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本帖最后由 满仓 于 2014-12-30 07:47 编辑
【中文标题】猪肉帝国
【原文标题】Empire of the pig
【登载媒体】经济学人
【原文链接】http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636507-chinas-insatiable-appetite-pork-symbol-countrys-rise-it-also
中国人永远无法满足的猪肉胃口，既标志着这个国家的崛起，也是对世界的威胁。
5422号猪蹒跚走进畜栏，在它的几平方米的领地上逡巡，然后登上一个塑料的架子。农夫清理了它的腹部，在他身上摸来摸去，然后拿出一个大约30厘米长的粉红色管子。然后他开始做按摩。周围的猪在喷鼻响、打呼噜、尖叫，但是这头猪不为所动。很快，他的一个略带余温的杯子里就注满了600亿颗精子。大约150头猪在它们短暂、混沌的生命中都要经历这样的一次发泄。
一股麦芽的味道弥漫在中国中部省份江西的复兴繁殖场上空，这里占地10公顷，遍布低矮的混凝土畜栏，紧挨一个小水库，住着大约2000头猪。31岁的欧阳宽学在4年前建立了这个繁殖场。欧阳先生的朋友说他注定是个猪农——因为他属猪，但是他自己的解释没那么玄乎：2003年，他从北京一所大学的管理系毕业，回到家乡萍乡，想不到该做什么事情。他的祖父是一个煤矿工人，养了几头猪，他的父亲养了100头猪，他决定把规模扩大。
现在，一家人都参与到他的生意中。他们有三个农场，总共5000头猪。欧阳先生的弟弟负责生产，弟媳负责管理办公室。欧阳说，去年生意不好做，其他养殖场也一样，因为猪肉价格下降，饲料价格上升。但是随后几年生意出奇地好。欧阳开着一辆大众SUV，他的妻子新买了一辆奥迪，戴着卡地亚手镯，还开了两家美甲店。他们在当地的一个住宅新区有一套公寓。欧阳的手机里全是养猪相关的信息，但是当他与朋友聚餐时，会尽量避开猪肉的话题。
中国猪肉简史
这个家族的好运象征着中国在过去35年里腾飞的猪肉市场。从70年代末开始，政府放开了农业市场，中国的猪肉消费量翻了7倍。现在，这里每年生产和消费将近5亿头猪，占全世界猪总数的一半。猪在中国的故事，就是这个国家经济飞速发展的故事。但是猪并不只有象征意义，中国对猪肉的消费渴求对这个国家——及整个世界——的经济和环境造成了严重的影响。
猪，占据了中国数千年来文化、餐饮和家族生活的核心地位。猪肉是这个国家最主要的肉类食物，普通话里，“meat”和“pork”是同一个字。中国字“家”就是一头猪在房檐下。猪是中国的生肖之一，在这一年出生的人据说都很勤奋、慷慨、富有同情心。猪代表了繁荣、肥沃和多产。诗歌、故事和歌曲都在歌颂它。在汉代（公元前206年到公元后220年）的墓穴中出土过小型的粘土猪。历史学家认为，中国南方人在1万年前最先把野猪驯养成家猪。
几个世纪以来，祭祀（也包括吃）猪肉，是所有纪念和庆典活动的主要内容。在秋天的重阳节（阴历第9个月份的第9天），男性长者会齐聚祖先墓前，宰一头猪，象征祖先继续泽被后代。哈佛大学的人类学家James Watson说，房子如果出现资金问题，猪是最后一项被考虑出售的财产，因为如果秋天的仪式被忽略，祖先将会再死一次——真正意义上的精神死亡。
几乎每一个农村家庭都有一头猪，不仅仅因为在共产主义年代，猪是家庭循环系统的一部分。他们可以吃掉不适合人类食用的废料，它们生产出的粪便也有利用价值。（甚至毛泽东曾经说：“一头猪就是一个小型有机化肥厂。”）食品作家和厨师Fuchsia Dunlop猜想，猪肉是中国餐饮中的核心食材，它非常适合中国人的饮食口味。猪的每一个部分都不会被浪费。猪头是美食家的最爱；Dunlop女士说，猪脑“像沙司一样柔软，极富营养”。这种饮食既符合口味的需求，也有药物用途——包括内脏。
从猪蹄到猪尾，中国人一点也不会浪费。但是在历史上，猪肉是一种奢侈的食物，有时候极少会进入寻常百姓家。但现在已经完全不是这样了。
猪的尖叫
