Happy to see this, but of course worried about the growth of insect farming. I didn’t realize it was so likely to grow.
One small point: I like that this essay goes into detail on a probabilistic estimate. I’d find it really useful if there were some other “sanity checks” from other parties to go along with that. For example, questions on Manifold or Metaculus, or even using AI forecasters/estimators to give their takes.
This strikes me as a pretty good forecasting question (very precise, not too far away). I imagine it would be easy to throw it on Manifold and spend $20 or so subsidizing it.
The 2023 forecast was a slight overprediction (78.5bn vs 76.25bn actual), which gives me a bit of hope that the rest of the curve will bend downwards faster than predicted.
Here’s the distilled forecaster commentary for 2025 onwards:
2025: Forecasters generally expect that global chicken consumption will continue to grow in the next few years. Their expectations are based on extrapolation of the data from 2019, with the assumption that there will not be any major changes in consumer attitudes towards animal ethics, tastes, or disease outbreaks. Forecasters anticipate that meat alternatives, such as lab-grown or plant-based options, may start to have an impact on the industry by 2030, but are not expected to significantly change the data for 2025. Forecasters also acknowledge the potential for: (1) improved standards of welfare to decrease consumer preference for poultry and (2) genetic engineering to increase yields at lower cost. However, the feasibility, regulatory permissiveness, and consumer preferences for the latter trend remain uncertain.
2032: Overall, forecasters expect global chicken consumption to continue to grow over the next decade. While they do not expect a significant global cultural shift towards lower meat consumption on this timescale, they do anticipate a limited decrease in highly developed countries to be more than offset by significant increases in consumption in less wealthy countries, as the latter’s populations become wealthier. Forecasters expect the economic growth of the last decade to slow only slightly over the next, but some do expect annual global growth to stall at some point between 2032 and 2052. This would arguably lead to a stark reduction in chicken consumption.
2052: Forecasters expect that affluence and population increase will lead to a continuation of the trend of increasing chicken demand per capita and total chicken production. However, they also expect that cultured meat and other technological advances may have a material impact on meat consumption, particularly in highly developed countries. In fact, many predict that lab-grown or plant-based alternatives will dominate the market by this point. Beyond 2052, forecasters express much more uncertainty, but expect that meat alternatives and artificially grown meat will continue to replace the majority of chicken meat obtained by slaughtering chickens. They project that the rate of growth will slow as population growth slows, leading to a plateauing of chicken consumption while the cost of raising more chickens increases. Notably, they expect that ethical concerns will play only a minor role globally by this time.
2122: With a long-term horizon of 100 years, forecasters expect technological advances in meat alternatives to lead to a massive decrease in chicken consumption. They predict that, by 2122, global energy consumption will be pulled in two directions, there will be: (1) both a demand for better energy efficiency and lower consumption overall and (2) cheaper and more abundant electricity as renewables continue to fall on the cost curve. Therefore, it is highly likely that cultured meat will have been cost-competitive with traditional meat for decades. There are some forecasters who expect the global chicken population to be around half of its peak and, given the availability of cheap, high-quality cultured meat, there’s a chance that the number of slaughtered poultry may fall close to zero.
Happy to see this, but of course worried about the growth of insect farming. I didn’t realize it was so likely to grow.
One small point: I like that this essay goes into detail on a probabilistic estimate. I’d find it really useful if there were some other “sanity checks” from other parties to go along with that. For example, questions on Manifold or Metaculus, or even using AI forecasters/estimators to give their takes.
This strikes me as a pretty good forecasting question (very precise, not too far away). I imagine it would be easy to throw it on Manifold and spend $20 or so subsidizing it.
The closest I know of is the Metaculus question How many chickens will be slaughtered for meat globally in the following years? from 2022, which forecasts 82.2 billion chickens slaughtered in 2032, declining afterwards to 64 billion in 2052 and 9.1 billion in 2122 (with increasingly wide prob dists), as part of the Forecasting Our World in Data: The Next 100 Years project.
The 2023 forecast was a slight overprediction (78.5bn vs 76.25bn actual), which gives me a bit of hope that the rest of the curve will bend downwards faster than predicted.
Here’s the distilled forecaster commentary for 2025 onwards: