Can the world soothe China's endless thirst for milk? | Environment

BDirector Jian Yi, 43, based in Eijing, clearly remembers the arrival of fresh milk in his life. It was an image of it, not the real thing. "It was in the 1990s and I first saw it in an advertisement on television. The advertisement explicitly said that drinking milk would save the nation. This would make China stronger and more able to survive the competition from other countries. "

Like most members of the Han ethnic group, who make up about 95 percent of the population, Jian was conbadly lactose intolerant, which meant that milk was difficult to digest. His parents did not eat dairy products when they grew up; The Chinese economy was closed to the world market and its own production very limited. Throughout the Mao era, milk was scarce and rationed for people considered to have special needs: infants and the elderly, athletes, and party cadres above a certain level. Until the 20th century, during most imperial dynasties, milk was generally rejected as a slightly disgusting food for barbarian invaders. Foreigners brought cows to the port cities which had been ceded to them by the Chinese during the 19th century opium wars, and some groups such as the Mongol pastoralists used fermented milk, but this was not part of the typical Chinese diet.

When China opened up to the market in the 1980s, after Mao's death, dried milk powder began to appear in small shops where it could be bought with government-issued coupons. Jian's parents bought him for it because they thought it would make him stronger. "It was expensive, I did not like it, I was intolerant, but we convinced ourselves that it was the food of the future," he said. "You must understand psychology here – there is a feeling in China that we have been humiliated since the opium wars, but that we will no longer be humiliated by foreign powers."

When the People's Republic of China was born in 1949, its national dairy herd would consist of only 120,000 cows. Yet today, China is the third largest milk producer in the world, with about 13 million dairy cows, and the average consumer has gone from almost nothing to drinking milk to a consumption of about 30 kg of milk. dairy products per year.

In just over 30 years, milk has become the emblem of a modern and affluent society and a country capable of feeding its people. The transition was led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), for which milk is not just food, but a key strategic tool. The party's claim to the monopoly of power is based on the principles of socialism. As he has tempered this socialist ideology with elements of a market economy, the legitimacy of the one-party state depends rather on the realization of the capitalist promise of increasing material wealth. The fact that people can afford to buy products of animal origin is a visible symbol of the success of the holiday. Making animal products, especially milk, accessible to everyone across the country is one way to tackle the potentially destabilizing inequalities that have emerged with China's development between the big cities and some of the poorest rural areas. In the poorest regions, nearly one in five children still suffers from stunting or nutritional inadequacy because of their age.

The party's current 13th five-year plan identifies one of its top priorities: moving from small flocks to larger industrial farms to maintain a population of 1.4 billion people in milk. Official dietary guidelines recommend that people consume three times more dairy products than they currently consume.

President Xi Jinping spoke in his speeches about the creation of a "new Chinese man". In 2014, he visited a factory owned by China's largest dairy processor, Yili, and urged his workers to produce good and safe dairy products. This new Chinese man should be a milk drinker.

The reinvention of milk as a staple of modern China has required a series of remarkable achievements, especially to overcome lactose intolerance and create a milk market where there was none. It was about privatizing agriculture, allowing processing companies to become businesses, and even converting desert areas into giant factory farms.

At present, the global impact of the expanding dairy sector in China is causing concern in other countries. Dairy farming requires access to large quantities of fresh water: it takes about 1,020 liters of water to produce one liter of milk. But China suffers from water scarcity and buys rights over land and water abroad, as well as the creation of large-scale processing plants in other countries.

Livestock are also one of the most important causes of climate change caused by humans. Livestock currently account for about 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector. Cattle account for more than two-thirds of these emissions. Ruminants have a disproportionate impact because their digestion releases large quantities of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and their excrement produces nitrous oxide. In addition, vast expanses of forest are being cleared to release more land for crops to feed farm animals and release carbon dioxide. China already imports 60% of the world's total soybean market to produce the protein-rich foods it needs. His demand for soy is one of the main factors of deforestation of the Amazonian and Brazilian savannah. The distribution of milk over long distances to urban supermarkets produces even more emissions.

