"Plan B is shaped by what is needed to save civilization, not by what may currently be considered politically feasible." –Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
Chapter 3. Moving Up the Food Chain Efficiently: New Protein Models
Mounting pressure on the earth’s land and water resources to produce livestock, poultry, and fish feed has led to the evolution of some promising new animal protein production models, one of which is milk production in India. Since 1970, India’s milk production has increased more than fourfold, jumping from 21 million to 87 million tons. In 1997, India overtook the United States in dairy production, making it the world’s leading producer of milk and other dairy products. (See Figure 3–4.) 39
The spark for this explosive growth came in 1965 when an enterprising young Indian, Dr. Verghese Kurien, organized the National Dairy Development Board, an umbrella organization of dairy cooperatives. A coop’s principal purpose was to market the milk from tiny herds that typically averaged two to three cows each. It was these dairy cooperatives that provided the link between the growing appetite for dairy products and the millions of village families who had only a few cows and a small marketable surplus. 40
Creating the market for milk spurred the fourfold growth in output. In a country where protein shortages stunt the growth of so many children, expanding the milk supply from less than half a cup per person a day 25 years ago to more than a cup represents a major advance. 41
What is new here is that India has built the world’s largest dairy industry almost entirely on roughage—wheat straw, rice straw, corn stalks, and grass collected from the roadside. Cows are often stall-fed with crop residues or grass gathered daily and brought to them. 42
A second new protein production model, which also relies on ruminants, is one that has evolved in China, principally in four provinces of central Eastern China—Hebei, Shangdong, Henan, and Anhui—where double cropping of winter wheat and corn is common. Once the winter wheat matures and ripens in early summer, it must be harvested quickly and the seedbed prepared to plant the corn. The straw that is removed from the land in preparing the seedbed as well as the cornstalks left after the corn harvest in late fall are fed to cattle. Although these crop residues are often used by the villagers as fuel for cooking, they are shifting to other sources of energy for cooking, which lets them keep the straw and cornstalks for feed. By supplementing this roughage with small amounts of nitrogen, typically in the form of urea, the microflora in the complex four-stomach digestive system of cattle can convert roughage efficiently into animal protein. 43
This practice enables these four crop-producing provinces to produce much more beef than the vast grazing provinces in the northwest do. This central eastern region of China, dubbed the Beef Belt by Chinese officials, is producing large quantities of animal protein using only roughage. The use of crop residues to produce milk in India and beef in China means farmers are reaping a second harvest from the original crop. 44
Another promising new animal protein production model has also evolved in China, this one in the aquacultural sector. China has evolved a carp polyculture production system in which four species of carp are grown together. One species feeds on phytoplankton. One feeds on zooplankton. A third feeds on grass. And the fourth is a bottom feeder. These four species thus form a small ecosystem, with each filling a particular niche. This multi-species system, which converts feed into flesh with remarkable efficiency, yielded some 13 million tons of carp in 2002. 45
While poultry production has grown rapidly in China over the last two decades, it has been dwarfed by the phenomenal growth of aquaculture. (See Figure 3–5.) Today aquacultural output in China—at 28 million tons—is double that of poultry, making it the first country where aquaculture has emerged as a leading source of animal protein. The great economic and environmental attraction of this system is the efficiency with which it produces animal protein. 46
Although these three new protein models have evolved in India and China, both densely populated nations, they may find a place in other parts of the world as population pressures intensify and as people seek new ways to convert plant products into animal protein.
The world desperately needs more new protein production techniques such as these. A half-century ago, when there were only 2.5 billion people in the world, virtually everyone wanted to move up the food chain. Today there may be close to 5 billion people wanting more animal protein in their diet. The overall demand for meat is growing at twice the rate of population; the demand for eggs is growing nearly three times as fast; and growth in the demand for fish—both from the oceans and from fish farms—is also outpacing that of population. Against this backdrop of growing world demand, our ingenuity in producing animal protein in ever-larger quantities and ever more efficiently is going to be challenged to the utmost. 47
While the world has had many years of experience in feeding an additional 70 million or more people each year, it has no experience with some 5 billion people wanting to move up the food chain at the same time. For a sense of what this translates into, consider what has happened in China since the economic reforms in 1978. As the fastest-growing economy in the world since 1980, China has in effect telescoped history, showing how diets change when incomes rise rapidly over an extended period. 48
As recently as 1978, meat consumption was low in China, consisting mostly of modest amounts of pork. Since then, consumption of pork, beef, poultry, and mutton has climbed. In 2003 people in China ate some 71 million tons of meat, close to twice as much as Americans ate. China has decisively displaced the United States, long number one in meat consumption. (See Figure 3–6.) 49
As incomes rise in other developing countries, people will also want to increase their consumption of animal protein. Considering the demand this will place on the earth’s land and water resources, along with the more traditional demand from population growth, provides a better sense of the future pressures on the earth. If world grain supplies tighten in the years ahead, the competition for this basic resource between those living high on the food chain and those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will become both more visible and a possible source of tension within and among societies.
NOTES
39. Figure 3–4 compiled from FAO, op. cit. note 1.
40. S. C. Dhall and Meena Dhall, “Dairy Industry—India’s Strength in Its Livestock,” Business Line, Internet Edition of Financial Daily from The Hindu group of publications, at www.indiaserver.com/businessline/1997/11/07/stories/03070311.htm, 7 November 1997; see also Surinder Sud, “India Is Now World’s Largest Milk Producer,” India Perspectives, May 1999, pp. 25–26; A. Banerjee, “Dairying Systems in India,” World Animal Review, vol. 79, no. 2 (1994).
41. Milk consumption from FAO, op. cit. note 1; United Nations, op. cit. note 3.
42. Banerjee, op. cit. note 40; Dhall and Dhall, op. cit. note 40.
43. John Wade, Adam Branson, and Xiang Qing, China Grain and Feed Annual Report 2002 (Beijing: USDA, March 2002); China’s crop residue production and use from Gao Tengyun, “Treatment and Utilization of Crop Straw and Stover in China,” Livestock Research for Rural Development, February 2000.
44. USDA, ERS, “China’s Beef Economy: Production, Marketing, Consumption, and Foreign Trade,” International Agriculture and Trade Reports: China (Washington, DC: July 1998), p. 28.
45. Li, op. cit. note 15, p. 26; FAO, op. cit. note 7.
46. FAO, op. cit. note 1; FAO, op. cit. note 7.
47. United Nations, op. cit. note 3; FAO, op. cit. note 1.
48. China’s economic growth from International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, at www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo, updated April 2004.
49. Figure 3–6 compiled from FAO, op. cit. note 1.
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