As meat demand doubles, Britain faces “food crunch”
February 26, 2008
Conservative party leader David Cameron expressed his concern as he considers the possibility of Britain being vulnerable to a global food crunch. The two Asian giants India and China, whose economies are growing at unprecedented rates are according to Cameron, partially responsible for the food shortage due to changes in their diets.
Mr. Cameron in his speech to the National Farmers’ Union’s centenary conference in London said “The growing consumption of meat and meat products by people as they get richer, especially in India and China has led to crunch in global grain stocks.”
“In 1985, the average Chinese consumer ate 20 kilos of meat a year. Now the consumption exceeded more than twice as they eat more than 50 kilos. Since 1980, the demand for meat in developing countries has doubled”. Hence the farmers switch from grain to wild stock, to meet the increase in demand, thus resulting in a crunch in global grain stocks.
You need three kilos of grain to produce a kilo of pork and eight to produce a kilo of beef. As a result farmers now feed staggering 250 million more tones of grain to their animals than they did twenty years ago, the opposition leader argued.
Quoting the United Nations figures to show that draught, deforestation and climate instability were responsible for the loss of 250 million acres of fertile soil each year. Last year, Australia was the worst sufferer due to its worst draught for over a century and saw its wheat crop shrink below 60 percent.
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