管理欧阳农场的经理雷晓平，这些天来每天午餐和晚餐都会吃猪肉——这是他自己的农场中意外死亡或者太小无法出售的猪。他毫不在意地大口咀嚼自己饲养的猪肉。毕竟，在雷小的时候（他今年51岁），每年只会吃三次猪肉。
在1949年革命之前，大部分中国人每年摄入的卡路里中，只有3％来自肉类。猪肉在那时还是稀缺食物。毛在50年代末和60年代初发动大跃进之后，数千万人在饥荒中死亡。Dunlop女士说，几十年来，农民在炒菜之前都会用一块肥猪皮在锅底擦一擦，然后炒菜，制造出吃肉的假象。这块猪皮被束之高阁，重复使用。90年代初，很多中国人的日常饮食，主要还是在街头市场上采购的蔬菜。
对于雷先生，以及很多农村人来说，饥饿的年代依然历历在目。于是，吃猪肉就变成了有一种战胜困难岁月的象征，就像高耸入云的摩天大楼和闪闪发亮的城市代表着中国的崛起一样。饿过肚子的祖父母给他们的孙子孙女嘴里塞满他们曾经缺少的食物——清单中的第一项就是猪肉。平均每个中国人每年吃掉39公斤猪肉（大约相当于三分之一头猪），比美国人的肉类摄入量还多（美国人比较喜欢吃牛肉），是1979年中国人猪肉消耗量的5倍。
最主要的影响就体现在猪身上。直到80年代，人们对像欧阳先生这么大的养猪场还闻所未闻，中国的猪95％来自圈养数量不到5头的小型农户饲养。海牙国际社会研究所的Mindi Schneider说，今天只有20％的猪来自这种后院饲养的方式。一些工业型饲养场——通常是国有或者跨国公司的产业——每年生产10万头猪。这些猪从出生到屠宰，都生活在金属板条箱里，大部分猪从未见过日光，更没有机会繁殖。猪的身体也在发生变化。中国95％的猪属于三个外来物种，为了保护自己的品种，中国建立了一个国家基因库（就是一个巨大的猪精子冷库）和一个土生猪的饲养场。尽管如此，很多古代品种很快就会灭绝。
但猪绝不是中国人钟爱猪肉的唯一受害者。对猪肉的需求让共产党顾虑重重，其造成的影响很快将成为世界上最大的经济问题，而且威胁到亚马逊的雨林。
小猪待在家
中国人对猪肉的依赖程度太高，一旦它的价格上涨，相关的成本也会上升。因此对共产党来说，让居民饭桌上有廉价的猪肉是至关重要的，尤其有益于稳定经济。例如，2007年，中国有大约4500头猪死于“猪蓝耳病”。猪肉价格直线上涨，年消费者价格指数（这种动物的重要性让我们可以称其为“消费者猪肉指数”）达到十年来最高点。市场上出现了恐慌性采购。有报道说，广州一家超市的猪肉促销，导致人们在疯抢时受伤，全国都为猪肉疯狂。进口量随之翻倍。
作为回应，党建立了世界上第一个猪肉储备制度，有些是冰冻猪肉，有些是活猪。其目的是让居民可以承受猪肉价格，猪农同时有利可图。当猪肉价格过高，政府就向市场投放猪肉；如果价格过低，政府就买进猪肉。还有其它一些让猪农受惠的政策，包括津贴、减税、低息贷款和免费检疫，全都是为了提升猪农的饲养积极性，同时让中国人餐桌上的盘子里堆起高高的猪肉。据伦敦一家智囊团Chatham House的估计，中国政府在2012年的猪肉生产补贴大约为220亿美元。核算到每头猪，大约是47美元。
但即使共产党也已经不能全盘掌控这个庞大的产业，部分原因在于人们对猪肉的需求量实在太大，增长得太快，因此需要境外猪农的支持。同时，中国的猪也在改变着遥远国度的环境。
共产党鼓励食物自给自足，中国的猪大部分也的确是土生土长的。但是平均每公斤猪肉需要消耗6公斤饲料，通常是经过处理的大豆或者玉米。中国的土地普遍缺水，无法满足人和猪的摄入需求。因此从前那些靠吃家庭垃圾的猪，越来越多地依赖进口饲料。
Schneider女士估计，全世界超过一半的饲料作物都被中国的猪吃掉。2010年，中国的大豆进口量超过全球大豆市场交易量的50％。谷物进口量也在上升，美国谷物委员会于此，到2022年，中国将会进口1900万吨到3200万吨玉米，这相当于今天全世界谷物交易量的三分之一到五分之一。
因此，地球另一面的土地使用方式发生了巨变。在巴西，2500万公顷的土地——其中部分是亚马逊雨林——被用来种植大豆。（中国公司尚未加入“大豆圆桌组织”，这是一个自愿性质的组织，其成员承诺不购买原来是森林的土地上种植出的大豆。）整个动植物物种都为中国的猪做出牺牲。阿根廷砍伐了数千公顷的森林，把传统的畜牧行业赶到偏远的地区，给种植大豆让路。从1990年开始，阿根廷用于种植谷物的土地面积增长了4倍，这个国家几乎把所有生产的大豆——大约800万吨——全部出口中国。有些地区的农民每年收获两茬，甚至三茬庄稼，他们使用的杀虫剂与新生儿缺陷和高致癌率有关。
