[SOUND] [MUSIC] [SOUND] [MUSIC] Doctor Brian Aldridge I'm here at the University of Illinois poultry unit. And as we've talked through these past six weeks, we've thought a lot about how management can effect the sustainability of food production in the world. But it would be remiss of us not to consider some of the other factors that affect our food availability. I mean, most of us take for granted our food supply, and we can eat what we want, we can eat when we want to as well. We can access food almost at all times. But many people consider increasingly that our food supply and the security of that food supply is at risk. Because there are many, many factors that are outside of just a producer, or a government's ability to control, that's going to effect whether you have food on the table. Whether that food is safe and edible, whether it's nutritious and also whether there's enough of it as well, to feed your family. I want to just spend a bit of time thinking about those factors in which we don't normally consider. It would be great topics for our discussion forum as well. So we're going to look all the way from factors that impact global availability to factors that even impact local availability, or the availability in your very own household of food for you. And we can really think about those factors in four broad categories. There are political factors that affect the security of food. There are technical factors. There are demographic and economic factors as well. And lastly, there's environmental factors. So when you think about what you eat in a day, certainly, in the United States and in Europe and many other parts of the world. What we eat in a day isn't from our own country. Certainly, isn't from our own region. There's a massive amount of food movement around the world. And just be interesting to consider what you eat in a day. Maybe just to record that and think about the different countries that it comes from. Some of those gives us a great richness of our diet, but imagine if some of those, that global supply, was changed in some way. It might be some countries that we think are stable, what about if there is war or political upheaval, what would be one of the factors that would impact whether a country can contribute to the global food supply? During the world wars the whole food chain as we know it was completely disrupted. And a lot of countries, a lot of towns and cities had to rely on the production of food from within their own country. So, you can see how, if you look at the great walls and the two World Wars in the past century that tells you what that political upheaval, what a huge impact that can have on food supply. There technical constraints in some parts of the world. So, there is an increase in polarity in the kinds of food production. So, some parts of the world are subsistence level food production. And then, you have places like the United States where in which there are huge technical advances in food production. And so if you imagined it globally, it might come as we looked to feeding nine billion by 2050. That some of the countries with greater technical advances and innovation, it might fall on them greater responsibility to provide food to the increasing number of people. There are demographic and economic factors as well. So, how can we afford food? Which countries? We see very wealthy countries and much poorer countries, and we tend to see that diet is very closely related to the economics and the population size within a certain country. So with the great economic collapses that we seen over the past ten or 15 years, we seen the food, security, and some of those countries, that have suffered an economic collapses would seemingly were very economically robust. That actually, one of the concerns would be when countries were in massive debt is can they feed their people and sustain the economic basis of food production and food import and food export. And lastly, there's environmental pressures as we tend to think of the health of the planet, and so what impact can that have on food security? There are lot of debate about whether the environmental warming, and some of those prophecies of ecological disaster are true, but it is true that we need to sustain our environment, because our livestock food production depends so much on water resources and food resources. The health of their natural environment around us. The next category we want to consider when we think about global food availability and the ability of food to move and to feed people in different countries is, what happens at a national level? And we can look at those same categories. Politically, as change in different governments and government structure, there's different amounts of resources go into livestock food production. So how important is agriculture to your particular country? How well supported is it by the government? How is it seen as a priority? Some of the resources for technical innovation relies on your own country investing in those technologies. So, looking at how competitive a particular food industry is in one country compared to another country, you might have a very advanced dairy industry in one country, and then you might have a neighboring country that hasn't invested a lot of infrastructure or technically is not very advanced in dairy. Similarly with poultry, in a lot of the developing countries, the poultry supply is very important as a source of protein and a source of nutrition. And the food conversion efficiency of these birds is incredible to think that they can grow from about 35 grams to three to four kilos in just six or eight weeks is remarkable. So you can see how this is, the poultry for instance are a very important part of a lot of developing countrys' economy. But then we don't, in some of those countries, we don't see an extensive dairy system, or an extensive beef system. So, technically, they might be behind in those areas. And so, when we think about other protein sources, if there was a disease outbreak that affected the poultry availability in that country, and they didn't have other food resources, then they might be limited as far as their food security. The demographic and economic factors also impact a country. If a country is unable to produce its own food, does it have enough economic stature to import food for its people? And certainly some of the natural resources in some countries are constrained. So as that population grows, they might not be able to be self sufficient as far as their own resources. So therefore having skills, or having industries that they can share so that their export, import balance is such that the food supply is sustained, even if their natural resources isn't the ability to produce livestock based food products. And lastly again the environment. Just as the environment is important globally, we see countries also that are having changes, even short term changes, in their climate or in their water availabilities. So you can imagine, the United States has recently had some drought conditions, and that's really affected some of the food supply, some of the crop supplies in certain parts of the country. And that has repercussions for feed costs and availability for food for livestock in the subsequent years. In Europe we've seen areas of great flooding as well, and so when our agricultural areas are flooded, there might be less pasture, or again, less food supply for live stock. And that effects prices and availability, that might necessitate the need for that country to depend more on imports for the next few years. And finally, I just want to think about the impact of a particular household and what is happening at a household level as far as the availability of food. So again, we have political and technical demographic and economical and environmental factors that even impact a single household. Politically, what's the confidence of a particular consumer for a certain food type? We're very susceptible now in this digital age to media pressures. And you might have certain households that have lost confidence in some of the livestock based food products. Either for health reasons or the fear of genetic modification or the fear of drug residues. And so, even though the livestock industry is working hard to combat those things and to gain consumer confidence, sometimes the media can be very, very powerful in affecting how confident a household is. And therefore, that can interrupt the food supply. And that can change the diet that individuals are receiving in a particular household. We also have, again, the environmental effects as well. So the household is not insensitive to the effects of environment on its food availability. So you can see now just having a glance just to have us think about it in much broader ways. We have, certainly we can have food supply issues, we can have problems with sustainability of the food supply. But you can see by looking across global pressures and national constraints, and even those at a household level, it's much more complicated as to how much food we have, the safety of that food and security of the food supply. [MUSIC]