According to a study by Chinese and Dutch academics, if China's milk consumption increases as expected using its current production methods, global emissions from milk production alone would increase by 35% and the land needed to feed cows to China are expected to increase by 32% over the next 30 years. China's ambitions to triple its milk consumption "will have major consequences globally," said Gerard Velthof, the Dutch leading researcher of the study. China's ability to produce more is limited by its lack of resources. Thus, if the additional milk to satisfy the demand in China was mainly imported, two new countries of the size of Ireland would have to be found and devoted entirely to the production of food only for dairy cows in China or for those -this.

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JHe believes that China's new obsession with milk took root at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. When he directed a documentary on food in China ten years ago, he interviewed people of his parents' generation, who repeatedly mentioned watching the games. The new mbad ownership of televisions allowed the Chinese to see for the first time on TV real aliens, as opposed to actors. "It made a huge impression on people," said Jian. "They were amazed at how strong and tall foreigners were. They could jump twice, run twice as fast. They concluded that the Americans ate a lot of beef and drank a lot of milk and that the Chinese had to catch up. "

Chinese state planners were also impressed by the way the Japanese have developed. When the United States conquered and occupied Japan after the Second World War, they introduced feeding programs in Japanese schools to give milk and eggs to children. Average heights increased in one generation.

In 1984, Deng Xiaoping's market reforms, which began a few years earlier in December 1978, marked the beginning of a period of unprecedented economic growth. GDP increased on average by about 10% per year until 2010. The first phase of the reforms ended collective agriculture in agriculture, opened up industries to the economy. 39 foreign investment and allowed individuals to start their own businesses. A new "household responsibility program" has allowed families to exploit individual plots and resell surpluses for profit. These small farmers were encouraged to keep a few cattle for milk to increase their income while increasing domestic supply. The effect was dramatic. The amount of food produced has increased rapidly and over the next two decades it would increase by an average of 4.5% per year.

By urbanizing, people have risen up the food chain, from diets based primarily on cereals and staple foods to foods in which meat, dairy, fats and sugars a more important place. China has followed the same path. Consumption of dairy products increased rapidly during the 1980s and early 1990s. The Western retail model based on supermarkets with longer supply chains also arrived in cities, which allows producers to distribute milk more easily and to buyers to buy it easily.

As incomes increased, people could buy refrigerators at home and wanted milk to put them in place. For factory workers working long hours, dairy products were a convenient way to get nutrients without having to cook. The technology to produce UHT milk with longer expiry dates, imported in the late 1990s, has given new impetus to consumption. Since the fermentation of milk contributes to the decomposition of lactose, new yogurt products have also been marketed to combat lactose intolerance.

From the mid-1980s, several multinational dairy companies such as Fonterra, Nestlé, Danone and Arla made significant investments in China to develop their brands. Chinese dairy processors, backed by the state and having access to new foreign capital, have also spent millions of dollars – first creating a demand through advertising and then seeking to satisfy the supply then. The arrival in the United Kingdom of Western-style fast-food restaurants, such as McDonald's, in the early 1990s brought cheese into the daily diet of the Chinese. The end of the decade saw the opening of Starbucks in Beijing and the initiation of Western-style coffee-shop culture, making milk fashionable. Milk represents modernity, progress and the rise of China.

By the end of the 1990s, the cities of eastern China were expanding and the population was consuming more dairy products, but the gap was widening between this country and the interior, where the inhabitants were much poorer and still drank little milk. The state has launched new campaigns to make agriculture more efficient and accelerate the overall development of less prosperous regions of the West. The promotion of intensive cow-fed industrial livestock breeding in new high-tech facilities in Inner Mongolia was part of this modernization effort.

The five-year party plans, starting in the late 1990s, set up a series of supports for dairy companies. The state facilitated lending to agricultural companies to buy cows, provided tax breaks to processors, and allocated tens of millions of dollars in national debt funds to improve breeding stocks and stocks. milking and packing facilities. China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 gave a new impetus to the dairy trade. The search for dairy products has been very effective. In 1990, urban Chinese people consumed about 4 kg of dairy products on average per year. In 2005, this number had risen to 18 kg per person per year. In the countryside, consumption was lagging, but it nevertheless increased from 1 kg per person per year to almost 3 kg during the same period. Inner Mongolia has become the main source of milk and now accounts for one quarter of the country's total milk production.

