Boom times for protein

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 used by India to produce milk. Since 1970, India's milk output has increased more than fourfold, jumping from 21,000,000 to 87,000,000 tons. In 1997, India overtook the U.S. as the world leader in dairy production.

The spark for this explosive growth came in 1965 when an enterprising young Indian named Verghese Kurien organized the National Dairy Development Board, an umbrella organization of dairy cooperatives. A co-op's principal purpose is to market the milk from tiny herds that typically average two to three cows each. It was these cooperatives that provided the link between the growing appetite for dairy products and the millions of village families who only have a few cows and a small marketable surplus.

In a country where protein shortages stunt the growth of so many children, expanding the daily milk supply from less than half a cup per person 25 years ago to more than a cup represents a major advance. 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 often are stall-fed with crop residues or grass gathered daily and brought to them.

A second new protein production model, which also relies on ruminants, is one that has evolved in China, principally in the four eastern central provinces of 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 com. The straw that is removed from the land, as well as the cornstalks left alter the harvest in late fall, are fed to cattle. Although these crop residues often are used by the villagers as fuel for cooking, they are shifting to other sources of energy for that purpose, allowing them to 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.

This practice enables these four provinces--dubbed the Beef Belt by Chinese officials--to produce much more meat than the vast grazing provinces in the northwest. 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.

Another promising new animal protein production model also has evolved in China, this one in the aquacultural sector. The nation has implemented a carp polyculture production system in which four species of carp are grown together. One subsists on phytoplankton, another on zooplankton, and a third on grass, while 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, annually yields some 13,000,000 tons of carp.

While poultry production has grown rapidly in China over the last two decades, it has been dwarfed by the phenomenal growth of aquaculture; its 28,000,000-ton output is double that of poultry, making China the first country where aquaculture has emerged as a leading source of animal protein. Although these three new protein models have evolved in India and China, they may find a place in other parts of the world as population pressures intensify. A half-century ago, world population stood at 2,500,000,000. Today, there are close to 5,000,000,000 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, three times as fast. The demand for fish, too, is outpacing that of population.

While the world has had many years of experience in feeding an additional 70,000,000 or more individuals each year, it has no experience with some 5,000,000,000 people simultaneously wishing to move up the food chain. For a sense of what this means, consider what has occurred in China since the economic reforms of 1978. As the fastest-growing economy in the world, China has, in effect, telescoped history, demonstrating how diets change when incomes rise rapidly over an extended period. Meat consumption used to be low, consisting mostly of modest amounts of pork. Now, the Chinese eat almost 75,000,000 tons of meat, close to twice as much as Americans (formerly the global economy's number-one meat consumers).

As incomes rise in other developing countries, people will want to increase their consumption of animal protein. Consider the demand this will place on the Earth's land and water resources, along with the more traditional strains from population growth. 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 more visible--and quite likely a tremendous source of tension within, and among, societies.

Lester R. Brown, Ecology Editor of USA Today, is president of Earth Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., and author of Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble and Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures. This column is adapted from the chapter, "Moving Up the Food Chain Efficiently," in the latter book.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning