China's Soybean Consumption Reconstruction Western Hemisphere Agriculture

In the past ten years, global soybean demand has soared, with China taking the top spot. Today, China's soybean imports account for 60% of global soybean trade, undoubtedly becoming the world's largest soybean importer.

About 3,000 years ago, farmers in East China started growing soybeans. However, after World War II, the cultivation of soybeans was excellent, becoming one of the world's four leading crops in parallel with wheat, rice, and corn.

A study by animal nutritionists reflects the growth in demand for soybeans. They mixed feeds from one bean meal with four other grains, such as corn, to greatly increase the efficiency of protein conversion in livestock and poultry. China’s demand for meat, milk, and eggs soared, and the use of soybean meal increased. China has nearly half of the world's live pigs, and pigs need to use a lot of soybeans. Soybean meal affects the rapidly growing poultry industry. In addition, China uses a lot of soybeans to raise food fish.

We use four figures to describe the surge in demand for Chinese soybeans. In 1995, China produced 14 million tons of soybeans and consumed 14 million tons of soybeans. In 2011, China still produced 14 million tons of soybeans, but consumption increased to 70 million tons, which means that China imported 56 million tons of soybeans.

In 1995, China’s neglect of soybean production affected the policies of the time, and Beijing decided to establish a self-sufficient food production policy. Many Chinese have experienced great famine in 1959-61, which has a great impact on them. They do not want their staple food to depend on other countries. As a result, a large number of subsidies supported the cultivation of food, basically ignoring the production of soybeans. China's grain output rose rapidly, but soybean production stagnated.

We assume that China's 70 million tons of soybeans consumed in 2011 will all be produced by itself. Then we need to convert 1/3 of the cultivated land to grow soybeans, which will force the import of 160 million tons of grain, which is more than 1/3 of the total food consumption. Of the 1.35 billion people in China, more and more people will improve their dietary structure, so the import of soybeans will inevitably continue to climb.

The biggest impact is that the global surge in soybean consumption will reshape the agriculture in the western hemisphere. Now, the United States has cultivated more soybeans than its wheat cultivation land. Brazil's soybean cultivation is more than the sum of its total cultivated land. Argentine soybean planting area is twice that of other grain crops, making Argentina face the crisis of soybeans becoming a single crop. They are responsible for 4/5 of the world's soybean production. In the 1960s, the United States dominated soybean production and exports, but in 2011, Brazil’s exports caught up with the United States.

Although the output of grain per acre has tripled since the middle of the 20th century, global soybean production has grown 16 times, with the vast majority coming from the expansion of arable land. However, the area of ​​cultivated land has increased by nearly 7 times, but the output has only increased by 2 times. The main problem is that the world needs more soybeans and it can only rely on growing more soybeans.

The next question is: Where are we going to grow soybeans? The United States has used all of its soybean farmland, and there is no surplus land to grow soybeans. The only way to increase soybean production is to convert arable land where other crops are grown, such as corn or wheat, into soybean arable land. Brazil's expanding soybean cultivation land comes from the Amazon Basin, Cerrado, or the southern savannah region.

In short, the desire to protect the Amazon rainforest is to curb global soybean demand as soon as possible, which requires stabilizing the world's population. But for the ever-increasing world population, this means that we need to eat less meat to slow down the demand for soybean cultivation.