这些进口让中国不得不接受国际商品价格体系。而中国的回应方式是在其它国家购买土地，有些用来种植饲料，有些直接用来养猪，以优惠价格卖回本土市场。中国不愿承认这些行为，但是加拿大可持续发展国际研究所计算的结果是，它已经在发展中国家购买了500万公顷的土地，有人认为这个数字应该更高。中国最大的猪肉产品生产商双汇，在2013年兼并了美国公司史密斯菲尔德，它同时获得了密苏里州和德克萨斯州大片土地的使用权。随着对猪肉需求的上升，中国的猪肉帝国也在扩张。
狼吞虎咽
猪的食物来源还不是猪农最关心的问题，他们最害怕的是疾病。患病的猪发育缓慢，更重要的是，中国现代饲养场中的猪基因极为类似（大部分都是同科），所以一个得病，整个猪群都会遭殃。于是猪农定期在它们的饲料中添加少剂量的抗生素，这也具有不利的连锁效应。在美国和欧洲，人们认为这样的做法会滋生“超级害虫”，也就是动物和人体内的病菌产生对抗生素的抗药性。2009年，从中国出口到香港的猪就被发现有这种害虫。大陆政府承认问题的存在，但是对抗生素、激素和生长促进剂的使用鲜有规范。
这些害虫进入了广泛的食物链，有的是通过桌子上香喷喷的猪肉，有的是通过平均每头猪每天排泄的5公斤粪便。这种一度价值颇高的东西，现在是全中国的问题。据农业部提供的信息，尽管有大片的地区来堆积这些粪便，但管理不善导致中国每年数十亿吨的牲畜粪便成为这个国家水质和土壤污染的主要来源。2013年猪类疾病集中爆发，16000头死猪被丢进上海饮用水源黄浦江的支流，这只是冰山的一角。
猪粪还会排放甲烷和一氧化二氮，这种温室气体所带来的影响是二氧化碳的300倍。集中饲养要比分散饲养的污染更严重。所以，中国的猪不但占领了带来自然凉爽空气的热带雨林，还直接为全球变暖做出了贡献。从1994年到2005年，中国农业行为的温室气体排放量增长了35％。加拿大西安大略大学的Tony Weis说，牲畜饲养行为的全球扩张是气候变化的主因，它占据了人类行为排放总量的将近五分之一。
所以，尽管猪象征着中国的繁荣，但它同时也是威胁。少数中国人——很少数——开始质疑，摄入越来越多的猪肉是否真的有好处。富有阶层肉类消费总量的曲线开始变得平缓，对健康的关注提升了有机食物的销量，尽管这些食物只占农业生产的很小一部分。素食在慢慢普及，但总体来看，依然被视为一种怪癖。大部分中国人的雄心壮志还是大口大口咀嚼猪肉馅饼。在大部分富裕国家，肉类的消费量基本上是稳中有降，但是在中土帝国，曲线依然在无节制地上升。忘了其它的属相吧，在今天的中国，每一年都是猪年。
原文：
China’s insatiable appetite for pork is a symbol of the country’s rise. It is also a danger to the world
PIG number 5422 saunters into the pen, circles its few square metres and mounts a plastic stand. The farmer cleans the animal’s underside, feels around and draws out what appears to be a thin pink tube around 30cm long. He begins to massage. Pigs elsewhere snort, grunt or squeal, but the alpha pig is unmoved. Soon he has filled a thermal cup with more than 60 billion sperm. Around 150 pigs will owe their short, brutish lives to this emission.
