The short and the sweet of it is that the world is in the midst of the largest increase in global food demand in human history. At least a doubling of food demand will unfold in the next 30-40 years, primarily as a result of economic growth in Asia, but also in Eastern Europe and parts of South America and Mexico. That economic growth is driving a greater demand for protein and improved diets throughout the developing world. In Asia, the incredible demand growth is outpacing their agricultural capacity in terms of both land and other resources.
In the next 30-40 years, Asia will have half of the world’s food and fiber consumers, but less than one third of the world’s arable land and less than one fourth of the world’s pasture. In short, Asia will be unable to feed and clothe itself entirely on its own.
WORLD FOOD CHALLENGES-POPULATION
The two factors affecting world food needs and farm product demand are population growth and individual income growth.
The world passed the six billion mark in 1999. The world’s overall population growth rate is currently about 1.5 percent per year—adding an additional 80-85 million consumers each year to the global population. That’s another Mexico added to the world’s consumer base each year, or an additional New York City every month. While an additional 85 million people per year may seem daunting, we are far from heading toward a population disaster.
In fact, we’re now for the first time at the point that adding the next billion people will take longer than the previous billion, indicating that the global population train has its brakes on hard. But it has taken a while for the train to scrub off momentum.
Since the 1960s when the alarm over “over-population” was first raised, we have learned that while poor farmers mostly have large families, affluent urban people have small families. The world is moving rapidly toward urban affluence, and its birth rates are plummeting. Europe is now down to a fertility rate of about 1.6-1.7 children per couple, with Germany, Italy, and Spain as low as 1.2 children per couple. Italy has been offering a $1,200 subsidy for 2nd Italian children to ensure the country is not totally abandoned to Albanian and North African immigrants.
In the former Third World, birth rates have fallen 80 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per couple in 1960 to about 3 births today with birth rates continuing to decline rapidly. Stability is 2.1. The UN Population Division has now lowered its peak projection for the global human population—again—to between 8 and 9 billion people. That still means a substantial increase of about 50% over the world’s current population over the next 45 years or so.
WORLD FOOD NEEDS-AFFLUENCE
This leaves income gains in countries not yet well fed as the farmers’ best friend, and such gains are continuing. The good news for the pork industry is that this is occurring in cultures where pork is the preferred food. The flip side is that the protein competition will get more intense as the wealthier consumers diversify their diets.
The GATT, now the World Trade Organization (WTO), has clearly shown itself to be the most successful international institution in human experience. It replaced tariff wars with economic growth. World non-farm trade has increased nearly 20-fold since 1950, and is still rising.
As a result of the explosion in world trade, nearly 3 billion people in Asia are now living in market-oriented economies that have been increasing their national economic output by nearly 10 percent per year, compounded, since 1980. This economic growth is headlined by Japan, but also includes Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Mauritius, and southern China. India and Indonesia have come a long way as well.
Nearly half of the world’s population lives in Asia. And as Asia continues to grow, both in population and economically, we can look to Japan as a model of what to expect from the region as a whole.
SURGING DEMAND FOR BETTER DIETS
The first thing that less affluent people do when they get more income is to bid for better diets. First, they want more rice and wheat. Then, they buy more cooking oil. Then, they buy more eggs, milk and, finally, more meat, fruits, and vegetables.
Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:
Japan was the first of the Asian tigers, and it has become the first of the Asian meat consumers as well. A country that once consumed less than 15 grams per day of animal protein and felt urgent concern about having fish on the plate, is now nearing 60 grams per day of meat and dairy products. If Japan did not still have such high tariffs on beef imports, the average Japanese might already eat more than 70 grams of animal protein. The Japanese meat consumption pattern is being emulated in Taiwan.
China, of course, is the huge Asian food challenge, with 1.25 billion people raising their incomes at a speed never before seen in a large country. China has been raising its meat consumption at 10 percent annually for the past decade, more than doubling its national meat consumption in the 1990s. Most of the expansion to date has been pork, but the demand for both beef and poultry have more than doubled and are still growing. Chinese pork consumption increased nearly 70 percent in the 1990s and is currently expanding by more than one million tons per year.
Moslem countries, also, are joining in the meat demand, even though they forego pork due to their majority Muslem populations.
