From the 1950’s on, here in England (and elsewhere in Europe and the US), we moved away from multiple breeds, bred on traditional, small farms and small-holdings, offering insurance against common diseases — and interest to our diet — towards pretty much a monoculture, based around industrial quantities of fast-growing, pretty tasteless, antibiotic drenched, country-side faeces staining, pig production — it can’t in all honesty be called farming in any meaningful sense of that word; these places are factories, pure & simple, indeed, in the USA, these ‘farms’ are classed as such which is why they can get away with their shit — literally and metaphorically.
And China seems to be riding headlong down that same road. Starting in the 1980s, to meet the huge surge in demand from a newly rich middle-class, the Chinese government gave subsidies to pig farmers who would cultivate breeds taken from the US and Denmark with names familiar here, like Duroc and Landrace. One could argue that these aren’t by any means the worst breeds they could be using, after all I’ve written about them before as rare breeds. So why the concern? Easy answer. Because they have their own breeds already. 72 of them at the last count although of these, some 30+ are believed to be on the verge of extinction.
In all honesty, one can’t blame them, their population growth, although slowing in part due to the earlier “One Child” policy brings people pressures, as their wants are the same things that we all — globally — now see on TV & ‘phone screens. Cars, houses, clothes, expensive consumer knick-knacks and food that isn’t that of the ‘peasants’ any longer.
There’s an interesting piece here about a US citizen’s attempt to preserve at least a few of these rare breeds:
A ‘People’s Pig’ in China Could Be Headed to Upstate New York
