Word: milkings
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...Dairy products traditionally have not been an important part of the Chinese diet. But government and industry promotional efforts have boosted consumption. The average annual per capita milk consumption of Chinese has grown from just 2 kg (4.4 pounds) in 1980 to 22 kg (48.5 pounds...
...trying to find other buyers, or sell directly to consumers, but no luck so far," says a farmer named He who owns about 1,000 cows on a Shanxi province collective farm. "I have 300-400 cows in production, and it's just not possible to store the fresh milk," he says. Over the past week, He has resorted to pouring out the surplus. Some farmers are considering slaughtering their animals to cut their mounting losses. He is trying to liquidate his herd. "We are selling them very cheap, but there haven't been any buyers," says He. "Still, anything...
...Rising demand contributed to the crisis, experts say. Melamine, which is used to make plastics and is banned from food because it causes kidney stones, was added to boost the apparent protein content of milk that was increasingly scarce and of poor quality. "Demand was outstripping supply so rapidly in the market that [producers] tried every way to increase supply," says Philippe Chan, Asia manager for Canadean, a beverage industry research firm. "That resulted in lots of raw milk not being not stringently controlled...
...using melamine, farmers may have played an indirect role in the crisis, says Joseph Cheng, who runs the Contemporary China Research Project at City University of Hong Kong. That's because farmers were squeezed between the rising cost of cattle feed and government-imposed caps on the price of milk. "The feed price rises, the milk price is low and they lose money," Cheng says. "What do you do? You feed the cattle with low-quality feed. Then the quality of the milk is very bad and the protein content not good enough." Somewhere along the line, melamine was added...
...Ministry of Agriculture says it intends to support the nation's threatened farmers. The government has proposed providing stipends to owners of milk cattle to prevent farmers from selling them or butchering them. But as herds disappear, it seems likely that China's $19 billion dairy industry will lose its ranking as the world's third-largest...