How Substituting Red Meat with Soybean Can Help China to Achieve Healthy and Environmental Goals?

Zhiming Yuan, Shenggen Fan, Yumei Zhang, Jingjing Wang and Ting Meng

No 344309, IAAE 2024 Conference, August 2-7, 2024, New Delhi, India from International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE)

Abstract: In the current Chinese diets, merely 14% of residents adhere to the recent dietary guidelines. The excessive consumption of red meat presents significant health and environmental challenges, leading to increased pressure on protein feed imports. This study proposes a pragmatic solution wherein the entire population partially replaces red meat with soybeans in China, and evaluates the impacts. Employing meta-analysis and counterfactual analysis, we investigate the correlations between food intake and disease risk, calculating avoidable mortality and the associated disease burden. Consuming 50g/day of soybeans may prevent 1.2 million deaths annually, saving $250.74 million indirect costs and $3.52 billion in direct medical expenses. Through substituting, completely eliminating the population exceeding 100g daily red meat intake in China could preventing 0.28 million deaths, and saving $247.66 million indirect and $2.06 billion direct medical costs. Furthermore, utilizing a partial equilibrium model, we projected the regional impacts and costs of following the recommended soybean consumption on water use, land use, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus emissions. Through dynamic data validation, estimating a 19.6% reduction in carbon emissions, 5.4% less water use, 26.2% lower nitrogen footprint, and 24.6% less phosphorus footprint. These findings offer valuable evidence for improving agricultural economic policies and strategies in China.

Keywords: Agricultural; and; Food; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2024-08-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna and nep-env
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/344309/files/21784.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:cfcp15:344309

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.344309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAE 2024 Conference, August 2-7, 2024, New Delhi, India from International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().