A malty smell hangs in the air at the Fuxin Breeding Farm in Jiangxi province in central China, 10 hectares of low concrete barns and fields beside a small reservoir, which is home to around 2,000 pigs. The business was started four years ago by 31-year-old Ouyang Kuanxue. Mr Ouyang’s friends say he was destined to be a pig farmer—he was born in the Chinese zodiacal year of the pig—but his own explanation is more prosaic: when he came back to Pingxiang, his hometown, in 2003 after studying management at university in Beijing, he could not think what else to do. His grandfather was a coalminer who kept a few pigs. His father already had 100. He decided to expand.
Now the whole family is involved: together they have three farms with a total of around 5,000 swine. Mr Ouyang’s younger brother is in charge of production; his sister-in-law runs the office. The past year has been hard for them and other pig farmers, Mr Ouyang says, because pork prices have been low and feed expensive. But this lean year followed many fat ones. Mr Ouyang drives a Volkswagen SUV; his wife has a new Audi, wears a Cartier bracelet and runs two nail bars; they own an apartment in a new block in the local town. Mr Ouyang has a panoply of pig-related news feeds on his phone. Still, when he goes out for dinner with friends, he tends to avoid pork.
A brief history of Chinese pork
The family’s good fortune is emblematic of China’s flying pig market over the past 35 years. Since the late 1970s, when the government liberalised agriculture, pork consumption has increased nearly sevenfold in China. It now produces and consumes almost 500m swine a year, half of all the pigs in the world. The tale of Chinese pigs is thus a parable of the country’s breakneck economic rise. But it is more than symbolic: China’s lust for pork has serious consequences for the country’s economy and environment—and for the world.
Pigs have been at the centre of Chinese culture, cuisine and family life for thousands of years. Pork is the country’s essential meat. In Mandarin the word for “meat” and “pork” are the same. The character for “family” is a pig under a roof. The pig is one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac: those born in that year are said to be diligent, sympathetic and generous. Pigs signify prosperity, fertility and virility. Poems, stories and songs celebrate them. Miniature clay pigs have been found in graves from the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD). Historians think people in southern China were the first in the world to domesticate wild boars, 10,000 years ago.
For centuries sacrificial pigs—and the eating of pork—featured prominently in all forms of commemoration and festivity. At the autumnal Double Ninth Festival (on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month), male elders gathered at their ancestors’ tombs and slaughtered a pig as a symbol of that forebear’s ongoing provision for his descendants. When an estate was in financial trouble, pigs were the last expense to go, says James Watson, an anthropologist at Harvard University, because if the autumn rites were neglected, the ancestor would die a second, terrible death, a final expiration of his spirit.
Almost every rural home once had a pig, not least because, well into the Communist era, the animals were part of the household recycling system. They consumed otherwise inedible waste and were valued for their manure (even Mao Zedong was a fan of the “fertiliser factory on four legs”). And their meat has always been central to Chinese cooking: it has “the perfect flavour for Chinese cuisine,” reckons Fuchsia Dunlop, a food writer and cook. Nothing is wasted. Pigs’ faces are served whole as a gourmet treat; their brains, says Ms Dunlop, are “soft as custard, and dangerously rich”. The appeal is medicinal as well as culinary: the innards are ascribed therapeutic benefits.
