World meat demand expected to rise

Press, 8 May 1978, Page 3

World meat demand expected to rise

World demand for meat will increase in pace with consumers’ incomes, New Zealand meat producers were told at the Lincoln College centennial seminar on Saturday morning. As the wealth of the world increased, as surely it would, the demand for animal products would increase, said an eminent scientist from the United Kingdom, Sir Kenneth Blaxter. Sir Kenneth, who is director of the noted Rowett Research Institute at Aberdeen, said that the extent of the future demand: was difficult to estimate, but I he suggested that by the end, of the century the output of animal products should at least double. As personal incomes rose by 1 per cent, consumption of meat and animal products increased by more than 1 per cent and at the same time there was a decline in the consumption of cereals. Consumption of cereals fell in most countries when incomes increased. This sort of rise in meat consumption occurred in all regions of the world including the major areas of Asia, the Near East and Africa. However, this was not a reflection of a deficiency of protein in human diets. There was much evidence to show that the incidence of protein malnutrition in the world had been grossly exaggerated in the last two decades. It had been described as the great protein myth. Malnutrition resulted from a shortage of food as i such and mostly a shortage of energy. Studies of economic

behaviour showed rather; that people liked to eat: milk, meat and eggs because they found them culinarily useful and socially acceptable. Much of the increase in the demand for meat and animal products must, however, come from livestock grazed in regions other than the temperate ones in the developed countries of the world, he said. It was here that the potential demand; was likely to be greatest in the long term. The difficulties of establishing animal industries and improving old ones in the | semi-arid and humid tropical areas of the world were, however, greater than had been encountered in the temperate regions. Sir Kenneth had been discussing the relatively low efficiency of animals in converting feed to edible products, which was sometimes quoted as a reason for dispensing with farm livestock, j It was argued that the use of land to produce feed for livestock when it might be used to produce crops for direct human use was a waste that should not be tolerated in a hungry world, he said. He noted that ruminant livestock could use parts of plants and particularly fibrous constituents that man could not digest. In the United Kingdom suckled beef herds and sheep were on upland and hill grazing country of poor in= herent productivity, much of which could not be ploughed and cropped at all. Animals were also kept to I provide food when land was; surplus to the needs of a

crop economy or when land could not be cropped at all, and as well they used byproducts of cropped land surplus to human needs.

“In these senses the contention that animals compete with man is rather ridiculous, for the use of animals in farming is part of the whole process of manipulating biological resources to use the primary resource of the land,” he (said.

The official New Zealand commentator on Sir Kenneth Blaxter’s paper, Dr L. R. Wallace, former director of the research division of the Ministry of Agriculture, said he was surprised to hear what Sir Kenneth had said about protein as so much had been heard about this problem. Having just returned from Sri Lanka he found it a little hard to believe that protein nutrition was as good as he had claimed, but [certainly these people lived on a rice diet which contained protein.