Lại đổ lỗi cho Trung Quốc

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When the People’s Republic of China was born in 1949, its national dairy herd was said to consist of a mere 120,000 cows. Yet today, China is the third-largest milk producer in the world (sản xuất sữa lớn thứ 3 thế giới), estimated to have around 13m dairy cows, and the average person has gone from barely drinking milk at all to consuming about 30kg of dairy produce a year.

...Now the global impact (tác động toàn cầu) of China’s ever-expanding dairy sector (ngành sữa ngày càng mở rộng) is causing concern in other countries. Dairy farming requires access to vast quantities of fresh water: it takes an estimated 1,020 litres of water to make one litre of milk. But China suffers from water scarcity (khan hiếm nước), and has been buying land and water rights abroad, as well as establishing large-scale processing factories (thành lập các nhà máy chế biến quy mô lớn) in other countries.

Farmed animals are also one of the most significant causes of man-made climate change (biến đổi khí hậu). Livestock currently account for about 14.5% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions (phát thải khí nhà kính), more than the entire global transportation sector (ngành giao thông vận tải). Cattle account for more than two-thirds of those livestock emissions. Ruminants (động vật nhai lại) have a disproportionate impact because their digestion releases vast quantities of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and their excreta (phân) produces nitrous oxide. On top of that, large areas of forest are being cleared to make more land available for crops to feed farm animals, releasing carbon dioxide. China already imports 60% of the total volume of soyabeans traded worldwide, to make the high-protein feed it needs. Its demand for soya is a major driver of deforestation of the Amazon and Brazilian savanna (hoang mạc, thảo nguyên). Delivering milk across long distances to urban supermarkets produces yet more emissions.

...if the additional milk to meet demand in China were mostly imported, we would have to find two new countries the size of Ireland (diện tích đất bằng 2 lần nước ireland) and give them over completely to producing feed just for cows milked either in or for China.