Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China's new strategy is for giant pig farms to sell carbon credits to finance their waste treatment facilities. Western environmental groups have questioned whether a surge of Chinese pig farms offering to sell carbon credits to foreign buyers really needed the credits to build biogas facilities, so China has created its own carbon-trading mechanism for pig farms with relaxed standards. Since the Chinese carbon market is only for large scale CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), Chinese news media are assuring the public that industrialized farms are "green" too. A pig farm operated by Muyuan Foods. The dark rectangle in the back is the manure collection lagoon. Source: Xinhua News Agency. In December 2025 China's Ministries of Environment and Agriculture jointly issued a methodology for China's Certified Voluntary Emission Reduction (CCER) covering utilization of biogas from livestock manure at large-scale pig farms . According to the document large-sca...

China is gearing up to grow food in its deserts, on its mountains and in the ocean. Propagandists show beautiful pictures and recite fake statistics, but no outsiders will be allowed to monitor these ecologically risky ventures. The plan envisions chains of mechanized farms and fisheries feeding warehouses, processing plants, and retailers controlled by industrial conglomerates to replace chaotic hordes of impoverished aging peasants, nomads, fishing boats and mountain dwellers collecting wild plants.  The 2025 communist party "Document No. 1" on rural policy priorities called for building "a diversified food supply system" by building deep-sea "marine ranches", creating "forest granaries" in mountainous areas, improve the edible fungus industry, and promote the cultivation of algae as part of China's "big food concept" and "big agriculture concept." These will likely be included in new 5-year plans to be issued in 2026. ...

China is setting up an ecological police system (生态警务机制) that combines citizen surveillance with law enforcement and prosecution to crack down on "environmental and resource crimes" as a strategy for beautifying the countryside.  The system is led by the Ministry of Public Security--highlighting the focus on law enforcement--in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice, the central government's planning ministry, and ministries responsible for environment, agriculture, water management, grasslands, forests, and the coast guard. The plan set forth in an "Opinion on Building an Ecological Police Mechanism" (关于加强生态警务机制建设的意见 which does not seem to be publicly available) aims to have the basic mechanism in place by 2027 and fully operational by 2035.  The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said the policing system will severely punish environmental pollution, destruction of wild flora and fauna resources, damage to ancient and famous trees, illegal fishing, i...

Chinese officials are demolishing livestock farms again now that a meat shortage has turned to glut. In April 2022 China's central disciplinary commission posted an article  warning village and town officials they could be reprimanded or fired for complicity in illegal use of farmland. Two of four cases of illegal use of cropland from Anhui Province circulated by the commission were cases of illegal hog farms built in 2020 when the government was pushing local officials to expand hog production as fast as possible to alleviate a pork shortage.  One illegal Anhui hog farm was built by a village official in July 2020 on 1.93 mu (less than a third of an acre) of land. The official continued building the farm after receiving a warning that the project did not comply with the local land use plan. The official was reprimanded and removed from his post for ignoring warnings despite being responsible for enforcement of local land use regulations. In another village, the party secretar...

Celebrating the results of China's second pollution census in early June, an agricultural official bragged that the agricultural sector produced more grain and meat while simultaneously reducing its discharge of pollution, a sign of progress in the greening of the country's farms, so he said. An environmental official also lauded the progress, but acknowledged that "green agricultural development" is still in its infancy. Data showing a boom in fertilizer application during the years when runoff supposedly fell 55 percent cast doubt on the pollution census data. A communique announcing results of China's second pollution census was issued June 8, 2020. The census estimated discharges of pollutants of water, air, and soil as of December 2017, ten years after the first pollution census revealed that agriculture was a major source of pollution. A 2014 survey of soil found that 19 percent of cultivated land was contaminated with heavy metals and other pollutan...

A Chinese fish farm's demand for compensation from a pig farm illustrates the competition for China's overburdened natural resource base and the power vested in courts by vague assignment of property rights. The Changjiang Daily reported that a fish-farming company went to court to seek compensation for loss of fish they blamed on wastewater dumped in the river by an upstream swine breeding farm. After large numbers of the company's fish died during June-October 2018, the fish company and the swine farm both filed a request with the local fishery supervisory commission to investigate the cause and evaluate the losses. The Ministry of Agriculture's Central-Upper Yangtze River Fishery Environmental Monitoring Center reported in December 2018 that the river's water quality suffered from serious ammonia-nitrogen, chemical oxygen demand, and eutrophication due to the long-term violation of regulations by the swine farm's discharge of wastewater. The initial cour...

