you can still find extreme poverty in Guizhou's mountains which is right above Yunnan. Leiyang is not a town in the American sense, it was a county now a city. Village → town → county → city → capital → province.
    • otakucode 7y ago
      I hear pig farmers will have lots of land available soon.
  • piker 7y ago
    > "You will never be hungry in China" Quite a bold statement, given China's recent history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
    • rurounijones 7y ago
      I actually read it in a very dark way. Same as "You will never be hungry when you have some dwarf bread" (i.e you would be willing to eat anything else). Given the history and what starving people are willing to eat, the saying takes a pretty black humour quality
      • i_am_nomad 7y ago
        “Dark humor is like food: not everyone gets it.”
    • mytailorisrich 7y ago
      This was 60 years ago... Nowadays China is a cornucopia of food of all sorts.