Recent decades have seen “the creation of more than a billion new consumers in the world who have had the opportunity to move from extreme poverty into what we would call today a moderate middle class,” thanks to economic growth in places like China and India. This means a billion people who have “access to meat” for the first time, Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe [Chairman of Nestle] says.
“And the demand for meat,” he says, “has a multiplier effect of 10. You need 10 times as much land, 10 times as much [feed], 10 times as much water to produce one calorie of meat as you do to have one calorie of vegetables or grain.”
via The Weekend Interview with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: Can the World Still Feed Itself? – WSJ.com.