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Bill Doyle: Agribusiness faces sustainability challenges, opportunities
Overcoming sustainability challenges will help people in developing countries to lead healthy, productive and satisfying lives. More protein consumption will help the world?s rising population, especially in developing countries, achieve full potential.
Source: FAO, UBC
Warning his audience at the Global Feed and Food Congress that "nothing worth having comes easy," Bill Doyle, President and CEO of PotashCorp, described difficult challenges facing agribusiness as it tries to overcome global hunger while employing sustainable practices. He spoke to the international organization in S?o Paulo, Brazil in April.
More than 700 million people in the world are undernourished, he said, and must consume more protein to achieve their full potential. "However, even as we deal with hunger in the present, we must also be preparing for the future."
The global population will increase by 40 percent by the year 2050, Doyle pointed out, another 2.6 billion people who will need to be fed. And even as the world gets more populous, it is becoming more prosperous, which increases the demand for foods rich in protein at a time when less land is available to feed each person.
"In 1950 there was over half a hectare per person," Doyle said. "Today, there is less than half that, and projections suggest that it will be further reduced by 2020 to about 0.2 hectares per person. Feeding the additional population will require substantially higher crop yields, or increased food production from the oceans."
However, the oceans' wild fish are already being harvested at an unsustainable rate. One-quarter of fish stocks are being caught at a rate that may permanently deplete their numbers.
Wild fish populations have been unable to meet the substantial global rise in demand for fish as a source
of protein during the past 20 years. The green bars (above) indicate almost no growth since the late 1980s.
Aquaculture, as seen in the blue bars, has been filling the gap.
Source: FAO, UBC
"To sustainably feed more people, we must look beyond wild fish," Doyle said.
One solution is aquaculture, which is expected to grow strongly and supply over 40 percent of global fish production by 2015. But its future will depend on innovation in the feed industry to find a substitute for the small "feed" fish, which are currently being pulled from the oceans at the maximum sustainable rate.
In Asia, great success is being achieved at replacing "feed" fish protein with vegetable protein from soybeans. Vegetarian fish like carp or tilapia thrive on a diet that is half soybeans, but carnivorous fish, such as salmon and trout, so far do well only with up to 10 percent. Research is underway to increase this percentage.
Agriculture's challenges are multi-faceted, Doyle emphasized to his audience.
At the same time as it meets this increased demand for soybeans for aquaculture, agribusiness must respond to the exploding demand for crops for biofuels. Demand for coarse grains for livestock feed production will rise, along with demand for grains, fruits, vegetables, coffee, sugar, cocoa and rubber.
"Countries around the world have been making headway in their efforts to improve the fertility of their soils," he said. "However, the bar has been raised a notch. We must move more rapidly in the future to achieve the optimum balanced fertilization levels needed to meet the world's requirements for both food and biofuels."
As a case in point, the International Plant Nutrition Institute has determined that soil nutrients in China, India and Brazil are not being replaced in a sustainable manner to meet the needs of high-yield agriculture. Both China and India need to apply 30 million tonnes more fertilizer, while in Brazil 10 million additional tonnes are needed to restore nutrients removed by the current planted acreage and crops.
"The challenges we face in providing the world with sufficient protein are daunting, yet we are moving steadily down the road to a more sustainable future," Doyle concluded. He said the global feed industry, which has made tremendous progress in dealing with
the challenge of supplying safe food, will play a leading role in overcoming these challenges and achieving the goal of allowing more people everywhere to lead healthy, productive and satisfying lives.
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