Has world beef consumption peaked?

Food has moved from being quietly talked about within the industry into something seen on the front pages of the press, Connolly told the Alltech REBELation Symposium in Kentucky.  On his frequent trips to China he reads stories about food, food safety, food security and sustainability.

“The world population is growing but we need to be extremely careful in judging or interpreting the future base of world population expansion because food consumption is not driven by population growth,” he said. “It is driven by income growth, so it is much more important for us to look at where income growth is than to look at where the population is growing.”

Asked for advice on the global markets for food producers he tells people to learn what BRIC means, Brazil, Russia, India, and China. “Then buy yourself a passport and go there.”

A new acronym, MINT, represents Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, he said. Producers need to have a sense of what is happening and what might happen in these markets. 

Global consumption of all meat is projected to increase about a 1.6% a year to 2023. Beef consumption represents only about 15% of those total projected increases.  Not just for China but for the world, poultry consumption will grow more rapidly and represents about half the increase of meat consumption in the next 10 years.

Beef consumption is stable: over the last three years it has only gone from 56.4m tonnes to 56.8m tonnes per annum. However China’s consumption has increased about 8% a year. Asia represents about half the global beef trade and there’s been a four-fold increase in imports into China in the last four years. In the United States consumption is on the decline – some say it has dropped to the levels of the 1950s. Middle East and Africa represent a proportion of import growth but are extremely price sensitive. 

Uruguay will have limited expectations of growth in beef demand and in Argentina the drop in production has been even more extreme, dropping 55,000t since last year and almost 500,00t since 2009. There may be some modest growth in demand in Europe.

The outlook for beef is that any increased production will be offset by increased exports including from India, Europe and Paraguay. India is the number-one exporter of beef – not just dairy cows but also buffalo – followed by Brazil, Australia and the US, in that order.

“Clearly, in terms of business, in whatever business we [look at] in agriculture, we’ve seen the numbers of herds and the numbers of animals declining and that’s equally true in all parts of the world. You can see long term declines in India, United States Brazil, China; you see declines in the overall number of people producing beef.”

But Connolly says beef prices have reached an all-time high, particularly in the United States, with increases in the price of steers and the prices on the shelves. Not just beef producers are gaining – many cuts and meats have hit all-time highs, creating profitable opportunities for all types of meat. With beef in particular this is a global phenomenon. European, US, Australian and Brazilian prices have been strong for a good period of time.

But the long term trend is not for a significant increase in beef consumption, Connolly said. “In fact, beef trends in US and Europe, based on current trends, look stable-to-declining. Export side opportunities will be in Asia, China and to a lesser degree Africa. 

“We will also see increasing competition for land use and the high cost structures in rumen production will need to be addressed.”

• Rural News reporter Pam Tipa travelled to Alltech’s REBELation Symposium in Kentucky courtesy of Alltech NZ.