Indonesia, which is both Moslem and Asian, has increased its poultry consumption dramatically. The broiler flock rose 25 percent in 1995 alone, to 600 million birds. The demand for corn in poultry feeds has been rising by 4 million tons per year as the feed industry expanded by 13 percent annually.
NEW CLOTHES, BEER AND DOGS
But just because you’re involved in pork, doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of the agricultural economy, because it will have an enormous impact on the pork industry as well.
The growing global affluence means that once we have fed the 8.5 billion people the way they prefer, we’ll have to satisfy their other growing farm product appetites because these consumers will drink and dress better, too. China’s beer consumption has more than tripled in the last decade. Imagine how much additional grain would be required if every one of the 700 million Chinese men drank just one extra beer per month. That’s 8 billion bottles of beer in a year!
Huge populations of people are moving from societies where everyone owned only two cotton outfits apiece, to a dozen and more—just like any other modern society.
There will even be a pet food challenge. The U.S. has 113 million pet cats and dogs for 270 million people. All over the world, ownership of companion animals and pet food sales rise with incomes. Already, China’s small-family policy is stimulating increased pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs, translating into significantly increased demand for pet food, including more meat, fishmeal and protein meal.
Combining the expected 50% increase in global population with the fact that most of these additional people will live in countries that are radically increasing individual consumption of high-protein foods—foods that take 3-5 times more farm resources per calorie than cereal calories—it is easy to see how overall farm resource demand will at least double, and will more likely triple over the next 45 years.
AG BIOTECHNOLOGY TODAY AND TOMORROW
Biotechnology is already playing a huge and growing role in transforming agriculture in the 21st century. It is making farming more environmentally friendly and more sustainable, despite the fact that we’re still in the comparative “biplane” stage of agricultural genetic engineering. We’re years away from the equivalent “jet age,” when the promise of agricultural biotechnology will produce self-fertilizing (nitrogen-fixing) crops that produce an appropriate array of insect protectants and are able to better withstand drought, salinity, and other adverse growing conditions. They may one day even produce their own natural herbicides to fight off weeds.
This will mean quantum reductions in fossil fuel use, pesticide and herbicide use, and far greater environmental sensitivity. Soils in our fields will improve, with less compaction from tractor traffic, higher organic matter levels, and greater water holding capacity. Topsoil loss will drop even further even as crop yields increase. Off farm impacts from sediment and nutrient runoff will decline further still.
This promise is already being realized.
First and foremost, herbicide tolerant crops—the largest single category of biotech crops currently planted, with 73% of the global biotech total—have made soil-conserving low- and no-tillage cropping possible on more farmland acres and made it more attractive to farmers to use these methods. And because of better and more timely weed control, herbicide-tolerant biotech crops have increased yields modestly while drastically reducing costs.
Low- and no-till farming is when weeds are killed with herbicides rather than killing them mechanically by plowing, disking, scraping, etc. Since the introduction of biotech herbicide tolerant crops, no-till crop acreage has increased nearly 40 percent in the United States. Two thirds of U.S. soybean growers who reduced their tillage since 1996 cited herbicide tolerant crops as a key factor. In addition, biotechnology tools to streamline conventional breeding have resulted in several non-genetically engineered herbicide tolerant crops that are already on the market. These approaches are becoming important to overcoming consumer resistance to these novel crop technologies.
In the United States, no till and conservation tillage farming annually save an estimated $3.5 billion in water treatment, waterway maintenance, navigation, flooding, and recreation costs. Fuel use is also drastically cut, as pulling tillage implements through the soil burns lots of tractor fuel. The savings total over 300 million gallons of diesel fuel each year in the U.S.
All of this results in better crop soil quality, with increased soil carbon, increased water infiltration and water holding capacity, greater soil tilth, 3 to 6 times larger earth worm populations, and better in-field wildlife benefits. Quail are estimated to find their food in one-fifth of the time in a no-till field compared to a plowed field—as the plant residues and soil structure have more beetles, insects and other food for wildlife.
Importantly, biotech has given us crops tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup, one of the most environmentally safe farm chemicals because it has low toxicity and breaks down rapidly into harmless byproducts.
These crops have become well established in several key animal feed export countries, including the U.S., and Argentina and Brazil—who together are the number one producer and exporter of soybeans, mostly for livestock production.
Nor are the benefits of herbicide tolerant crops limited to farmers in the developed countries. One of Subsaharan Africa’s worst pests is witchweed, a parasitic weed that can devastate corn and sorghum yields, the key food grains in the region. A new strategy is preparing for field trials, which will plant herbicide-tolerant corn seeds, soaked in a systemic herbicide which can kill the witchweed as it attempts to invade the plants’ roots. That could protect food yields on millions of small African farms.
Insect protected crops are the second largest biotech crop in acreage terms, with18% of the global biotech total. Currently, these incorporate a protein toxic to plant-eating caterpillars from the natural soil bacteria Bacillus thurengiensis, or Bt. This drastically reduces the amount of insecticides used in growing crops, especially corn and cotton. In the U.S., biotech Bt crops reduced insecticide use in 2003 by nearly 7 million pounds, reducing potential pollution and ecological impacts.
Organic farmers have been spraying aqueous solutions of Bt bacteria on crops for decades as a pesticide and Bt is extremely safe. After seven years of widespread planting on millions of acres, there is still no evidence of pest resistance to biotech Bt. , In fact, the only documented case of pest resistance to Bt was from over-reliance on sprayed Bt.
The results of biotech insect protected crops are increased productivity, less pest damage, higher quality, and increased profitability. All of these benefits are scale neutral, and farmers from the subsistence level to the largest have rapidly adopted biotech crops. For livestock production, one key benefit of insect-protected crops besides lower cost is a marked reduction in mycotoxins, which can adversely affect animal performance and health.
One third of biotech crops are now grown in developing countries. Farmers in South Africa and the Philippines are growing Bt corn for food and feed. Indian and Chinese smallholder farmers are growing large amounts of Bt cotton, increasing yields and incomes and reducing pesticide deaths. China is growing Bt cotton on 7 million of its 12 million acres of cotton, or 58%. This affects potential cotton meal and oil export sales to some degree, but the benefits are clear and overwhelming.
Indian farmers are officially growing only 250,000 acres of Bt cotton crops, or about 1% of the total Indian cotton area of 22 million acres. But there are literally thousands of acres of illegal Bt cotton—the result of fraud by an Indian seed company and the impatience of Indian farmers. But it tells you that when farmers in developing countries have the opportunity to see for themselves the benefits of biotech, they rapidly adopt it. The productivity, pollution, and sustainability benefits are significant.
In the near future there will hopefully be biotech revolutions in even more crops. How about a super-eco-potato, a biotech potato that is resistant to the Colorado Potato Beetle, a devastating virus spread by aphids, and the ruinous potato blight. The insect and viral protection are already realities and were even grown in the U.S. for a couple of years until the fast food companies found out and refused to purchase them. The blight-resistance could be in farmers fields within 5 years. Combining the blight-proof trait with the already proven and approved insect and virus resistance could cut global fungicide and insecticide use by tens of millions of pounds per year, with less spraying, fuel use, soil compaction.
Scientists have also already produced salt and aluminum tolerant crops through genetic engineering. Dr. Eduardo Blumwald at UC Davis has developed salt tolerant tomatoes and canola by inserting more copies of natural tomato salt pump genes into the genome. This has resulted in tomatoes that can grow in nearly 40% seawater.
Not only that, but this may be a way to deal with the salinization of the world’s irrigated croplands—the problem that killed the hanging gardens of Babylon. Irrigated fields are our most productive croplands and salts are in all water used for irrigation. The canola plants store up to 18 grams of salt in their leaves during the growing season. Their oilseeds have no more salts than conventional canola (same for the tomatoes). After the canola is harvested, the farmer can harvest the leaves, and dispose of the salts. Sustainability wise, this is nearly as big an advance as synthetic fertilizers.
NON-TRANSGENIC BIOTECH IMPROVEMENTS
We can now fully explore and exploit the yield-enhancing genes from wild crop relatives as well, which will help keep feed costs down as global farmland competition heats up in the coming decades. Two researchers from Cornell University scanned the genomes of wild rice and tomatoes and identified superior gene variants that human breeding had inadvertently eliminated.
