This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 27 Jun 2008, by Steve Leckie.
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27 Jun 08
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According to Daryll Ray at the University of Tennessee, the US government's own figures show that China has been a net exporter of meats since 2001, subsidised to some extent by the running down of local grain stores, and an increased import of soybeans. Moreover, it has produced more grain than it has consumed for every year since 2005, and continues to export heavily. When it comes to India, Ray says the story is much the same as China's. In fact India has been a net exporter of grains and meat over nearly all of the past two decades even though it has the world's largest number of hungry people.
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China is certainly the world's largest consumer of meat in aggregate, and that is because it is the world's most populous country. Meat consumption has increased from 24kg per person in 1980 to 54kg last year, and the chief of China operations for Tyson Foods, the world's largest meat packer, predicts that this is the last year that China will be self-sufficient in protein.
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John Cunningham, consumer research manager at the Vegetarian Research Group, has commissioned a series of surveys on meat consumption since the early 1990s, and he has noticed some trends. The number of vegetarians has been going up. Between 2.5 per cent and 10 per cent of Americans are now vegetarian, almost double from a decade before, with numbers of young people higher than the general population. 'There's been a deep change', says Cunningham. 'If you talked about being vegetarian in the 1980s, people were incredulous. Today, people say, "Wow, that's great, I wish I could do that".'
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22 Jun 08
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