Will Feeding China's 1.3 Billion People Result In The Rest Of The World Going Hungry?

A typical Chinese style banquet in a banquet hall. Wikipedia

Appetite For Destruction -- Damien Ma and William Adams, Foreign Policy

Why feeding China's 1.3 billion people could leave the rest of the world hungry.

On Aug. 20, the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton announced that it will pump nearly $3 billion into developing a deposit of Canadian potash, a mineral used in the manufacture of fertilizer destined for farms fields across the world. And in late September, Chinese pork producer Shuanghui officially purchased Smithfield Foods in the largest Chinese acquisition ever made in the United States. The companies' investments are both decisions that speak to a vote of confidence in global food consumption growth over the next decade -- and nowhere will bellies be filling up faster than in China.

For three decades, resource-intensive manufacturing fueled China's spectacular economic rise. By 2012, the country was consuming nearly half of the world's coal and producing 46 percent of its steel, 43 percent of its aluminum, and about 60 percent of its cement. The Chinese economy has slowed in 2013 in part because of the government's recognition that such a resource-intensive growth model has become unsustainable. As a result, Beijing is trying to rebalance away from exports and investments and toward domestic consumption. Companies like BHP Billiton are betting that China's rebalancing will spur rapid growth in demand for food and the inputs needed to produce it. The underlying economic logic -- China as demand driver -- is the same, but it reflects the resource scarcity that is starting to replace maintenance of rapid growth as China's foremost economic challenge.

Read more ....

My Comment: When I first visited China (mid 1980s) .... the basic Chinese diet was rice, some fish, and maybe some pork. In today's China .... everyone wants to eat grain/beef/chicken meals .... they basically want to eat the western diet.