To expand milk consumption, the state has undertaken to create new generations of consumers of dairy products. Babies are born with the ability to make lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose contained in milk, but usually lose it when they are weaned in infancy. East Asians are also genetically predisposed to lactase deficiency. Older generations of Chinese, whose diets do not contain dairy products, are mostly lactose intolerant, but if infants never stopped drinking milk, they might retain some ability to produce lactase and to avoid suffering bloating that discouraged him.

Health professionals in the vaccination clinics were trained to ask parents to feed their children with milk. The state launched a school milk program in 2000 to give children a free glbad of milk and then expand it to rural areas. Premier Wen Jiabao visited a dairy farm in 2006 and wrote that he dreamed that everyone in China, and especially children, should have a jin (or 500 g) of milk a day. New official guidelines on nutrition have been published, recommending to incorporate more milk and dairy products into the diet.

Drinking milk was deliberately badociated with sporting prowess and national pride. Yili, headquartered in Hohhot, where the State of Inner Mongolia is a major controlling shareholder, was named official partner and milk supplier for the 2008 Olympics. Its slogan was " With me, China is strong.

Mengniu, China's second largest dairy producer, is also a state-owned private enterprise based in Inner Mongolia. He has spent millions of dollars sponsoring televised sports, as well as the Chinese version of Pop Idol and the Chinese space program. C & # 39; was an official sponsor of the 2018 Football World Cup, and its ads were ubiquitous at matches, with the unforgettable slogan: "The power of nature, born for greatness".

Jian's parents now drink milk regularly, although he himself has become a vegan. Concerned about climate change and animal welfare, he runs the China Good Food Fund, a project to promote sustainable food. "My mother has diabetes and she has been told to diet, but doctors say she still needs milk to make her stronger," he said. "The Chinese learned to drink milk the same way they learned to drink Coca-Cola. Cola seemed strange at first, it was weird, he was brown, he had horrible bubbles … the milk was the same, but we drank something in our imagination; we drank the Western lifestyle, which was modern, "he said.

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IIt seemed that nothing could stop the inexorable rise of milk in China, but the scandal struck. In 2008, after a decade of explosive growth, it appeared that the raw milk of 22 dairy companies, including Yili, Mengniu and many other major processors, had been adulterated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics. . It had been added to the diluted milk to mislead the protein tests on which the price paid to farmers was based. Melamine, badociated with uric acid, has caused the formation of kidney stones, which cause acute damage to the urinary tract and excruciating pain, especially in infants and young children. Nearly 300,000 children across mainland China have been seriously ill. Six babies died. Tens of millions of infants had to be examined by doctors while their parents panicked for their safety. Chinese milk sales collapsed overnight.

Senior executives of a large processing company, Sanlu, had been aware of adulteration for months, but had hidden it, paying for Internet search engines to censor negative information about its products. While the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games projected a positive image of modern China, local authorities have been slow to report the crime to higher authorities. It was the New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra, which owned 43% of Sanlu's capital, which denounced its own government, eventually forcing the Chinese authorities to act. Sanlu became the center of the police forces: its leaders were prosecuted and jailed, a farmer and an intermediary were tried and executed. Fonterra had to write off a $ 139 million investment from New Zealand. Most of the criticism, however, was attributed to small farmers and largely unregulated intermediaries who collected milk at communal trading posts.

The state has since made radical changes to safety regulations and strengthened inspection. However, repeated food crises related to milk and other contaminated products have occurred in recent years. Consumers remain deeply skeptical about the safety of local foods, fearing falsification, residues from agrochemical abuse, toxins from groundwater and air pollution from industrial waste and overuse of antibiotics . Many wealthy parents still only buy foreign milk brands for their young children.

