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Increasing Population Expected to Create Challenges and Opportunities

An Emeritus Professor of Food Marketing at Imperial College London, says an expanding global population will create opportunities and challenges for agriculture.
Global Food Industry Developments, implications for the Pork Industry in Canada was discussed yesterday as part of the Banff Pork Seminar.
Dr. David Hughes, an Emeritus Professor of Food Marketing at Imperial College London, says the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion since 1973 and it will increases by another two billion by 2050 but where we'll get more people is where agriculture faces stress due to global warming.

Clip-Dr. David Hughes-Imperial College London:

If you look at that two billion are they spread evenly across the world?
Not at all.
We've got about a billion population in Africa and over the next 25 years that will turn into two billion.
It's frightening in many respects.
What we need to happen in Africa is strong economic development and I'm not certain that's going to happen.
We have political uncertainty etcetera.
If we think we've got concerns right now about immigration right now, I think it's going to be a very big deal later.
Let's take another quick example, 170 million people in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a country the same size as Wisconsin and half that country is below sea level.
What do you think is going to happen over the next 30 years with climate change?|
It's going to be under water and those people will walk.
Back to Europe, it's static population there.
Some countries are declining.
Then take great export markets like Japan.
They're losing a million people per year over the next 25 years.
It's a population of 125 million now and by 2050 it will be less than 100 million.
That's a great export market for us but it's getting smaller so it depends on where you are in the world.

Dr. Hughes notes 1.6 billion of that population increase will be Muslim or Hindu and they don't eat pork but there's still millions who do.
He says there's very strong pork eating in North and South America and they're growing in population and they're going to want to eat more pork.

Source : farmscape

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