“ And this is just the beginning. By 2030, China’s per capita meat consumption is expected to hit 50 kilograms, equal to neighboring Taiwan. Granted, that’s still barely half the levels projected in wealthy nations like the United States, but because China will have 1.6 billion consumers by then, the impact of this relatively modest increase will be extraordinary. Even now, China’s meat mania is implicated in everything from deforestation in Brazil to food-price inflation in Africa, and most resources specialists expect that this nutritional domino effect will only intensify. “I cannot imagine what the world will look like when China is as wealthy as Taiwan,” Tian Weiming, one of China’s top food security experts, told me. “It will be very different.
