World Ostrich Association Newsletter No. 84
March, 2010

Included in this edition:
City Food Lecture – Managing the Earth’s Resources to Deliver Food for Nine Billion

This newsletter will cover just one item this month.  There is a link to the lecture which makes interesting viewing.

City Food Lecture
An article from a US based meat industry e-newsletter led me to a conference that took place in the City of London.  The event is the Annual City Food Lecture.  The lecture was given by Sir David King, Director of Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford, England.  The question asked in the lecture:

Attendees were made up people from all areas of the food industry spectrum including politicians and academics, farmers and heads of supermarkets, food campaigners and manufacturers and members of the press.

The panel answering questions following the lecture was made up of a representative from Cargill, The Soil Association and Waitrose.

Most readers will be familiar with Cargill as a global and very powerful corporation involved in many aspects of the food chain.  The Soil Association is the governing body for organic food production in the UK.  Waitrose is a major UK supermarket that works closely with producers to understand their challenges, recognises consumer concerns whilst competing with the supermarkets that work in a less ethical manner.

Taking time to listen to this lecture and the panel discussions illustrates the challenges of the global markets we are working in today.  This is the link:  http://www.cityfoodlecture.com/.    The lecture discusses the impact on our eco system whilst still providing the food for an ever increasing world population.   Sir David King opens with comments on how we are currently consuming resources faster than we can replenish them. 

Slide 12 Projected Population Growth

He illustrates how we entered the 20th century with a global population of 1.5billion and ended the century with 20billion.  He emphasised that during the time we had managed to improve systems to support this rapid growth in populations, but indicated that a projected growth to 9billion (using the medium figure) required planning.  Not only are the populations increasing, economies are also improving and this increases consumer demands.

Slide 13 illustrates how many of the challenges are interconnected with population growth the driving force.

Slide 13 illustrating the interrelationships of the factors

There are some interesting illustrations of regions that had been destroyed and undergone successful regeneration and the benefit of keeping people working productively on the land.  There is also a discussion on GM crop improvements both through natural selection in the manner we have done since man first started agriculture and more modern slicing and splicing. 

With water a precious and essential resource, he talks about “more crop per drop”.  This references the improvements in irrigation to optimise the way water is distributed to the growing crops.   Slide 20 was used to illustrate the effect of water usage to produce one kilogram of product.  This argument is used widely to encourage reduced consumption of meat products by many.  In fact it is not as simple as the density of nutrients in the different products also has to be considered.  However, in this discussion he was pointing out that as demand increases driven by improved economic circumstances, so will the demand for meat products over products of vegetable origin.

Slide 20 Litres required per kg of product

This again illustrates the contribution Ostrich can make once there is production at commercial levels. 

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