Future Protein Supply and Demand: Strategies and Factors Influencing a Sustainable Equilibrium

By M. Henchion, M. Hayes, A. Mullen, M. Fenelon, Brijesh K Tiwari. Foods, 2017

1,258 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing global population, combined with factors such as changing socio-demographics, will place increased pressure on the world’s resources to provide not only more but also different types of food. Increased demand for animal-based protein in particular is expected to have a negative environmental impact, generating greenhouse gas emissions, requiring more water and more land. Addressing this “perfect storm” will necessitate more sustainable production of existing sources of protein as well as alternative sources for direct human consumption. This paper outlines some potential demand scenarios and provides an overview of selected existing and novel protein sources in terms of their potential to sustainably deliver protein for the future, considering drivers and challenges relating to nutritional, environmental, and technological and market/consumer domains. It concludes that different factors influence the potential of existing and novel sources. Existing protein sources are primarily hindered by their negative environmental impacts with some concerns around health. However, they offer social and economic benefits, and have a high level of consumer acceptance. Furthermore, recent research emphasizes the role of livestock as part of the solution to greenhouse gas emissions, and indicates that animal-based protein has an important role as part of a sustainable diet and as a contributor to food security. Novel proteins require the development of new value chains, and attention to issues such as production costs, food safety, scalability and consumer acceptance. Furthermore, positive environmental impacts cannot be assumed with novel protein sources and care must be taken to ensure that comparisons between novel and existing protein sources are valid. Greater alignment of political forces, and the involvement of wider stakeholders in a governance role, as well as development/commercialization role, is required to address both sources of protein and ensure food security.

Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3540be29d67f8c0df1c4fb61258067c73cb28a54

Citations in the corpus

• The Potential of Goat Meat in the Red Meat Industry (2019, neutral): “Furthermore, there is a projected twofold increase in the demand for safe, healthy, good quality meat and meat products by 2050 resulting from the dramatic growth in human population, improving lifestyles and urbanization [5,14,15,17].”