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The Role of New Technologies in Increasing Livestock Production
In the next 30 years, the world’s population is projected to grow by nearly 2 billion, and will become more urbanized, with a more skilled workforce. The good news is that global prosperity and affluence will increase. The challenge is that food supply will need to more than double in order to meet the increasing demand. Specifically, the demand for animal-sourced foods needs to more than double to meet the demands of the newly affluent. With fewer and fewer people engaged in agriculture, and for the sake of the planet, animal production growth cannot continue to come from the deployment of more animals and land. Some have argued that current organic systems may be for the rich and curious and could not produce enough food to feed the world in the future. Past technologies that allowed us to advance productivity may not be enough to bring about future intensification, especially for smallholders who live in areas that require attention to climatic adaptability and disease resiliency. Instead, changes in total factor productivity needs to occur through significant changes in current techniques. To transform current near-subsistence smallholder production systems, we need technological innovation to drive the needed sustainable productivity increases. We require collaborative global research teams to come up with new ways of developing and adapting modern concepts in biotechnology to create the next-generation of animal genetics, health, and livestock nutrition systems. These technologies will then have to be deployed affordably through context-relevant mobile communication and digital platforms to increase accessibility.
Keywords: livestock production, food supply, biotechnology