Hennie Pieterse, hp dezign
The Need for Feed. We know that the need for feed is driven by the need for food. Edible protein forms a very important part of our diet and compound feeds are designed and manufactured to produce edible fish, meat, milk and eggs. A rapidly growing amount of Petfood should also be listed as a driver for ingredients and processing technology to produce food (rather than feed) for companion animals.
The Need for Feed is increasing as we speak. But what are the real drivers for this trend ? And how can we as scientists, nutritionists, feed manufacturers and feed milling engineers play a role ensuring that our world and its people will have enough nutritious, healthy and safe protein foods available in the future? Let’s consider a few of these drivers:
1. Population Increase
For many years and with great interest I studied changes in world population. There are many resources available on the internet with real-time “population counters” based on statistical analysis and mathematical modelling. One I follow as a source of information is from worldometers. Another is TheWorldCounts. I used information from both publishing this Blog.
It took human history until 1800 for the world’s population to reach 1 billion. From then onwards growth in population happened exponentially as per table 1 below:
We count just over 7.4 billion today at a net growth in population of just more than 2 people per second! No spelling mistake here : per second it is! No wonder mathematical models predict we will hit 11 billion by the turn of this century.
At the current population growth rate roughly 80 million people are added to our planet each year. These people need space for domestic and industrial purposes and in the process, reduce the agricultural land space we have available for (feed and) food production.
The distribution of population globally is reflected by the map in fig 1.
It is clear from this map that the concentration of people and therefore feed and food is still Asia-Pacific; the EU; the USA, and some parts of South America and Africa.
2. Hunger Statistics
The World Food Programme (WFP) indirectly confirms the Need for Feed through their focus on malnutrition and hunger. Just consider the following:
- 795 million people on earth do not have enough food to lead a normal, healthy life;
- the majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries where 12.9% of the population is undernourished
- two thirds of Asia do not have enough to eat.
- Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of hunger
- poor nutrition causes 3.1 million children under age 5 to die each year
- one in six children (approximately 100 million) in developing countries are underweight
- 66 million primary school age children go to school hungry in developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone
And this list could be expanded with similar facts from the WFP website.
There clearly is a growing need for feed to produce edible protein products that will provide people with a better quality life.
3. Global Economy Increase
One of the resources I cited states that the world economy could grow a massive 26 times in this century. We experienced this trend in recent times by following economic developments in Asia, and in particular China and India accounting for roughly 2.7 billion people.
A growing world-wide population with more money to spend per household leads to a change in the way people buy and consume food. By now, we are all well aware of the need for foods classified as Organic, Kosher, Vegetarian, Vegan and Chemical-Free to name but a few. All of these trends call for specific approaches in primary production of commodities and the way in which we process these commodities into high quality and safe feeds for edible protein production.
4. Environmental & Social Sustainability
We all understand that something has to change or improve in order to secure sustainability of the world we live in. We have no choice but to ensure we minimise our effect on the environment as we
- farm and produce commodities for feed and food production;
- utilise by-products, new commodities and traditional commodities to formulate feed;
- design smarter and more efficient processing solutions for feed processing.
The role of Food & Feed Manufacturing Technology
As food and feed processing technologists, manufactures and suppliers of equipment & complete plants, this topic should be of great interest to us. We are part of the chain of scientists and engineers adding value to basic food commodities transforming it into safe and healthy feed & food. We have a direct effect on The Need for Feed world-wide, both in terms of quantity and quality. As Feed Millers and Feed Milling Engineers we play a key role in providing the latest technology and equipment helping our world to produce Fish, Meat, Milk and Eggs at optimum Quantity and Quality while striving to achieve this at the lowest unit cost possible.
We need each other in our quest to meet the increasing demand for edible protein world-wide. We are eager to learn how you are contributing to this goal and are keen to share with you the innovative equipment and engineering solutions we can help you with.