Reader comment: Applauding frankness on China’s cost edge in alt‑protein push

The useful part

On July 2, 2026, a member of the Executive Board, Frank Elderson gave a speech to the 7th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists – The green transition – benefits and barriers. In that speech, he directly tied the mounting climate chaos with inflation volatility and emphasised the need to transition as quickly as possible to a net zero carbon economy. The evidence demonstrates that the Chinese are now using its traditional expertise in fermentation to fast track production of Alt protein.

How it works

• "The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user of land.
• In June 2018, two researchers (Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek) published an article in Science – Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers – and found that:
• As long as we hang on to neoliberal ideologies that prevent wide scale state support of emerging industries and starve researchers of state provided R&D funding, the greater will the gulf between China and...
• We should be following the processes that China has put in place.
• As we know, the production of protein via livestock is highly inefficient (protein per hectare) and environmentally unsustainable.

What to take from it

It will also ultimately provide solutions to food insecurity but also for housing construction, given that we cannot keep extracting timber and cement resources at the current rate for much longer. A bushfire in Australia a few years ago created a critical shortage of construction timber and with climate change ongoing those sorts of problems are going to become more acute. Novel food production A recent report put out by Good Food Institute APAC – China's Biomanufacturing Boom Opportunities and Risks for Microbial Protein Producers – is worth considering.

Example or evidence

• Why we need to end livestock production In 2006, the FAO published its report – Livestock's long shadow: environmental issues and options.
• Using biomass and converting lignocellulose into food protein is a way around that situation and the Chinese are already way ahead of the rest of us.
• Alt protein is the solution for humanity to eliminate livestock dependence.
• The total area occupied by grazing is equivalent to 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet".

Details worth keeping

We are now seeing this in the production of EVs, for example. ", the total area dedicated to feedcrop production amounts to 33 percent of total arable land. In all, livestock production accounts for 70 percent of all agricultural land and 30 percent of the land surface of the planet." 3.

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