Eating a duck also has to pay a royalty fee! Britain once relied on the patent rights of Cherry Valley Duck to profit hundreds of millions of yuan from China every year, obviously it is a "Chinese duck", why is it still stuck in the neck?
Professor Jin Canrong of Chinese Min University once said: China is a typical foodie country, and 96% of the ducks in the world are eaten by us.
Although this data is not accurate, Chinese is really unbeatable in eating duck, because duck meat has a history of at least thousands of years in China. There is a record in the Northern Wei agronomist Jia Sixun's "Qi Ming Zhishu": The cook, the son goose is 100 days away, the Zi duck 60 or 70 days, good.
In addition, the Southern Dynasty's "Food Treasure Record" also records the eating method of roast duck slices, including in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, all kinds of saltwater duck, plate duck, osmanthus duck, etc., were all served on the table.
There is also a ranking of the provinces that eat the most ducks on the Internet, Nanjing, which comes out on top, it is said that they can eat 100 million ducks a year, followed by Beijing, Wuhan, and Guangdong, and the competition for second place is quite fierce.
It can be seen that Chinese loves duck meat, and in 2011, China's duck slaughter reached 3.94 billion, accounting for more than 80% of the world's total slaughter. By 2019, the total number of meat ducks slaughtered reached 4.43 billion, which is an astonishing figure.
But you know what? Every roast duck we ate before may have paid a patent fee, because the duck we ate is not an authentic local duck, but an improved duck called "Cherry Valley Duck", of which 90% of the roast duck is made from this variety.
The duck also comes from the UK, and if China wants to breed and sell it, it has to pay royalties. It is reported that China's annual intellectual property patent fees to Cherry Valley Duck reach hundreds of millions of yuan.
Moreover, it is not introduced once and for all, because this duck is divided into 4 generations, namely great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and commercial generations. Among them, the quality of the great-grandparents is the best, but it is not allowed to be exported to China.
China can only choose the parent generation, but the parents introduce duck seedlings, and the gross profit margin after successful breeding is very low. In other words, most of the benefits obtained by these ducks go into other people's pockets.
The most ironic thing is that the "Cherry Valley Duck" actually flows Chinese blood, and its ancestors are the unique Peking duck of the mainland, and the Peking duck is domesticated from the mallard.
In order to get this variety, the domestication time was even as long as two or three hundred years. At that time, whether it was the famous Peking duck, saltwater duck, plate duck and other delicacies, almost all of them used this kind of Peking duck.
But the strange thing is, why did the Beijing duck change into a cherry valley duck to harvest the Chinese market?
In fact, all this has to start in 1873, when because of the war, the mainland Peking duck was brought to the United States, and then dispersed from the United States to European countries to cultivate, occupying the European market in a short time.
In the 50s, this duck attracted the attention of a farmer named J. Nixon, who led the team to improve and breed the cherry valley duck with more tender and fatty meat, which received a good response as soon as it was launched and soon sold worldwide.
As a "big duck eater", China can only pay an annual fee to import duck meat in order to meet the needs of Chinese people. Imagine if we had applied for a patent when it had been circulated, maybe the situation would have been different.
But at that time, China's awareness of patents was still very weak, and it could only eat yellow lian dumbly and suffer all this silently. In fact, this is not the first time that animal and plant resources on the mainland have been preemptively registered by foreign companies.
If we do not have a firm grasp of germplasm resources, agriculture and animal husbandry will be stuck in the neck in the future. With the development of science and technology, China has gradually realized the seriousness of this problem.
So, in 2017, after the efforts of all parties, the mainland's CITIC Agriculture and Shounong jointly acquired 100% of the equity of "Cherry Valley Duck" at a price of 1.5 billion. This means that the ducks we have eaten since then are pure Chinese food.
Peking ducks have returned to their homeland, followed by American soybeans and New Zealand kiwifruit with Chinese roots, and China will remember this bitter and bitter history and do its best to protect China's native resources.
This article is reproduced from the popular science room