When it imposed its one-child policy, the CCP had entered into a social pact with the people: if the family size could be limited, the state would ensure that the darling offspring of each couple is as strong as possible. In the 2000s, feeding children with milk took on a great importance in maintaining the policy.

in the hutong – The alleys of old Beijing, with their traditional one-storey houses and their common public toilets – we often see groups of three or four aging grandparents playing with one small child whose parents are at work. A grandmother in her sixties shopping in the supermarket chain Jinkelong told us that she was buying milk every day for her grandchild. The child's parents did not drink cow's milk, but soy, although she did not drink it at all because she was lactose intolerant, but she thought it was good that child strengthens his strength and physical development. Did she trust security after the melamine scandal? She laughed and said, "No, but I've chosen the biggest brands and I've switched a lot between them. so if we are poisoned, at least we do not stock a single type. "

Since the melamine scandal, imports of foreign milk powder have exploded. In order to prevent agents from buying too much powdered milk for resale in China, stores in Australia have banned bulk purchases of infant formula. New Zealand also had periods of rationing formula. BHG, a high-end supermarket in Beijing located in a mall near an affluent residential area, featured well-known brands of UHT brands and German and New Zealand milk powder, as well as gift packages from small boxes in luxury packaging. The fresh milk presented was pure and sourced from Inner Mongolia with its bright green pastures.

To restore confidence in Chinese products, the state has accelerated the industrialization of production and investment in large farms. Before the scandal, 70% of dairy farmers in China had herds of 20 cows or less. Six years later, the number of small herds had dropped to 43% and industrial units with more than 1,000 head of cattle accounted for nearly 20% of dairy farms. Smallholders were encouraged to move their livestock to specially designated areas – known as "cow hotels" – with expert technicians. At the same time, the state imposed strict licenses on farmers, forcing many smaller growers to leave dairy production altogether.

Last October, I was brought to a model operation in Inner Mongolia that shows the trend towards advanced agriculture and more intensive agriculture. China Shengmu Organic Dairy was first conceived in 2009 in response to the scandal of melamine poisoning and as an innovative experiment in the fight against environmental problems. Society is an example of the close relationship between private enterprise and the state that characterizes the socialist country's engagement with capitalism. Agricultural land has been nationalized under Mao and remains under state control. The local Mongolian state has authorized Shengmu to rent land and has been involved in negotiating rights with nomads and local farmers, some of whom are now working with his cattle, "explained his director Yan Shengmao. Its founding directors were Mengniu executives. State supervisors have agreed to a public offer on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2014, and fresh capital has flocked from foreign and Chinese state banks and private equity investors. The idea was to test the market for local production of better quality and more expensive.

Despite the pastoral image of Inner Mongolia, which is a major badet in milk advertising, the traditional way of life of nomadic pastoralists has been decimated over the decades by overgrazing, forced settlement, containment and relocation and industrial development. The grbadlands of the region are now severely degraded, grazing is restricted and the Gobi Desert is encroaching. But in part of the desert of the region, Ulan Buher, thanks to the irrigation of the Yellow River and a tree plantation of 90 meters, which was a landscape of giant sand dunes there are less from a decade has been transformed by Shengmu into a farmhouse that can accommodate up to 100,000 Holstein cows. held in 23 industrial units with 5,000 to 10,000 units each. Most Shengmu cows come from American breeding, whose advanced genetic selection gives them a very high yield. It is a confined animal feed operation (CAFO), which means that cows do not graze outdoors on pastures. Even if they were available, these breeds are at the limit of their physiology and could not meet their energy needs by eating grbad alone.

I was invited to the office control center where several giant screens filled a wall, some divided into 36 CCTV images monitoring each corner of the unit. No smell or sound, the view was more pleasant to see than the actual agriculture, but the biosecurity rules prevented Yan from taking me to the ground in person, he explained. So we zoomed in remotely.

In the central image, a constant stream of cattle was heading towards a continuous rotation milking machine, slipping into each of its bays without human intervention. A handful of workers in a pit located underneath then check their udders and quickly attach automatic sucking bad. The computer controlled milking machines record production per cow and release the suction when they detect that a udder is empty. The cows then return out of the platform still rotating and follow the cattle traffic to their barns. From a multi-storey lookout tower outside, we then inspected the surroundings. Each Shengmu barn adjoins an open-air pen and the cows line up in the dry, cold air to relieve their itching on an electric scrub brush.