Great progress in transforming the country's livestock and poultry sector has been declared by China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA). Markets have stabilized, outmoded farms have been closed, and pollution problems are being addressed. First, MARA lauds a rebound in hog and egg markets. Hog prices went through a precipitous decline from February to May this year. The rebound in prices since May has approached the breakeven level, and some efficient farms are making good profits now. Officials say they prevented a more serious disequilibrium by issuing guidance to farmers to reduce herds to tide them over the depressed market. The egg sub-sector has also recovered from a steep drop in the market last year. The average egg price of 8.29 yuan per kg is up 42 percent from a year ago. Meat poultry, beef and sheep production is stable with good profits, MARA says. Second, MARA reports that traditional modes of livestock and poultry production are being transfo...

An online commentator complained that China's pig farmers are dangerously irresponsible when it comes to pollution issues. The commentator visited a relative in the countryside who started raising pigs a couple years ago. With prices at record-high levels last year, the relative was pleased that he had earned a lot of money. During his visit, the commentator noticed there were many pig farms, and quite a few dumped manure into the small river that runs through the village. Knowing that China has been enforcing regulations to protect the environment by banning or limiting pigs in designated districts, the commentator asked his relative if he was under pressure. "What pressure?" the puzzled pig farmer replied. The city relative clarified: "Pressure from environmental protection?" The pig-farmer scoffed at the question. "Environmental protection has nothing to do with me. None of the villages around here are in districts that ban pig-farming,"...

China is expanding subsidies for crop rotations and land-idling to rehabilitate degraded farmland and conserve moisture in marginal agricultural areas. At a press conference last week , a Ministry of Agriculture spokesman explained the program --a continuation of a plan initiated in 2016. The spokesman explained that intensive use of farmland has degraded the quality of land and resulted in pollution. The exploratory pilot program aims to establish a rotation and fallowing system within 3-to-5 years that will restore fertility and reduce environmental degradation. The 2017 rotation and fallow pilot program covers 12 million mu in 9 province and 192 counties--5.84 million mu more than last year. This year's program will be supported by 2.56 billion yuan in central government funding, nearly twice as much as last year. The funding will be used to compensate farmers for reduced income while land is idle and to cover the cost of officials administering the program. The farmland ro...

213,000 livestock farm closures during the first half of 2017 were featured in a news conference held by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection last month that reported progress on a “Water Pollution Prevention Action Plan.” Local authorities across China have been ordered to designate zones where livestock farms are banned, where they are limited, and zones suitable for livestock farms. Commercial-scale farms must close or move out of the zones where they are banned--near bodies of water, drinking water sources, residential communities, and scenic areas. If they want to continue operating, farms must invest in facilities to collect animal waste, re-use waste water, and utilize manure for biogas and organic fertilizer. According to a report on the news conference by the China Livestock Farming Alliance , 49,000 livestock-farming-ban zones covering 636,000 square km have been designated nationwide. So far this year 213,000 livestock and poultry farms have been closed or ...

In 2007, when pork prices were soaring to record highs Chinese officials rolled out a half-dozen pig subsidies and sent rural bankers to knock on doors offering villagers loans to build pig farms. Now--exactly ten years later--the manure from these farms has become a severe pollution problem. The same officials are paying farmers to demolish their farms and either move them out of sight in the hinterland or find another way to make a living. The Masses Daily reported a story from Shandong Province's Liangshan County last month that shows not everyone is happy with the farm-closure campaign at the local level, and not everyone is getting compensated for destruction of their property. In Han'gai, a town in Liangshan County, there are about 200 small-scale hog farms. All of them are about 500 meters from villages, but local people still complain about the smell and large numbers of flies. The main concern, however, is the large volumes of untreated manure that washes into r...

A campaign to curb garbage-feeding of pigs illustrates efforts of China's current regime to cope with the country's transformation to an urbanized economy by cleaning up the environment and repurposing "waste" as resources. During April, Chinese news media in a number of cities ran articles calling attention to the hazards of feeding restaurant waste to pigs. The most prominent is an investigation of "garbage pigs" or "swill pigs" on the outskirts of Tianjin by China's national Xinhua News Service. The journalist reported finding a location outside Tianjin's ring road where about a dozen farmers raised 100-200 pigs each on waste gathered from restaurants. The operations consisted of a semi-enclosed area where waste cooked, crude brick sheds where pigs are kept, and crude brick structures that serve as living quarters for employees. Small vans loaded with blue barrels and plastic bags used to collect waste from restaurants were parked out...

Officials in China are pushing ahead with a nationwide campaign to shut down pig farms in populated and environmentally-sensitive areas. The shut-down plan appears to be cutting pig numbers at a time when a short supply of pork is causing prices to soar. "arrest warrant" for a pig satirizes the campaign to close or move pig farms. source: toutiao.com A series of laws and regulations issued by Chinese officials over the last two years appear to signal a new era in which pigs will be physically segregated from the human population, a major undertaking in a society where the species have lived together for thousands of years. Local bans on pig farms began in 2013 following the embarrassment caused by thousands of swine carcasses that floated down the river into Shanghai.  In January 2014, regulations were issued to prevent pollution from waste emissions of "scale" livestock and poultry farms; the regulat...