Posted on 01/19/2008 3:55:20 PM PST by blam
A Thirst for Meat: Changes in diet, rising population may strain China's water supply
Sid Perkins
China's rapid industrialization and increasing population, along with a growing dietary preference among its citizens for meat, are straining the country's water resources to the point where food imports will probably be needed to meet demand in coming decades.
Economic growth in China is brisk: Over the past 2 decades, the country's gross domestic product has risen, on average, about 8 percent per year. That's the highest rate of development in recent world history, says Junguo Liu, an environmental scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf. Accompanying that growth has been a jump in urbanization and per capita income, both of which have contributed to significant changes in the Chinese diet.
Chinese consumption of staples such as corn, rice, and wheat has changed little in recent years, even dropping somewhat in the last decade, data suggest. However, consumption of more water-intensive fruits and vegetables, now the largest part of the average Chinese diet, has more than quadrupled since the early 1960s. A more significant strain on water resources, says Liu, is the dramatic rise in meat consumption. Since 1980, the Chinese yen for meat has nearly quadrupled, he notes.
While cereal crops such as rice or wheat require between 0.84 and 1.3 cubic meters of water for each 1 kilogram of yield, it takes about 12.6 m3 of water to produce 1 kg of beef. Even though meat and other animal products made up only 16 percent of the typical Chinese diet in 2003, those foodstuffs accounted for more than one-half of the country's food-related per capita water consumption, says Liu. He and colleague Hubert H.G. Savenije of the Delft University of Technology
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
—global warming will melt all that ice and snow in Siberia and it’ll run downhill to China—(sarc)—
It might help if they stopped dumping raw sewage,chemicals,and God only knows what else in their rivers.They have fouled their corner of the planet and now they reap their reward.
A thirst for meat? What next - a hunger for water? Who writes these headlines?
We can trade some water for gasoline, eh?
With the shortage of food, water, and women, the country is going to implode someday soon. I wouldn’t want to be there.
Who was it who said,
“The Chinese will eat anything with four legs, except a table, anything with wings, except an airplane, and anything that swims, except a submarine.”
(Ni hao ma, zhongguo ren min, flameproof suit donned)
These guys actually think that all this water is consumed, lost forever to the sky or sea.
They should stick to carbon where they’re having success selling the story of resource depleted and pollution.
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