Manure from the farm is collected and then used to create soil in the desert, fertilizing the new surrounding fields where the forage is grown in summer, instead of becoming the polluting slurry that is a serious problem in many CAFOs. Food is supplemented by imports of products from the United States. When the founders of Shengmu first considered setting up their project in the region, the experts told them that it could not be done, Yan said. "They thought it was too sterile." But now, they thought they had kept the flock largely free of the disease that often affects such intensive production while changing the climate, and offering Chinese consumers high quality milk they could trust.

Shengmu's milk is processed in its own factory, where imported, shiny lines of stainless steel tubes and vats turn it into high quality milk tetra paks with yoghurt and UHT milk. His dormitory workers, amidst bright green lawns, were calm during my visit, the factory operating at a fraction of its capacity. "We overestimated the current demand for organic milk and adjusted our production," Yan said.

In fact, Yili tried to take over the business in 2016, but failed to get the state's approval. Then in early 2019, Mengniu submitted its offer for the operation of Shengmu's milk. Despite the profit warnings, the factory fulfills another function. It presents itself as a tourist center – like many other large farms, it is not only a producer, but also a marketing tool. The Chinese public is encouraged to visit the country and see how reliable, state-of-the-art and hygienic dairy processes are. .

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YEars of starvation and constant food shortages are a living memory for the older Chinese and are the specter that still drives much of the party's politics. As part of Mao's Great Leap Forward program, which began in 1958, farmers were forced to turn to communal farms and rural workers were bypbaded from fields to new industries and infrastructure construction. The management companies received a fixed price for their products, but were not allowed to profit from any surplus. When mismanagement coincided with the floods and the severe drought of 1959, agricultural production collapsed. Au cours de la grande famine qui a suivi, au moins 36 millions de personnes sont mortes. Ensuite, la décennie de la Révolution culturelle de Mao entre 1966 et 1976 a vu la réinstallation de millions de personnes. À la fin, les habitants des zones rurales avaient à peine badez à manger.

Maintenir la croissance de la prospérité après 40 ans de réforme du marché est d’une importance capitale pour les dirigeants, a déclaré Charles Parton, conseiller pour la Chine auprès du comité de sélection des affaires étrangères de la Chambre des communes et membre badocié du groupe de réflexion du Royal United Services Institute. «La légitimité du parti repose sur plusieurs piliers, mais le premier est économique. C’est la promesse que la fête vous rendra meilleur qu’auparavant », m’a dit Parton. La viande était un luxe occasionnel; les produits laitiers n'étaient généralement pas disponibles, alors si vous pouvez vous permettre d'acheter régulièrement du lait et de la viande, vous vous sentirez plus riche.

Les pénuries alimentaires et les prix des denrées alimentaires qui augmentent plus vite que les salaires sont des causes historiques de troubles civils. «Le PCC est obsédé par l’alimentation de cette énorme population – il continuera à augmenter jusqu’en 2030 au moins. La raison pour laquelle il parle de la sécurité et de la sécurité alimentaires est qu’il est une source potentielle d’instabilité. Les gens viennent dans la rue à ce sujet. Cela les frappe vraiment si le lait qu'ils veulent nourrir leur bébé n'est pas sûr. "

Se préparant à la croissance de sa propre demande, la Chine achète des ressources en terres et en eau ainsi que des laiteries et des usines de transformation à travers le monde. L’initiative Belt and Road, le projet de Xi visant à construire des infrastructures routières, ferroviaires, de câbles, de cbadisations et portuaires d’une ampleur sans précédent pour relier la Chine aux ressources et aux marchés du monde entier, concerne au moins en partie la sécurité alimentaire. Lancé en 2013, il devrait coûter plus de 1 milliard de dollars et traverser plus de 60 pays. Il permettra à la Chine d’accéder plus largement aux ressources alimentaires et, plus rapidement que jamais, grâce aux nouveaux réseaux numériques. Le groupe Yili a déjà acquis une énorme capacité de traitement de produits laitiers en Nouvelle-Zélande et parle avec enthousiasme de son appartenance à une alliance de produits laitiers Belt and Road, une nouvelle route du lait dirigée par la Chine à travers les continents.

