Pork Production Systems in China: A Review of their Development, Challenges and Prospects in Green Production

Abstract

This paper reviews the changes in pork production in China, the largest pork producing and consuming nation in the world. The pork sector in China has changed dramatically since the 1990s, with large-scale intensive pork production systems replacing the former, exclusively family-based pork production systems. Modern breeding, feeding, vaccinating, and management technologies are widely used now. However, smallholders still account for a large proportion of the total production. The intensification and specialization of the pork sector is expected to continue in the future,but there is increasing awareness and pressure to develop more environmentally-sustainable production systems. Therelative shortage of domestically produced feed, the low utilization efficiency offeed ingredients, the large emissions of nitrogen and phosphorus to theenvironment, the high use of antibiotics, and the presence of residual metals inmanures are very large challenges for the pork sector nowadays. To solve theseproblems, techn ques including new feed resource utilization, precise feeding,low-protein diets, alternatives to antibiotics and increased manure recycling areall important topics and research directions today. With new techniques andmanagement approaches, it is possible to build more sustainable porkproduction systems in China.