Using biotechnology, they swapped the inferior genes for the superior ones—natural genes from the crops’ own wild relatives—and increased yields considerably. In rice, each of the gene variants increased the yields of the best Chinese rice hybrids by nearly 20 percent. In tomatoes, they increased solids yield by an incredible 50 percent.
BIOTECH ANIMAL NUTRITION ADVANCES
We’re now at the point where we’re able to significantly alter nutritional characteristics of major food and feed staples, and this will soon have a major impact on livestock production around the world.
While most have heard about Golden Rice that contains beta-carotene to prevent blindness and disease in developing countries where malnutrition is currently quite high, the potential to tailor feed crops for specific animal production characteristics is still largely unexploited. However, this will change dramatically over the next decade.
Phytate/Phytase: Biotechnology has already given us the ability to identify crop mutants that have lower phytate levels and increased available phosphorus. However, these varieties also have had lower yields, discouraging their use. That is why feed makers have added bacterially-derived phytase to animal feed rations. Yet here too there are increased expenses and problems in maintaining enzyme activity through the manufacturing and transport process, which has also limited their use.
Biotechnology will soon allow us to produce transgenic crops with heat-resistant, stable forms of phytase in the grain itself, drastically reducing costs while increasing performance and reliability. Initial studies have found no adverse effects from these phytase-enhanced transgenic crop feeds on animal health. Moreover, crop performance should be able to be maintained because the phytase production can be targeted to the grain itself and therefore should not hinder crop performance.
Amino Acid/Protein Balance: Biotechnology is also allowing us to more easily and cheaply tailor the amino acid balance of the feeds for optimal animal nutrition and efficient protein synthesis in livestock. Cereal proteins are deficient in lysine and tryptophan. Breeding with opaque-2 mutants has produced “quality protein maize” with improvements in the lysine and tryptophan contents of the seed proteins. Legume proteins are often deficient in methionine, cysteine and lysine. Wild soybean germplasm with improved contents of methionine and cysteine may be used to introgress this trait into the cultivated soybeans, just as the researchers have done to increase rice and tomato yields. Biotechnology may also be useful through expression of foreign proteins that are rich in the amino acids that are limiting in the crop plant.
Energy/Oil Traits: High oil corn developed via breeding is on the market. These varieties have seeds with larger embryos, producing increased content of oil, essential amino acids and vitamins in the seed. Feeds containing this energy-dense corn improve animal performance. These are sold as single cross hybrids or as blends. Blends are composed of a pollinator variety having a very high oil content together with a conventional corn variety. The hybrid seeds produced in the field have oil content midway between that of the parents. High oil grain developed via biotechnology may reach the marketplace within 5 years.
Vaccination via feed. Edible vaccines delivered via feeds may also help to maintain the health of livestock in the future. Animals have been immunized against diseases through feeding of transgenic plants expressing antigens (i.e. subunit vaccines) from various microbes. These edible vaccines have been successful against diseases caused by transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus, foot-and-mouth disease virus, rabies virus, swine diarrhea, avian influenza, bovine viral diarrhea virus, swine fever virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus. Some of these are now being entered into veterinary trials, but it will be some time before any edible vaccine products are licensed for marketing. Nevertheless, this biotechnology strategy has great potential for providing benefits that could not be achieved through plant breeding approaches.
Biotech plants have also been used to produce chimeric plant virus particles expressing antigens from various animal pathogens. These chimeric plant virus particles have been purified from host plant tissue and used as vaccine injections. Antigen structures displayed on the surface of these virus particles are very effective in stimulation of immune responses in animals. These plant-derived vaccines have been successful for protection of animals against infectious diseases such as canine parvovirus, mink enteritis virus, feline panleucopenia virus and Staphylococcus aureus.
BARRIERS TO THE BIOTECH BONANZA
In short, the promise of agricultural genetic engineering is enormous. It will allow us to grow more food from less land and far fewer inputs. Our production will be safer, more efficient, and far more cost effective.
However, there are still significant barriers to biotechnology acceptance. The key barrier is consumer unease. Biotechnology is new and in many consumers eyes, it is untested, despite the enormous experience gained over the past decade of biotech crop production and use.