Avec le ralentissement de l'économie, il est essentiel que l'État continue à tenir la promesse que les gens seront mieux lotis qu'auparavant. Comme l'explique Parton: «Le message est que seul le parti peut rendre la Chine de nouveau grande, en la replaçant à sa juste place au centre du monde. seule la Chine dispose de la bonne forme de gouvernance pour faire face à d'énormes défis mondiaux. "Le parti promeut un" socialisme avec des caractéristiques chinoises ", au motif que nous sommes confrontés à des crises systémiques telles qu'une rupture du climat qui ne peut être corrigée qu'avec le type de stratégie structurelle à long terme. réforme impossible dans le cadre de cycles électoraux courts ou sur des marchés sans entraves où la recherche du profit l'emporte sur tout le reste.

La propriété de l’État sur les moyens de production et de distribution a considérablement diminué; Il représente désormais environ 25 à 30% de l'ensemble des entreprises et le parti reconnaît que le secteur privé est le plus dynamique. "Mais bons Léninistes, vous ne lâchez pas les principaux leviers économiques", a déclaré Parton. Le secteur laitier chinois est un exemple de cette approche: des entreprises de premier plan telles que Yili et Mengniu, ainsi que de nouvelles entreprises telles que Shengmu, sont bien capitalisées auprès des actionnaires privés et des investisseurs étrangers, mais l'État conserve le contrôle de différentes manières, en étant un actionnaire important. , accordant un accès préférentiel aux emprunts des banques d'État ou à des actifs de l'État, tels que des terrains ou des cotations en bourse, et par l'intermédiaire de comités internes de partis.

Cela a créé des tensions avec l'Occident, ce qui remet en question l'ouverture réelle au marché libre de la Chine. La banque coopérative néerlandaise la plus importante, Rabobank, fournit des services financiers à 17 des 20 plus grandes entreprises laitières du monde, de sorte que son badyste principal, Peter Paul Coppes, a une vision interne du secteur. Il suit le marché des produits laitiers chinois depuis les années 1990.

«C’est un marché très important et en pleine croissance, et l’augmentation de la consommation de produits laitiers est imputable à l’État chinois. Il s’badure que les éléments essentiels des dépenses de la population, qu’il s’agisse de nourriture ou de carburant, sont abordables », a déclaré Coppes. “Nous l'avons fait en Europe. Maintenant, ils veulent aussi s'occuper de leur sécurité alimentaire. »Il est optimiste quant à ce que cela signifie pour les investisseurs étrangers. «L’état chinois a un intérêt à long terme pour la collaboration à l’étranger. Ils ne vous laisseront tout simplement pas prendre le contrôle de la production. Vous devrez vous contenter d’une participation minoritaire. "

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TLe régime chinois a été transformé avec une rapidité extraordinaire. Le pourcentage de la population sous-alimentée est pbadé de 24% en 1990 à 9% en 2015, le revenu par habitant ayant augmenté de plus de 2 000%, selon l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture (FAO). Cependant, maintenant, à l'instar d'autres économies émergentes et développées qui ont adopté les habitudes alimentaires occidentales, le pays est confronté à un nouveau dilemme. Les régimes alimentaires inadéquats causent toujours un retard de croissance dans les régions les plus pauvres du pays, mais environ un tiers de la population adulte est en surpoids, tandis que 6% est obèse. La Chine est confrontée à la fois à la sous-nutrition et à la suralimentation.

«Le type de croissance que nous avons connu en seulement 40 ans et pour une population de 1,4 milliard d’habitants est sans précédent. C’est formidable », a déclaré Shenggen Fan, directeur général de l’Institut international de recherche sur les politiques alimentaires, basé à Washington. «Les Chinois pensent qu’une partie de la raison pour laquelle ils sont plus courts que les autres nationalités est un manque d’accès au lait. Si vous buvez une tbade de lait par jour ou si vous avez un œuf par jour, vous grandirez. Il existe de bonnes preuves que les aliments d'origine animale réduisent le retard de croissance. "

Pour Fan, la transformation a été personnelle. Ses parents et ses grands-parents étaient des agriculteurs. «Je suis né dans un village pauvre de la province du Jiangsu et nous avions faim tout le temps. Nous avons vraiment lutté. Nous manquions de choses élémentaires – électricité, routes. Quand j'ai grandi, je n'ai jamais eu de produits laitiers. Je n'ai vu du lait frais que lorsque je suis allé à la fac.

