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Environment
OpinionComment
Ryan Huling
Diane Fermin
Ryan HulingandDiane Fermin

The View | Asia can satisfy the world’s growing appetite for meat by investing in alternative proteins

  • As global demand for meat soars, a large-scale shift towards plant-based and lab-grown meat production will be necessary
  • Already a leading global supplier of clean energy technology, Asia is well-placed to rise to this new challenge in food sustainability

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A customer buys meat at a market in Shenyang, China’s northeastern Liaoning province. Rising affluence in Asia is driving demand for meat. Photo: AFP
Ryan HulingandDiane Fermin

Two decades ago, a rapid rise in electricity demand across Asia fuelled massive investments into clean-energy sources like wind and solar power. Building critical infrastructure for renewables helped fend off widespread power-grid shortages and laid the groundwork for an economic boom of historic proportions.

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Fast forward to today and the wisdom of those early investments is clear. Asia now accounts for nearly half of the world’s wind energy capacity and produces more than 80 per cent of all solar panels. As countries grapple with escalating climate crises and tight deadlines for energy transitions, Asia makes and sells what the rest of the world urgently needs.

But looking beyond the energy sector, another potentially catastrophic shortfall looms on the horizon: demand for protein is surging.

Globally, meat consumption is the highest it’s ever been – and growing. In Asia alone, economic growth and rising incomes are projected to increase consumers’ appetite for conventional meat and seafood by 33 per cent by 2030 – compared to 2017 – and 78 per cent by 2050.

That’s a big problem because conventional methods of producing meat are inherently inefficient. Chickens, for example, consume nine calories of crops for every one calorie we get back in the form of meat. That’s 800 per cent waste – the equivalent of a farmer preparing nine plates of food, only to throw eight of them in the garbage.

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The ripple effects of this extraordinary inefficiency are visible everywhere from water depletion to air pollution, but perhaps nowhere more so than in land usage. Of the roughly four billion hectares of land currently used for agriculture, a staggering 75 per cent are used to grow crops to feed to chickens and pigs or to graze cows and other farmed animals. For perspective, that’s a land mass as large as China, plus India, times two, plus Indonesia.

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