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A satisfactory national average food supply can be defined as 2750 kilocalories food energy per capita per day, including 40 g animal protein, which corresponds to approx. 650 kilocalories food of animal origin. The food supply in all African and many Asian and Latin American countries does not meet these criteria. Population growth makes food production increase necessary; economic growth increases demand for animal products and livestock feed. As further increase of the harvested area is ecologically undesirable, it is necessary to increase crop yields; this requires, inter alia, more nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizer, despite the environmental problems which this would exacerbate. It is probable that a satisfactory food supply and an environmentally benign agriculture worldwide cannot be achieved without reducing population to less than three billion. The UN "Low" population projection shows that this reduction could be achieved about 200 years from now.
Key Words: Population; Nutrition; Cereal yield; Nitrogen fertilizer; Energy; Environment.
Nutrition
To measure the adequacy of a diet at least two indicators are needed: a quantitative and a qualitative. The quantitative is the energy content of the daily food supply Per capita. The qualitative is the daily supply of animal protein: protein from meat, marine products, dairy products and eggs1.
A substantial amount of animal protein in a national average diet is desirable for several reasons:
1. It is universally preferred; per capita animal protein consumption exceeds 40 g per day in almost all countries classified by the UN as "developed", and also in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Israel, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
2. Feeding cereal grain to cattle, pigs and poultry is a safety buffer in the event of a sudden fall in grain production. Recent history confirms this. Until 1991, over half the Soviet Union's grain was fed to livestock. When grain production in the former Soviet Union fell drastically in the 1990s, there was a decline in the consumption of animal protein, but only a slight fall in the consumption of vegetal calories. There was no famine. In contrast, almost all grain in China in the 1950s was consumed by humans. When grain production fell drastically in 1959-61, 30 million people died of starvation (Ashton et al., 1984).
3. Animal...
