As meat, eggs and other animal byproduct increasingly became commonplace on Chinese dinner table, growing incomes have a noticeable effect on food trends, including a willingness to focus more on high-quality and heathy food.

China has not introduced any policies on high-quality food, but some local farms changed the way middle class eats.

A major force affecting the local high-quality food production

The purchasing power of China's middle class is a major force affecting the local high-quality food production. The past ten years have witnessed many small farms in Beijing providing high-quality meat and vegetable that is free from fertilizers and antibiotics.

Green Dudu, a small family-owned farm located in Beijing's Shunyi District, raises 20,000 high-quality Beijing Oils, a traditional local hen breed, and takes care of their eggs with forest planting and grass farming methods.

Chickens at Green Dudu all live in barns, with an indoor leaven that allows them to bid farewell to their smelly living environment. In the daytime, those happy birds are out on the pastures and then came back to their respective homes when the sun goes down. At night, the flock of birds stays on perches in the barn.

"Increasing numbers of consumers have recognized that animals raised with high welfare are of high quality and without antibiotics, and both the producers and our market understand it," Li Zhe, the manager of the farm said.

With demand for high-quality food, middle class people are not only looking at the quality and taste of the meat, but also its origins and food safety. According to a survey by Faunalytics, a non-profit animal advocacy and research organization, Chinese consumers are interested in higher welfare products due to quality and safety reasons rather than living condition concerns.

"My motivation for pursing organic food is environmental safety, not nutritional value," Sheng Xi, an organic food lover who orders vegetables and meat from local farms every week, told CGTN. 

Contradiction between mass population and food supply

China is still a developing country needing to feed its 1.4 billion people, and the contradiction between the mass population and food supply has not been solved yet. For now, ensuring food security "is the top priority of the work" to build China's strength in agriculture, Chinese authorities reiterated in many occasions.

In 2017, Yu Kangzhen, vice minister of agriculture, said that as an outcome of economic and social development, animal welfare promotion should not proceed faster than a country's current stage of economic and social development.

At present, there are only a few farm animal welfare standards in China, including the Farm Animal Welfare Requirements - Pigs and the General Principles for Animal Welfare Evaluation.

The concept of animal welfare has not yet been widely adopted in China. To most farm owners in China, the destination of farm animals is slaughterhouse and the idea that animals have feelings or natural habits is more like an unthinkable luxury.

When talking about the cage-free egg industry in China, the CEO of World Animal Protection Steve McIvor told CGTN that most of hens in China are currently kept in cages and each hen has about a space of an A4 sheet of paper.

"It is still quite a small part of the market in China, but there are a number of foreign retailer companies that are selling (free ranch eggs) in China," McIvor said. "But there are lots of local producers, small-scale barns and free range farms."

Still, there are signs that the Chinese government is starting to take farming animal welfare seriously.

In 2017 at the world conference on farm animal welfare, Minister Yu claimed that China would take farm animal welfare promotion as an important approach for transformation and upgrading agriculture in China, and promote a route for environmentally friendly sustainable development.

"The government is paying more attention to raising livestock in the woods so I think that in this case, animal welfare may be the next trend," the Green Dudu manager said.

Among the countries with the most livestock, the improvement of the welfare is also a guarantee of food security, McIvor believed.

Building trust organically

For now, China has not issued unified standards on organic food and high welfare farming and the cost of organic certification by international organizations is too high to afford. But the local small farms found their way to build the trust between producers and consumers.

At Beijing Farmer's Market, an organic farmers market in Beijing aiming to build connections so that consumers and farmers are more like friends, consumers and producers meet face-to-face, keeping both farmers accountable for selling quality products and consumers for supporting quality foods.

"Many organic consumers prefer the intimacy with these small farms and the trust between the farm and the consumers gives them a deep connection," Sheng Xi said. 

"But for me, I still prefer to buy products from large farms since they can afford to be certified by the relevant authorities."

Producers and retailers are all looking forward that standards and policy could be promulgated soon. 

"We really hope that our government or relevant authorities can issue some standards to clearly certify our farming method," Li from Green Dudu  said. "Now it is all by our own claims, which is certainly not as credible as an authority," Li continued.

"Cage-free standards already exist in most of the world and we are trying to work on adopting a standard in China as well," McIvor said.