The Economist magazine provoked a furious reaction from China's State propagandists when it tweeted last week that the world's pigs consume more grain than all the people in China. Chinese State media conflated the adjacency of pigs and Chinese people in the same sentence to claim the Tweet was racist. Nearly everyone commenting on Twitter echoed the Chinese accusations of racism, thus successfully diverting attention from the inconvenient truth that China's hungry pigs (and chickens) are in fact contributing to tight grain supplies.
On June 23, 2022 The Economist ran a brief story, "Most of the world's grain is not eaten by humans," subtitled "Nearly half of all grain is either burned as fuel or eaten by animals" to provide some perspective on this year's tight grain supplies and high food prices.
China's stridently nationalist Global Times was outraged over The Economist's tweet that "In 2019 pigs ate 432m tonnes of grain, 45% more than the people of China did," claiming that the comparison implied that Chinese people are pigs. China Daily cited the tweet to warn that western countries should beware of the rise of racism. Tweets from Chinese State TV and China Daily (correctly labeled by Twitter as "affiliated with Chinese state media") intoned that "Humans don't write like that" and "The Economist magazine is clearly owned by a drove of pigs. Racist pigs." (Note that Twitter is banned in China and the subscription fee for the Economist is quite high.)
The Economist was chastened, explained that it did not intend to offend, edited the article and removed the tweet. The Global Times however, was not satisfied, criticizing The Economist's lack of apology and insisted that the magazine "...failed to convince Chinese netizens outraged by such racist and dehumanizing language."
The claims of racism were meant to deflect attention from the fact that China is the largest grain importer and its livestock are indeed responsible for the country's skyrocketing grain imports.
China's Agriculture Ministry data indicate that Chinese livestock did in fact eat slightly more than Chinese humans in 2021. According to grain supply and demand data in China Agricultural Development Report (2022-2031) released at the Ministry's April outlook conference, humans in China consumed 305 million tons of grains and soybeans in 2021, while animals in China consumed 308 million tons (242.45 million tons of grains and about 66 million tons of soybean meal).
During May 2022--in response to news about farmers cutting their wheat fields as cattle feed--Chinese state media outlet Yicai published an article titled "Behind the Wheat Silage Incident: Food Grain Surplus and Insufficient Feed Grain" observing that China has excess supplies of wheat and rice, but a growing deficit of feed grains. Yicai remarked, "Our country's agricultural supply and demand has a persisting conflict between an expanding deficit of grain for animal feed use and excess production capacity for food grain." Yicai noted that reserves of corn--the main feed grain--had been emptied out in 2020, while 50 million tons of wheat had been auctioned to flour, animal feed and livestock companies, and 20 million tons of rice had been fed to animals.
What Chinese propagandists don't want the world to notice in this year of tight food supplies is that animals are responsible for their country's grain import boom. China's imports of major grains surged from under 20 million tons to about 65 million tons between 2019 and 2021. Corn, barley and sorghum--all used as animal feed--accounted for most of the surge. In addition, a large portion of imported wheat last year was used as feed. About half of China's 2021 rice imports was composed of broken rice which was probably used mainly as feed. This excludes the 95 million tons of soybean imports--about 70 percent of which ends up as animal feed. It also excludes nearly 2 million tons of hay imports last year and other items used as feed like whey products, dried peas, and cassava.
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| Source: Chinese customs data; calendar years. |
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