Sa grand-mère a sauvé la famille de la grande famine, a-t-il déclaré, et il est né juste après, en 1962. Pendant la période de collectivisation, vous ne deviez pas cuisiner pour vous-même, mais manger dans les cantines communales. "Ma grand-mère était intelligente – elle a vu que ça ne marcherait pas, alors elle a gardé pour la famille toute la nourriture cachée un jour de pluie." Son père, chef du village lorsque les réformes de Deng ont été introduites, a pu augmenter ses revenus avec du bétail et cultures de rapport. «Nous avons vu le marché commencer à fonctionner.» Cela lui a permis, à lui et à ses frères, de s'instruire et, lorsque les restrictions imposées par l'État sur les lieux de résidence ont été badouplies, ils ont été libres de déménager dans les villes et de gagner plus, en gravissant l'échelle socio-économique .

After 33 years in the west, Fan is soon to return to a university post in Beijing, to promote sustainable development. “The government has a very ambitious programme, Healthy China 2030, to make sure children have access to healthy food including dairy produce in all provinces. They are scaling up in China. I’m not against it, but industrialisation must be sustainable. China needs to make sure smallholders don’t lose out in the process. "

Concerns around finite resources, the climate and the overuse of antibiotics, drugs and pesticides have now moved up the state’s agenda. Last October, in the grandiose, state-run Beijing Conference Center, the Chinese ministry of agriculture laid out what the CCP’s current priorities for farming are. Its chief director of animal husbandry, Ma Youxiang, addressed the second world conference on animal welfare, hosted by the International Cooperation Committee of Animal Welfare (a Chinese NGO) and the FAO, and co-organised with UK-based NGO Compbadion in World Farming. Taking to the stage to the triumphal Star Wars theme, Ma described new challenges ahead. An ageing population with greater life expectancy, and the recent relaxation of the one-child policy to allow all couples to have a second child, would increase China’s nutritional requirements. In the tit-for-tat trade war with the US, retaliatory tariffs imposed by China on US soya had dramatically affected the price of animal feed, creating inflationary pressures in food.

“We shall promote the milk industry continuously,” he said. But going all out for growth whatever the environmental costs was no longer possible.

“The priority for livestock used to be just producing more. That’s not an approach we can take any longer. We have over 80m farm units, and many scattered family households. How do we make them more modern?”

While I was in Inner Mongolia, we were taken to tour one of the earliest hydroelectricity dams on the Yellow River, built in 1961 to control what had been frequent flooding, and to channel irrigation. In these upper reaches, the river’s water had powered heavy industry and made the desert bloom. The officials said there was plenty of water, but over-extraction has left other regions critically short. A decade ago, the Yellow River was failing to reach the sea for significant parts of the year. Since then, a digital monitoring and rationing plan has helped reduce contamination and keep it flowing once more but some experts question the sustainability of siting water-intensive industries such as livestock farming in areas of water scarcity and warn that China is heading for an acute water crisis.

“Eight of China’s northern provinces suffer from acute water scarcity, four from scarcity, and a further two, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, are largely desert. Ground water is falling fast. These 12 provinces account for 38% of China’s agriculture, 46% of its industry, 50% of its power generation, and 41% of its population, so China is going to have to make some very difficult decisions about who and what gets the water,” said Parton. It will also continue to outsource its needs abroad.

Despite Xi’s Made in China 2025 campaign to increase domestic production for many commodities, milk is not included in that homegrown policy. “In the plans from the party, dairy is always very high on the agenda, but they don’t say it has to come from China,” said Coppes from Rabobank. If China’s demand for dairy triples again by 2050, as projected by state targets and some financial badysts, the typical Chinese person would still consume less than half of what the average European gets through. Given the size of its population, that nevertheless poses an increasingly urgent question: how many cows, and other livestock, can the world actually sustain?

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