This unease and unfamiliarity—amplified by the generally poor scientific literacy of the vast majority of consumers—has meant that acceptance has been slow and uneven. While U.S. consumers have more or less accepted biotechnology in agriculture fairly readily, this is certainly not true of many countries, notably Europe and the more affluent sectors of Asia.
Part of this can be laid at the hands of activist groups and others who have a philosophical opposition to the use of biotechnology in food and fiber production. Groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other anti-biotech activists are now global actors and have made opposition to ag biotechnology a centerpiece of their efforts.
However, I believe that this opposition will soon wane. In fact, I think that the biotech “war”, so to speak, has already been won and only the final battles remain to be fought.
Part of this can be attributed to the enormous success and “GE diplomacy” of biotech cotton. It’s not a food crop, and no amount of fearmongering has served to frighten farmers or consumers about the cotton it produces. Instead, farmers and governments have been enormously impressed by the ability of biotech cotton to resist the voracious pests that had always made cotton the most intensively pesticide-sprayed crop in agriculture.
China, India, and South Africa now feel heavily dependent on biotech cotton to preserve not only their cotton farmers’ livelihoods but also the millions of industrial jobs that depend on their cotton production.
Famine has been another winning issue for biotech. The activist efforts to bar American food aid corn from the famine stricken regions of southern Africa seem to have backfired. When the president of Zambia said he would not distribute U.S. food aid corn to starving people who’d already been reduced to boiling poisonous roots, the world shuddered. The reality that no harm has been linked to biotech crops was extended to many more people. The inhumanity of the eco-activists was exposed in a new way.
This year, Brazil has decided to permit the planting of biotech soybeans. According to that country’s major soybean growers, this is likely to stimulate another expansion of soy production there, because it will sharply reduce growers’ costs.
In the future, if Europe wants to continue importing non-biotech soybeans, it may actually have to pay a premium to get them. Will Europe do this? If so, that will put EU hog producers at a further disadvantage in world competition.
Will the WTO uphold the EU constraints of biotech development and trade? That will be highly interesting as well.
In almost any case, it seems likely that the rest of the world will proceed with genetically modified crops, and eventually even biotech animal developments.
HIGH YIELD CONSERVATION: A WINNING STRATEGY
Someone must tell the urban public about the environmental benefits of high-yield modern farming and why we should be carefully but deliberately embracing these technologies because of the growing maw of affluent consumers who will NOT be satisfied with a vegetarian future. I submit that it will have to be agriculture.
Agriculture and agricultural researchers must talk about saving wildlands and wild species with better seeds. We must talk about conquering soil erosion with high yields (so there’s less farmland to erode) and conservation tillage (which radically reduces erosion per acre of farmland). We must talk about preventing forest losses to slash-and-burn farming (the cause of destruction for two-thirds of the tropical forest we’ve lost). We must point out that where high-yield farming is practiced, the amount of forest is expanding. We must point out that the losses in wildlife habitat overwhelmingly occur where the farmers get low yields.
Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat. And if the world has 30 million wildlife species, (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.
Through the higher yields per acre afforded by the use of pesticides, fertilizers, confinement meat and dairy production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat from conversion to agricultural use.
Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.
Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges of the 21st century, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the food and fiber yields per acre of land and per unit of input from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting the products to where the people are demanding it.
Two years ago, we were joined by nearly 1,000 scientists and conservationists in signing the High Yield Conservation Declaration. The keynote signers were Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias (former President of Costa Rica), Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, and GAIA hypothesis creator James Lovelock. They recognize the challenge we face in the 21st century of feeding and clothing humanity without taking any more land from nature. (www.highyieldconservation.org)
Please visit this site and sign your names to this global petition. And while you take home the news of the coming advances in pork and feed production, please also take with you the message of high yield conservation. This concept is gaining increased acceptance and will be a key aspect of future acceptance of even more radical changes in livestock and feed crop production that will maintain pork’s share of the global food market.
Pork is an amazingly widely accepted food. But if consumers become falsely convinced that it contributes to environmental degradation or burden, then pork will see its share of the consumer protein diet decline needlessly.
I thank you for your time and your attention.