Future trends in food production, with special reference to animal production

Horn, Péter

Keywords: animal production trends, natural resources, efficiency, environmental footprints

Forecasts concerning the magnitude of increases in animal protein and meat de-mand are summarised, in association with the possible quantities of additional plant biomass required in the next 20 years to cover the needs of food, feed and biofuel on a global scale. The problem of the diminishing availability of the main resources such as land and fresh water are tackled. The constant decreasing trend of natural sea and freshwater fish catches, increasing the need to enhance intensive aquaculture produc-tion, is considered. The efficiencies of various animal production sectors (poultry, pork, beef, mutton), milk and eggs, and their environmental footprints are compared, summarising the most important research results concerning UK, USA, OECD and our own evaluations. Intensive systems using highly productive plant and animal popula-tions will play an even more important role in the future especially in poultry, pig, milk and aquaculture production systems being efficient users of resources (feed, water, land) and having smaller environmental footprint per unit of product. Present climate change trends, if they continue, will mostly affect regions with extensive pastoral ani-mal production systems (3 billion ha); here reduction in product output will be close to 50% within 20 years. Those regions where irrigation is possible, and especially those where renewable fresh water resources are available, will play an exceptionally impor-tant role in agriculture in the future. Hungary has significant reserves in respect of the latter, therefore much more has to be done to rethink the whole national complex freshwater management strategy.

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