Thanks to a faltering economy, consumption of animal products is way down in China. The chairman of the country’s top factory farming company says, “We thought agriculture products would be spared from the financial crisis: we were wrong.”
A commodity analyst chimes in: “Declining income will definitely have an impact on food consumption, especially for meat and meat products.”
The global financial crisis is certainly causing much human hardship, but it’s also preventing great amounts of animal suffering. Link.
Update: A spot-on comment from Vegan.com reader Matthew Bate: “Do you have any idea of the level of subsidy Chinese farmers get for animal agriculture? I know they still work on a collective system, but it’s possible that if there is no special weighting, we could be witnessing a model of how animal agriculture across the world would fare without subsidy.”
