Will Chinese consumers have to eat rising food costs?
● China,hometooneoftheworld’smostancientanddiversecuisines,isfastbecominga gourmand’s paradise. Even as traditional Chinese chefs indulge in flamboyant reinterpretations of the classics, local epicures are adding imported foods to their diet – Washington apples, Australian lamb chops and blueberries from Chile. Every day, it seems, a new restaurant “concept” opens in one of the top-tier cities, staffed by yet another imported celebrity chef.
●    But China, famed for serving food that is both delicious and dirt-cheap, is rapidly becoming an expensive place to pick up the check.
●    In June, China’s measure of food prices spiked 14.4% year-on-year. That in turn drove up the overall consumer price index (CPI) by 6.4% – the sharpest annual increase in three years.
●    Structural factors will maintain upward pressure on Chinese food prices for the foreseeable future.
●    Costs for farmers – in particular for fuel, fertilizer and water – are rising and being passed on to consumers.
●    When people upgrade their diet, they usually eat more meat, which multiplies the demand for grain.
●    China has 446 million hogs – more than the next 43 pork-producing countries combined – and it consumes half of the world’s pork each year. Keeping all those hogs fed with soybeans and corn is draining the domestic grain supply.
●    China’s water supply is dwindling, particularly in the northern plains, where more than half of the domestic wheat and one-third of the corn is grown. Agriculture uses more than half of the water consumed in China, much of that wasted by shoddy irrigation systems.
●    The era of cheap Chinese food is over.
http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/en/content/ expensive-taste