Global Trends & Feeding the World
It is the time of the year where everybody is adjusting from the busy holiday season and preparing for the new year ahead.
You cannot help but to reflect on how blessed we are as we hear all the man-made turmoil along with the natural disasters around the globe. We hear once in a while about poverty, starvation and lack of food in many countries and we wish we can be part of the solution.
If we venture to read what the predictions and the trends say by the year 2050, it may surprise some of us to learn how wasteful we have been.
Almost one billion people each year are experiencing hunger according to the World Food Prize while over 1.3 Billion tons of food is lost in the global food system every year.
This trend will even be more pronounced if we do not contribute to finding solutions to utilize the wasted resources. Predictions are that the world population will reach 9 billion people by 2050.
Another trend is the dwindling resources of certain ingredients and their prohibitive cost that were discussed in previous blogs. Fish meal is a prime example; as wild caught sea food is limited while aquaculture is at a steady growth. Conventionally, aquatic feed utilizes fish meal as an important source of protein, energy and required fatty acids found in fish oil. On the bright side, dry extrusion (high shear extrusion) technology was tested for many years through co-extruding local ingredients with by-products including fish and marine residues into highly digestible source of protein and energy that can successfully replace the expensive fish meal.
As the under-developed and developing countries experience faster growth than the developed countries, their population segments are shifting from poor to middle class. The increase in their purchase power is allowing them to consume more protein and the luxury of having a pet or two. This means a steady increase in the demand for oilseeds and the need for processing them into high quality protein and oil. Again, we have witnessed this in the increased demand for our ExPress® technology for the production of soy protein and oil both for human food application and also for animal feed.
For more information, you can access our numerous blogs and the following references:
–Feeding the World- Economists Conference – The 9 Billion people question
–OECD and FAO Secretariats “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, 2012
–OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2013
–Oilseed & Grain Trade Summit, 2013
–worldfoodprize.org