From trotter to tail, the Chinese eat the whole hog. Still, for much of China’s history, pigs were a luxury consumed only rarely, sometimes extremely rarely. That has changed dramatically.
Everything but the squeal
Lei Xiaoping, the manager of Mr Ouyang’s farm, eats pork for every lunch and dinner these days—swine from the farm that have died in a fight or are too small to sell. He is not squeamish about guzzling pigs he has reared himself. After all, as a child Mr Lei (now aged 51) ate pork only three times a year.
Even before the revolution of 1949, most people in China got only 3% of their annual calorific intake from meat. Pork soon became scarcer still. Tens of millions died in the famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For decades after that peasants would rub pork fat around their woks to give their vegetables a meaty hint, says Ms Dunlop, before putting the fat away to use on another occasion. As recently as the early 1990s many Chinese mostly subsisted on a diet of vegetables bought at street markets.
For Mr Lei, as for many of his countrymen, the years of deprivation are well within living memory. Not surprising, then, that eating meat has become a symbol of triumph over hardship, as much a part of China’s transformation as the towering skyscrapers and glistening cities. Grandparents who once went hungry stuff their grandchildren with the treats they lacked—and top of the list is pork. The average Chinese now eats 39kg of pork a year (roughly a third of a pig), more even than Americans (who typically prefer beef), and five times more per person than they ate in 1979.
The most obvious impact has been on the pigs themselves. Until the 1980s farms as large as Mr Ouyang’s were unknown: 95% of Chinese pigs came from smallholdings with fewer than five animals. Today just 20% come from these backyard farms, says Mindi Schneider of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Some industrial facilities, often owned by the state or by multinationals, produce as many as 100,000 swine a year. These are born and live for ever on slatted metal beds; most never see direct sunlight; very few ever get to breed. The pigs themselves have changed physically, too. Three foreign breeds now account for 95% of them; to preserve its own kinds, China has a national gene bank (basically a giant freezer of pig semen) and a network of indigenous-pig menageries. Nevertheless, scores of ancient variants may soon die out.
But China’s pigs are far from the only victims of their popularity. Demand for them worries the Communist Party, underpins what will soon be the world’s biggest economy and threatens Amazon rainforests.
This little piggy stayed home
The Chinese eat so much pork that when its price goes up, the cost of other things rises, too. For the Communist Party, therefore, keeping affordable meat on the table is vital, not least for the stability of the economy. In 2007, for example, an estimated 45m pigs died in China from “blue ear pig disease”. Pork prices rocketed; the annual rate of increase of the consumer price index (sometimes known as the “consumer pig index” because of the creature’s prominent role in it) hit a ten-year high. Panic buying ensued. There were reports of customers being injured in a crush on a supermarket escalator when rushing to buy cheap chilled pork in Guangzhou, and a general pork-buying frenzy across China. Imports doubled.
In response the party established the world’s first pork reserve, some of it in frozen form and some the live, snorting variety. This aims to keep pork affordable and reasonably priced: when pigs become too expensive, the government releases some of its stock onto the market; if they become too cheap, the reserve buys more porkers to keep farmers in profit. Other pro-pork policies include grants, tax incentives, cheap loans for farms and free animal immunisation—all intended to boost intensive pig farming and to keep plates loaded high with Chinese pork. According to Chatham House, a London-based think-tank, the Chinese government subsidised pork production by $22 billion in 2012. That is roughly $47 per pig.
Yet even the Communist Party can no longer control every aspect of this vast industry. That is partly because the appetite for pork is now so great—and growing so fast—that sating it depends on places far beyond China’s borders. Chinese pigs, in turn, are reshaping the environments of faraway countries.
The Communist Party prizes self-sufficiency in food. Most of the pigs China eats are indeed home-grown. But each kilogram of pork requires 6kg of feed, usually processed soy or corn. Given the scarcity of water and land in China, it cannot feed its pigs as well as its people. The upshot is that Chinese swine, which previously ate household scraps, increasingly rely on imported feed.
Ms Schneider reckons that more than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. Already in 2010 China’s soy imports accounted for more than 50% of the total global soy market. From a low base, grain imports are rising fast as well: the US Grains Council, a trade body, predicts that by 2022 China will need to import 19m-32m tonnes of corn. That equates to between a fifth and a third of the world’s entire trade in corn today.
As a result, land use is changing drastically on the other side of the world. In Brazil, more than 25m hectares of land—parts of which were once Amazon rainforest—are being used to cultivate soy (Chinese companies have not signed up to the “soy roundtable”, a voluntary association, the members of which agree not to buy soyabeans from newly deforested land). Entire species of plants and trees are being sacrificed to fatten China’s pigs. Argentina has chopped down thousands of hectares of forest and shifted its traditional cattle-breeding to remote areas to make way for soyabeans. Since 1990 the Argentine acreage given over to that crop has quadrupled: the country exports almost all of its whole soyabeans—around 8m tonnes—to China. In some areas farmers harvest two or three crops a year, using herbicides that have been linked to birth defects and increased cancer rates.
All these imports have made China ever-more exposed to global commodity prices. China has responded by buying land in other countries, some of which is used to grow feed crops or to raise pigs that are sold onto the domestic market at preferential prices. China itself is secretive about these purchases, but the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think-tank, calculates that it has bought 5m hectares in developing countries; others think the total is higher. When Shuanghui, China’s largest pork producer, bought Smithfield Foods, an American firm, in 2013, it acquired huge stretches of Missouri and Texas. As demand for pork rises, China’s porcine empire is sure to expand.
Pigging out
Feeding the pigs is not farmers’ only concern. Their greatest fear is disease: growth slows when a pig gets sick, and, even more worryingly, swine on modern Chinese farms tend to be genetically similar (many are half-siblings), so when one gets ill, much of the herd may succumb. Farmers routinely add small doses of antibiotics to their feed, and this, too, has daunting knock-on effects. In America and Europe such practices are associated with the emergence of “superbugs”, bacteria in animals and humans that are resistant to most antibiotics. In 2009 pigs exported from China to Hong Kong were found to harbour one such bug. The mainland government acknowledged the problem, yet the use of antibiotics, hormones and growth-promoters is barely regulated.
These drugs pass into the wider food chain partly via sizzling plates of pork, and partly through the 5kg of manure that the average pig produces a day. This once-desirable substance is now a critical problem for China. Though large swathes of land have been set aside to contain it, they are poorly managed. The billions of tonnes of waste China’s livestock produce each year are one of the biggest sources of water and soil pollution in the country, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. The 16,000 dead pigs that were dumped in the tributaries of the Huangpu river, a source of Shanghai’s tap-water, after a virus outbreak in 2013, were a lurid indicator of a seeping national problem.
Porcine waste also contributes to emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Intensive swine-farming is much more polluting than smallholding. So, as well as depriving Earth of the natural cooling function of the rainforests they displace, Chinese pigs contribute to global warming more directly. Greenhouse-gas emissions from Chinese agriculture increased by 35% between 1994 and 2005. The global expansion of livestock production is one of the primary causes of climate change, says Tony Weis of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, responsible for almost a fifth of emissions produced by human activity.
So although its proliferating pigs are a resonant symbol of China’s prosperity, they are also a menace. A few inChina—a very few—are beginning to question the benefits of eating more and more pork. Meat consumption is beginning to plateau among the very rich; health scares have boosted sales of organic food, though it still accounts for a tiny share of agricultural production. Vegetarianism is growing, but is generally thought eccentric. The ambition of most Chinese continues to be to devour as large a slice of the pork pie as possible. In much of the rich world meat consumption is stable or falling but in the Middle Kingdom it soars unrestrained. Forget the zodiac: in today’s China, every year is the year of the pig.
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狗仔卡
发表于 2014-12-30 07:45
提升卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
发表于 2014-12-30 08:38