Take your seat at the meat feast in Asia

A growing appetite for meat combined with pastures damaged by years of overgrazing have made satisfying the nation's hunger a daunting task for China's farmers. It's good news for potash producers though.

With a population of 1.3 billion discovering a taste for meat, satisfying China's growing hunger is a daunting task for its farmers. And it's getting harder. After years of overgrazing sheep and goats on ecologically fragile hills, Chinese farmers have helped turn the country into a giant dustbowl. Expanding deserts are swallowing almost a million acres of land a year. More than 4,000 villages have been wiped off the map. Soon 40% of the country could be scrubland, says China's Environmental Protection Agency, from the 18% that is desert today.

All of which is music to the ears of one group of companies potash producers. Potash is one of the three key minerals used in fertilisers for crop production. The Brazilians use it to boost their sugar cane crops in producing biofuels. The Americans use it to turn over huge corn harvests to feed their ethanol frenzy. Now, with huge swathes of farmland being eaten up, Chinese farmers have developed a heavy reliance on the fertiliser as a means to boost their yield. Fertiliser use in China is already running at three times the global average.

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Eoin came to MoneyWeek in 2006 having graduated with a MLitt in economics from Trinity College, Dublin. He taught economic history for two years at Trinity, while researching a thesis on how herd behaviour destroys financial markets.