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Abstract
‘Meat grabbing’ describes actually existing land deals undertaken for industrial meat production, either directly in the form of animal housing and stocking (confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs), or indirectly in the form of monocrop grain and oilseed production for livestock feed. Meat grabbing is also a concept for analyzing the relationships between industrial meat regimes, food security politics and the global land rush, relationships which have not yet been sufficiently considered in research or in policy. Using China's reform-era meat revolution as an analytical case, this paper proposes meat grabbing as a concept with three broad goals: (1) to show how industrial meat complicates notions of food security and of food security land grabs, (2) to incorporate social inequalities and environmental injustices into the conceptualization and measurement of land deals and (3) to expand dispossession's domain to include relationships between people and agroecosystems. This is an initial exploration of the content and framing of meat grabs, intended to synthesize its core features and raise questions for further study.
For their feedback and support, I would like to thank participants in the Land, Money and Movements workshop organized by the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at Johns Hopkins University, 14 February 2014. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at JPS for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions.
Notes
1For a detailed description of water grabbing, see Franco et al. (Citation2013).
2In addition to increased meat consumption, the nutrition transition describes a general shift from complex carbohydrates and fiber, as the highest proportion of caloric intake, to plant and animal fats, saturated fats and simple sugars (Drewnowski and Popkin 1997).
3See Asya Pereitsvaig's (Citation2013) GeoCurrents post for a useful map of ‘The global geography of meat (and fish) consumption’.
4Full text in FAO (Citation1998).
5Consumption estimates are deduced from food sales for urban households, but a finer-tuned analysis of what people are actually eating would need to take into account food waste from banquets and dinners eaten out and in groups.
6The ‘go out’ strategy is a set of policies initiated in 2000 to encourage Chinese firms to invest in operations and infrastructure abroad. See Armony and Strauss (Citation2012).
7It is important to note that China also has only seven percent of the world's fresh water (China Water Risk n.d.).
8My intention in using the population-to-land ratio in the name ‘21-9 Challenge’ is not to neglect water resource constraints that are arguably as important as notions of limited land. I chose this focus because it commonly appears in Chinese sources on food security.
9See for example Wong and Huang (Citation2012) and Zhong and Zhu (Citation2001).
10During my fieldwork in China from 2009–2011, CAFO managers described the process of land acquisition taking these many forms.
11Although Chinese energy corporations are among the list of investors for maize projects, presumably for biofuel projects, these deals are primarily for livestock feed.
12The IISD reports Chinese investments in soya in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Zambia and Russia. They report Chinese investments in maize in Burma, Cambodia, Uganda, the Philippines, Bolivia, Russia, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe (Smaller et al. Citation2012).
13See the Beidahuang page on GRAIN's farmlandgrab.org website (GRAIN Citation2014).
Additional information
Mindi Schneider is assistant professor of Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Netherlands. Her research centers on food and agrarian questions, and their intersections with agroecology and environmental injustices. She has conducted research on local food systems and sustainable agriculture in the United States, on the political economy of food riots and food security and, most recently, on the politics and implications of increasing meat consumption in reform era China.