Crunch time for meat industries
Major technology advances foreshadow end of animal proteins
Anew report forecasts the world is on the cusp of the fastest disruption to agricultural production for 10,000 years in a shift that could threaten New Zealand’s key primary exports. Independent London/San Francisco-based think tank RethinkX says the US cattle farming industry, including dairying, will be all but bankrupted by protein technology within 10 years, with severe knock-on effects for all associated businesses. It says the cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 than existing animal proteins, and 10 times cheaper by 2035, to ultimately become close to the price of sugar. Within 10 years the modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animalderived products they replace, says the report by RethinkX, which analyses and forecasts the speed and scale of technology-driven disruption and its implications for society.
It says the massive approaching change is the result of rapid advances in precision biology. This is allowing big strides in precision fermentation, which enables programming of micro-organisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule.
These advances are being combined with an entirely new model of production, in which individual molecules engineering by scientists are uploaded to databases — molecular cookbooks that food engineers anywhere in the world can use to design products in the same way software developers design apps, the report says.
The report says the industrial livestock production model has all but reached its limits in terms of scale, reach and efficiency.
“As the most inefficient and economically vulnerable part of this system, cow products will be the first to feel the full force of modern food’s disruptive power.
“Modern alternatives will be up to 100 times more land efficient, 10-25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time efficient and 10 times more water efficient. They will also produce an order of magnitude less waste.”
The disruption does not rely solely on the direct, one-for-one substitution of end products, the report says.
“The whole of the cow milk industry which is already balancing on a knife edge, will thus be all but bankrupt by 2030.”
The report makes sobering reading for New Zealand agriculture, which contributes 5 per cent or around $10.6 billion to GDP and is a major contributor to the country’s $79b annual export revenue. Most of agriculture’s production is exported.
Primary industry annual export revenue as at June this year was $46.4b. Of this dairy exports contributed $18.1b. In the 2017-18 year red meat exports were worth $6.7b.
Late last year a Treasury report into the impact of artificial protein found it was unlikely that the potential impact to New Zealand’s meat industry will cause significant disruption within the the next five years. Consumption of meat in the European Union and in the United States was expected to be stable and beef consumption per capita in China was forecast to increase by 10 per cent between to 2022.
The RethinkX report says the cost of modern foods and other manufactured protein products will be at least 50 per cent, and as much as 80 per cent, lower than the animalderived products they replace.