中国人吃肉吃出的革命 NEW EATING HABITS FORCE REVOLUTION ON CHINAS FARMS

Mr Liu, who along with his brothers topped China's first rich lists in the late 1990s, says China's fractured system of tiny farms, each selling its output separately, will inevitably die.

“The gap between the modern industrial and urban economy and the small peasant economy is getting larger and larger. We need to modernise farming, and that means scale,” he says.

“All the recent problems with inflation and food safety relate to our working system. How can we supervise a system with 200m production units that each raises four or five pigs?”

The top three producers of pork in the US supply about 80 per cent of the market. In China, the top three would be lucky to have a combined 10 per cent market share.

Mr Liu is now putting his entrepreneurial energy into building a single, vertically integrated national feed business. If he succeeds, such is the scale of Chinese consumption of pork and other meats that he will inevitably have the largest feed business in the world.

Instead of just selling feed, Mr Liu wants to control the whole process, from breeding stocks to product processing. To do so, he will have to contract, and help finance, potentially millions of farmers.

Quite apart from recent food inflation in China and more recently around the world, Mr Liu says, farm costs at home will continue to rise, in order to compete with urban wages, and will translate into higher prices.

“Fewer farmers now want to raise pigs, and over 70 per cent of middle and younger men have left the countryside,” he says. “When the market is in such an imbalance, prices are sure to go up. I think they will stay high for a while.”