Global food demand and the contribution of livestock as we enter the new millennium

Abstract

AbstractPeople in developed countries currently consume about three to four times as much meat and fish and five to six times as much milk products per capita as in developing Asia and Africa. Meat, milk and fish consumption per capita has barely grown in the developed countries as a whole over the past 20 years. Yet poor people everywhere clearly desire to eat more animal protein products as their incomes rise above the poverty level and as they become urbanized. Growth in per capita consumption and production has in fact occurred in regions such as developing Asia and most particularly China. Per capita consumption of animal proteins and use of cereals for animal food in Asia have both grown in the 3 to 5% per annum range over the past 20 years. By 2020, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute's IMPACT model projections, the share of developing countries in total world meat consumption will expand from 47% currently to 63%. Of the global total projected increase in meat consumption, 40% is from pork, 30% is from poultry and 24% is from beef. The latter helps mitigate the otherwise much larger decline in real beef prices expected through 2020. Projected annual growth in meat consumption in China of 3.2% per annum through 2020, up from 8.3% per annum from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, drives these results.A rapidly expanding supply of feedgrains will be essential to achieving the desired production increases for livestock products without undue upwards pressure on grain prices, especially in view of the rôle of monogastrics and the relative increase in industrial production in developing countries. IMPACT projections under various technical and economic assumptions suggest that there is enough production supply response in world systems to accomplish these production increases smoothly. Sensitivity analysis of the impact of restrictions on China's ability to produce more feedgrains illustrates that in a system of linked global markets for cereals and livestock products, such restrictions are not effective at lowering Chinese livestock consumption, which is driven by global trade in manufactures, although they do lower Chinese livestock production. The resulting imbalance raises world food costs by one-third in 2020 over anticipated levels, encourages increased livestock exports from Latin America, discourages livestock exports from the USA and reduces meat and cereals imports and consumption in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia.