توسعه اقتصادی و تعادل تولید و مصرف مواد غذایی: یک چالش جهانی در حال رشد

Rising affluence in major developing countries (principally China and India) and increasing diversion of agricultural resources for energy production (USA and Brazil) sharply increase agricultural resource demand. Food consumption and production changes during development are analyzed using resource-based cereal-equivalent measures. Diet upgrades to livestock products require fivefold increases in per capita food resource use, reflecting a consistent pattern which is only marginally affected by land base. Food consumption increases exceed production during early development, leading to imports. Consumption eventually stabilizes at high incomes, but production falls short in land-scarce countries. Pork and poultry consumption increase the most; less efficient beef and dairy production command a majority of agricultural resources.

Increases in per capita food demand in developing economies follow a dynamic growth path that places increasingly strong pressure on food production resources. The claims on these production resources, however, are not evenly divided. To date, only the 15% of the world’s population located in high income countries has reached food consumption stability. Yet in reaching this stability, their high income diets, focused on animal products, command 30% of the world’s food production resources. In contrast, low-income countries with 15% of the world’s population need only 8% of the world’s production resources to satisfy their crop-based diets.1 In the past, technological change against a fairly stable land base has allowed growth in food production to keep pace with rising demand from this limited number of high income diets. Now, given current development and demographic conditions as well as critical environmental considerations, the challenges facing our global food production systems are growing exponentially.

Food needs during economic development (income growth) are driven by two forces, population growth and diet upgrade, principally to livestock products. Diets rich in livestock products require considerably more agricultural resources to produce than do diets composed primarily of crop products. Using cereal equivalents to measure food consumption in a way that reflects resource use, we estimate that development-induced diet change alone will increase per capita food resource use by a factor of five as incomes move from low to high. Pork and to a lesser extent poultry products demonstrate the largest percentage gains among livestock products. Beef and dairy products show a lower percentage gain, but because they are less efficient in the use of agricultural resources, they combine to account for over one-half of our cereal-equivalent measure (resource use) at all levels of development. Countries with limited land resources demonstrate only moderate reductions in consumption growth of livestock products during development, continuing to consume significant levels of resource inefficient products such as beef and dairy through food or feed imports. The shift in production to supply the growing demand for livestock products from both population pressures and diet change generates increasing environmental externalities, including global warming potential.