In the last article, I wrote “If people in poverty start being rich, they begin to eat meat”. And then I wrote that to produce the meat for those, we need significant amount of feed grain. Means that our meat eating diet is sustained by that extremely inefficient luxury. This time I will go bit deeper about the issue.

In EU, average meat consumption is 70 kg per person. To produce this 70 kg of meat, we need 420 sq meters of grain farm. It is the same size as 1 basketball court.

Every year, people in EU consume a meat which ate one basket ball court of grain feed. And we, an Asians, eat average of 27 kg of meat. It needs 160 sq meters of grain farm to produce grain feed. It means that we use 160 sq meter land for 3.6 billion people to produce a grain feed. How big is that then? It is the size of combining France and Belgium together.

Then as I wrote, if the population of Asian region exploded to 4.5 billion and they become rich enough to eat meat, their average meat consumption shall be around 35 kg. Of course then we need more land to produce feed grains you know. It will be around the size of Japan.

Well, even if we, the people in developed countries, think that “Ok. I ate enough eat meat in my life, so, we should reduce it for our health!”. Since we won’t be able to force that to people in developing countries, we have to increase the produce of feed grain somehow to sustain a demand.

Why I see the potential in developing countries such as Cambodia, it is because they probably can take such demand. The countries has factors like low in harvest yield, cheap labor cost and vast uncultivated land. In this land, I have been trying from cultivation of land to produce of crops and then to logistics and more over, I tried production of feed grain and even production of meat. Let me tell you that I am having straight loss because of tons of unexpected problems and events. Yes I know. Thank you. But now I could feel that I know how I should play with those.

Now I see what I was envision when I come to Cambodia and start agriculture 3 years ago. Cambodian people around me begins to eat meat more and more. Price of pork is increasing, import of meat cow is getting active, foreign organisation that do mass cattle husbandry is stepping into Cambodia. I think increasing an efficiency of agriculture itself is the only way to sustain such dramatical and significant change in food culture.

And in my country Japan where most of feed grain are imported, what is going to happen with this sharp depreciation of yen? They will never be able to eat a meat the price we had been eating…