The FAO blithely projects a doubling of the population of farmed animals but such a doubling would presumably require a doubling of feedstuffs for those animals. The world is already using half of the available habitable land (71% of all land) and large quantities of ocean animals to feed the existing farmed animal population. If twice as many farmed animals have to be fed, then presumably that would require using all of the habitable land for agriculture (to produce feed for the greater number of animals. That leaves no land for wild animals or forests (or other human needs). This is undoubtedly a simplistic calculation but doubling the number of farmed animals would certainly have disastrous consequences for biodiversity and current land-based carbon sinks.
I would like to see a projection that looks at future animal populations plus the options for feeding those animals from existing land and marine sources.
In addition, just because someone projects that the world will reach a particular condition does not mean that such a condition is inevitable. At one point, population scientists projected that the world population would peak at around 12.4 billion people.
However, their projections have fallen. Forecasts now suggest that there will be 8.9 billion people by 2100 (1 billion more than today). That number could be driven even lower if the world was better at preventing a larger portion of unintended pregnancies.
Crop yields are extremely low in much of Africa so my guess is there’s potential for farmed animals to be fed while keeping constant or even decreasing land use.
Thank you for your comment. We appreciate critical questions and thoughts!
Of course, changes in farmed animal numbers might be quite different than projected. We are relying on projections from the FAO, since this is the only dataset we are aware of where animal numbers have been modelled globally until 2050. Needless to say, there are a lot of uncertainties and assumptions involved in such modelling. Precise numbers should thus be taken with caution. However, we think that the overall trend suggested by the data (i.e. Africa vs. other world regions) should be robust, as the African continent has the fastest-growing populations in the world and most countries are still early in their economic development (which is highly correlated with animal product consumption).
The FAO blithely projects a doubling of the population of farmed animals but such a doubling would presumably require a doubling of feedstuffs for those animals. The world is already using half of the available habitable land (71% of all land) and large quantities of ocean animals to feed the existing farmed animal population. If twice as many farmed animals have to be fed, then presumably that would require using all of the habitable land for agriculture (to produce feed for the greater number of animals. That leaves no land for wild animals or forests (or other human needs). This is undoubtedly a simplistic calculation but doubling the number of farmed animals would certainly have disastrous consequences for biodiversity and current land-based carbon sinks.
I would like to see a projection that looks at future animal populations plus the options for feeding those animals from existing land and marine sources.
In addition, just because someone projects that the world will reach a particular condition does not mean that such a condition is inevitable. At one point, population scientists projected that the world population would peak at around 12.4 billion people.
However, their projections have fallen. Forecasts now suggest that there will be 8.9 billion people by 2100 (1 billion more than today). That number could be driven even lower if the world was better at preventing a larger portion of unintended pregnancies.
Andrew Rowan, D.Phil.
President, WellBeing International
Crop yields are extremely low in much of Africa so my guess is there’s potential for farmed animals to be fed while keeping constant or even decreasing land use.
Thank you for your comment. We appreciate critical questions and thoughts!
Of course, changes in farmed animal numbers might be quite different than projected. We are relying on projections from the FAO, since this is the only dataset we are aware of where animal numbers have been modelled globally until 2050. Needless to say, there are a lot of uncertainties and assumptions involved in such modelling. Precise numbers should thus be taken with caution. However, we think that the overall trend suggested by the data (i.e. Africa vs. other world regions) should be robust, as the African continent has the fastest-growing populations in the world and most countries are still early in their economic development (which is highly correlated with animal product consumption).
Thomas’ comment also seems highly relevant, as there is still a lot of potential for crop yields to grow massively in many African countries. Hannah Ritchie also talked about this in depth on an 80K Hours podcast episode.