First Annual Malthus Lecture: "Meat"
View webcast (by Kata Fustos
(April 2010) The Malthus Lectureship, a partnership between the Population Reference Bureau and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), promotes the study of the connections among nutrition, food, agriculture, and population and invites an outstanding scholar or policymaker to give a presentation each year. The first Annual Malthus Lecture took place on March 3, 2010, in Washington, D.C.
Joel E. Cohen delivered the first Malthus Lecture, "Meat." He surveyed some of the strong demographic, economic, environmental, and cultural interactions between human and livestock populations and their implications for public policy. Cohen is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations at The Rockefeller University and the Earth Institute of Columbia University, and a PRB Trustee. He heads the Laboratory of Populations at Columbia and Rockefeller Universities. Cohen studies populations of living beings and their interactions by combining mathematical tools with observations of concrete problems in demography, epidemiology, and ecology. Cohen is the author or editor of 14 books and 360 articles, including How Many People Can the Earth Support?
During the 20th century, humans drastically expanded production of meat and other foods. Between 1961 and 2008, world meat production grew approximately fourfold, while the human population doubled. In total, meat production per capita increased from 23 kg/person/year in 1961 to 41 kg/person/year in 2008, driven in part by the combination of the growth in population and expanding economic demand.
Today, the populations of livestock animals greatly exceed the number of people in the world; in 2008, for example, chickens alone outnumbered people almost three to one. Yet livestock remains a relatively unproductive form of capital from an economic point of view. In 2003, 24 percent of the world's total assets were contained in the form of livestock, although livestock generated only 1.4 percent of world GDP. While the amount of cereal grain grown in 2008/2009 was enough to feed 9 billion to 11 billion people, humans consumed directly only 47 percent, while 33 percent went to feed animals. The distribution of food remains very unequal in the 21st century, despite unprecedented capacity to produce it. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that in 2009, the number of undernourished people worldwide surpassed 1 billion, with the majority located in Asia and the Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa.
Kata Fustos is a communications intern at the Population Reference Bureau.
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