Endless hunger for meat: China wants to produce cloned pigs with robots

Created: 06/30/2022, 09:23

From: China.Table

Cloned pigs in a stall in Tianjin: China's hunger for meat is growing.

© VCG/IMAGO (archive photo)

Chinese researchers have developed a method to clone pigs using robots.

The country could thus embark on a path that differs significantly from the ideas in Europe.

• China wants to become less dependent on imports with clone pigs produced by robots – as soon as the technology is ready for mass production.

• The creepy-looking procedure was born out of necessity.

  The Chinese are eating more and more meat, and at the same time an unusually large number of animals have recently fallen victim to swine fever.

• This article is 

  available to IPPEN.MEDIA

   as part of a cooperation with the 

  China.Table Professional Briefing -

  China.Table

   first published it 

   on June 22, 2022.

Beijing – Chinese scientists have developed the world's first method of cloning pigs for the meat industry using artificial intelligence and robots.

If the technology proves to be ready for mass production, the People's Republic could soon become independent of imports.

Second, cloning could be useful for testing new drugs or conserving endangered species, say the researchers from the College of Artificial Intelligence at Nankai University in Tianjin.

They made the breakthrough for the technology back in March.

At that time, seven cloned pigs could be brought into the world by a mother animal.

Every step up to birth was completely automated, explains Liu Yaowei, a researcher who helped develop the process: "There was no human intervention." no cell damage occurs.

The problem of human clumsiness had always set cloning technology back.

The most common method of animal cloning was somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

It involves a scientist manually removing the nucleus from an animal's egg cell, which is then replaced with a nucleus taken from another, "normal" body cell.

The embryo with the transplanted nucleus is then implanted into a surrogate animal.

Professor Zhao Xin from the Institute for Robotics at Nankai University in Tianjin: China wants to satisfy its population's hunger for meat with cloned pigs.

© VCG/IMAGO (archive photo)

The researchers explain that the conventional process had a high error rate and was very time-consuming.

In the past five years, they have succeeded in improving the success rate of machine-cloned embryos from 21 percent to 27.5 percent.

With manual interventions, the success rate is only around ten percent.

"Our AI-powered system can calculate the stress inside a cell and instruct the robot to then carry out the cloning process with minimal force."

A research publication detailing the technical details is currently under review by the scientific community in China.

It is due to be published in the Journal of the Chinese Academy of Engineering soon, the scientists tell the

.

China: Pork is considered systemically important

The procedure, which seems scary not only for animal rights activists, was born out of necessity.

The more Chinese become wealthy, the more meat they eat.

And the swine fever that was rampant in China before Covid showed the vulnerability of meat supplies.

China is now the world's largest producer – and also consumer – of pork.

According to official customs data, China imported 140,000 tons of pork in April alone.

In comparison, this value is still low due to Corona, just like the prices.

In December before the pandemic, imports were close to 270,000 tons.

also read

Energy price flat rate: How pensioners get the 300 euros

Even economists are confused: where has all the labor gone?

The Chinese consume more than 30 kilograms of pork per capita per year, as much as the USA.

In Germany it is 45 kilograms.

The Chinese demand is therefore enormous.

However, China's swine industry has still not fully recovered from the 2018 and 2019 outbreaks of African swine fever that decimated China's breeding population.

The virus, which survives even when you cook or freeze meat, had spread across the country from northeast China.

Hundreds of millions of pigs had to be forcibly killed.

These are the largest cities in China

View photo gallery

But because pork is such an integral part of Chinese cuisine, China imported millions of tons from abroad, which also affects prices in Germany - in both directions.

Even the "strategic pork reserves" established by the government in 2007 in nationwide cold stores had to be tapped to keep prices stable.

With a cloning technique mature for mass production, Chinese farmers could keep their herds stable in such cases in the future.

They would also be less dependent on the breeding cycle that is now leading to oversupply. 

China's clone pigs: Profitable but risky business

The question is when automated pig cloning will be ready for the market.

There was already an attempt in 2015, but it never made it into implementation.

The Boyalife company wanted to mass-produce identical cows and dogs.

The company is still in the business of genetic engineering for agriculture and continues to pursue its cloning plans, but is years behind schedule.

But Boyalife is already selling cloned guard dogs to security agencies.

Cloning livestock has a number of advantages in mass meat production.

Large numbers of embryos are produced in a central factory.

The animals all have identical, perfect qualities.

The use of robots should also reduce the hitherto high level of rejects when cloning.

However, the young animals must continue to be carried by sows and reared and fattened on farms.

China: Contradiction to Europe's approach

But this can also be transferred to large production structures.

Since experiments with extreme collectivization, agriculture in China has once again been organized into smaller parts.

Re-consolidation would promote professionalism.

At the same time, all these ideas fundamentally contradict the prevailing European approach to improving the agricultural sector.

The EU promotes organic farming.

A ban on cloned meat has been under discussion in Europe for years and has even been passed by the EU Parliament.

However, the rules have not yet become effective due to resistance from the member states.

However, the cloning of farm animals is not yet common practice in the EU, nor is it to be introduced on a large scale.

By Frank Sieren

The China specialist and bestselling author 

 has lived in Beijing since 1994.

He has already worked as a correspondent for Wirtschaftswoche and Handelsblatt.

He has been writing for the 

since 2021 .

This article appeared on June 22, 2022 in the China.Table Professional Briefing newsletter - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available to the readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.

China.Table Logo © China.Table Professional Briefing