4-5 IAN China is Ahead
A global survey recently commissioned by the Alltech company assessed the feed tonnage of 132 countries and all species. Asia has secured a role as the number one feed producing region with a tonnage of 305 million, and China is the leading country with a total tonnage of 175.4 million. I called up Aidan Connolly, vice president of corporate accounts at Alltech. “It drives me crazy that China is number 1. How could America with all of its agricultural capacity and production capability not be leading the world? We are not far behind. The United States has been the number 1 producer of pelleted feed since pelleted feed was created nearly 80 years ago. This is the 1st time China has gotten to that level. Until now, China has had a lot of very small farms, a few pigs, several chickens, a few cows and it’s always mixed or made its feed on the farm. Whatever is left over from food scraps or forage or whatever they grow on the farm. Now we have a situation where China is industrializing and starting to produce industrial feeds which are high-tech which gives them more traceability. Traceability is a massive issue in China because Chinese people themselves don’t trust their own food. This is for good reasons, there have been a number of scares with melamine, milk etc. so what you are starting to see is China is doing what the United States has been doing for the last 80 years. The major difference is that China has 1.3 billion people and we only have 300 million.
