April 20, 2012

BILL KIERNAN Director, GAI Research & Insight

Every now and then, you read something that strikes you as so simple and so profound, that it fundamentally changes how you think about the world, its history, and its future.  That happened for me in the fall of 2008 when I read an Op-Ed article published in the New York Times by one of my favorite authors; Jared Diamond (A professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles) entitled “What is Your Consumption Factor?”  In this article, Professor Diamond made a profound and critical point about humanity’s collective future; population growth may not be the major challenge faced by the world in the 21^st Century, rather how much the world consumes is.  Specifically, he said, “Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the major challenge facing humanity.  Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.”  He went on to argue that consumption is changing because of rising global incomes, and this will have huge implications for all of us in the 21^st century.

I felt pretty silly that this statement blew me away the way it did.  After all, it was so simple, but sometimes the simplest things are the least obvious to us.  I immediately went out and bought a copy of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Guns, Germs and Steel” and devoured it.  Professor Diamond has an intense interest in the birds and culture of New Guinea, and he spends quite a bit of time there.  “Guns, Germs and Steel” begins with an account of a conversation Professor Diamond had with a local New Guinea politician named Yali which occurred in the early 1970’s.  Yali asked Diamond a very profound question that became entire subject of the book.  The question was "Why is that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" This simple question set Diamond on course to write his marvelous theory of why the current inequalities in the world evolved the way they did.  What really impressed me was that the original causal factor was the evolution of agriculture.

Having grown up on a farm and worked professionally in agriculture my entire life, I became immediately and intensely interested in how increasing rates of consumption, on both a per capita basis and in aggregate would impact the agriculture sector this century.  What I learned was that globally, incomes (GDP per capita is a decent approximation) are rising, and they are rising fastest in lesser developed countries of the world.  As incomes rise, people in developing nations begin to consume more like people in the most developed nations, and the first thing that people do is improve their diets.  Specifically,

• Individuals increase their caloric intake
• The proportion of calories from starchy staples such as roots and tubers declines as individuals eat more wheat, primarily in the form of bread.
• As incomes continue to rise, calories from animal proteins (meat, milk, cheese, eggs) are substituted for carbohydrate calories.
• In the most developed nations of the world, health, wellness and longevity become priorities, and people begin eating less meat, and more tree nuts, fish proteins, fruits and vegetables.

When I considered how resource intensive production of animal proteins really was, and that it takes almost 10 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, I began to see how much demand will be placed on agriculture this century.  Though this is highly dependent upon continued economic growth, the future seems to look fairly bright for agriculture.