China
soybean needs shaping West's
farms By Lester R Brown
WASHINGTON - Global demand for soybeans
has soared in recent decades, with China leading
the race. Nearly 60% of all soybeans entering
international trade today go to China, making it
far and away the world's largest importer.
The soybean was domesticated some 3,000
years ago by farmers in eastern China. But it
wasn't until well after World War II that the crop
gained agricultural prominence, enabling it to
join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world's
four leading crops.
This rise in the
demand for soybeans reflected the discovery by
animal nutritionists that combining one part
soybean meal with four parts grain, usually corn,
in feed rations would sharply boost
the efficiency with which
livestock and poultry converted grain into animal
protein.
As China's appetite for meat,
milk, and eggs has soared, so too has its use of
soybean meal, and since nearly half the world's
pigs are in China, the biggest share of soy use is
in pig feed. Its fast-growing poultry industry is
also dependent on soybean meal. In addition, China
now uses large quantities of soy in feed for
farmed fish.
Four numbers tell the story
of the explosive growth of soybean consumption in
China. In 1995, China was producing 14 million
tonnes of soybeans and it was consuming 14 million
tonnes. In 2011, it was still producing 14 million
tonnes of soybeans but consuming 70 million
tonnes, meaning that 56 million tonnes had to be
imported.
China's neglect of soybean
production reflects a political decision made in
Beijing in 1995 to focus on being self-sufficient
in grain. For the Chinese people, many of them
survivors of the Great Famine of 1959-61, this was
paramount. They did not want to be dependent on
the outside world for their food staples.
By strongly supporting grain production
with generous subsidies and essentially ignoring
soybean production, China increased its grain
harvest rapidly while its soybean harvest
languished.
Hypothetically, if China had
chosen to produce all of the 70 million tonnes of
soybeans it consumed in 2011, it would have had to
shift one-third of its grainland to soybeans,
forcing it to import 160 million tonnes of grain -
more than a third of its total grain consumption.
As more of China's 1.35 billion people move up the
food chain, its soybean imports will almost
certainly continue to climb.
The principal
effect of skyrocketing world soybean consumption
has been a restructuring of agriculture in the
Western hemisphere. In the United States, there is
now more land in soybeans than in wheat. In
Brazil, the area in soybeans exceeds that of all
grains combined. Argentina's soybean area is now
close to double that of all grains combined,
putting the country dangerously close to becoming
a soybean monoculture.
Together they
account for over four-fifths of world soybean
production. For six decades, the United States was
both the leading producer and exporter of
soybeans; in 2011 Brazil's exports narrowly
eclipsed those from the United States.
Although most of the growth in the world
grain harvest since the mid-20th century is from
the tripling of grain yield per acre, the 16-fold
increase in the global soybean harvest has come
overwhelmingly from expanding the cultivated area.
While the area expanded nearly sevenfold, the
yield scarcely doubled. The world gets more
soybeans primarily by planting more soybeans.
Therein lies the problem.
The question
then becomes: where will the soybeans be planted?
The United States is now using all of its
available cropland and has no additional land that
can be planted to soybeans. The only way to expand
soybean acreage is by shifting land from other
crops, such as corn or wheat. In Brazil, new land
for soybean production comes from the Amazon Basin
or the cerrado, the savannah-like region to
the south.
Put simply, saving the Amazon
rainforest now depends on curbing the growth in
demand for soybeans by stabilizing population
worldwide as soon as possible. For the world's
more affluent people, it means eating less meat
and thus slowing the growth in demand for
soybeans. Against this backdrop, the recent
downturn in US meat consumption is welcome news.
Lester Brown is the president of
Earth Policy Institute. For further reading on the
global food situation, see Full Planet, Empty
Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity,
by Lester R Brown (W.W. Norton: October 2012).
Supporting data sets and PowerPoint presentations
are online at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.
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