FIXING ASIA’S FOOD SYSTEM
The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 20181
Foreword
Transforming our food system to meet evolving consumer
needs
Our food system today is facing the pressure of producing about 70% more food to feed a population
that will cross 10 billion people by 2050. We need to do this with diminishing resources. Producing more
with less and ensuring the highest safety standards are key challenges facing the food and agriculture
industries to feed Asia. Three areas that can truly strengthen our food systems in Asia are trade,
technology and proftable farming.
Nearly 1 billion people worldwide already depend on trade to meet their basic food needs and to feed 10
billion people by 2050, food must move and increasingly be grown in the most efcient and sustainable
manner. There also needs to be fair and equitable rules-based systems as a world without multilateral
trade dispute resolution institutions would be a world of chaos.
Innovation can radically transform the food system. In many pockets of Asia today, technology adoption
across the food supply chain is not happening or not happening fast enough. We need to ensure that
technology is being readily deployed and adapted with the clear purpose of making the supply chain
more productive, efcient and resilient.
Agriculture today cannot exist without successful farmers. We need to make farming more proftable to
ensure a healthy fow of labour. Today’s youth is not interested in farming and with an ageing population
and rapid urbanisation, farming is losing labour at an explosive rate in Asia, as high as 2,000 per day in India.
Cargill wants to nourish the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way. We are constantly
engaging governments, farmers, NGOs and other stakeholders to fnd out the most efective ways of
meeting the demand for nutritious food in a growing world. Our hope is that this report will trigger
more conversations and dialogues around the future of food and increase collaboration within the
industry, with governments and other stakeholders to address the challenges we have today without
compromising our ability to feed future generations.
Together, we can rewrite how food is produced, traded and consumed, and feed the world in a safe,
responsible and sustainable way.
Peter Van Deursen
CEO, Asia Pacifc
Cargill
FIXING ASIA’S FOOD SYSTEM
The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 20182
Fixing Asia’s food system
In Karnataka, India, Twitter has become an unlikely battleground in the fght to secure Asia’s food
system. In May 2017, the state’s agriculture minister tweeted a cartoon of Millet Maga and Millet
Magalu—two superhero children with eye masks and capes–to urge people to buy millet, a supergrain.
Complete with its own hashtag (#LetsMillet), the campaign is part of the government’s efort to
combat stress on the country’s food system, which is facing droughts and other resource crises. Millet
requires less water than rice and ofers higher nutritional value. However, consumer tastes have
changed over the years, and millet, which was once a traditional staple, has been shunned as poor
people’s food.
So the government teamed up with large companies and research outfts to try and recreate a market
for the ancient wonder grain. Beyond social media, the campaign brought well-known chefs on board.
One, chef Ramasamy Selvaraj, from the Taj hotel chain, came up with recipes for millet-based pasta,
pizzas and even ice cream.
The campaign is just one example of recent eforts to nudge the food system towards more
sustainable and nutritious consumption. According to Shenggen Fan, director general of the
International Food Policy Research Institute, a research body, such initiatives are sorely needed to fx
Asia’s “broken” food system.
Concerns about Asia’s ability to meet its food security needs were echoed in a recent Economist
Intelligence Unit study of 820 business leaders in Asia’s food industry. According to the respondents,
90% are concerned about their local food system’s ability to meet food security needs, but only 32%
feel their organisations have the ability to determine the success of their food systems. Within this gap
is a shifting balance of responsibility between the public and private sectors, a tension that needs to
and can be strategically addressed.
The need for change
The urgency for change comes largely from the fact that Asian populations are growing, urbanising
and changing food tastes too quickly for many of the regions’ food systems to cope with. Asian cities
are dense and are expected to expand by 578m people by 2030. China, Indonesia and India will
account for three quarters of these new urban dwellers.
These urban populations will not only demand more food but also diferent varieties. People in cities
consume more convenience food in the form of either processed or ready-made food. In Asia, imports
of processed foods more than doubled to US$162bn between 2005 and 2015 as the opportunity cost
of time rose with economic development. City dwellers also tend to eat less carbohydrates and more
FIXING ASIA’S FOOD SYSTEM
The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 20183
Figure 1: Insatiable appetite
What are the biggest risks to the food system in your country today Select two.
(% respondents)
Don’t know
Lack of political will
Poor international supply chains
Non-tarrif barriers, lack of
standard harmonisation
Surveillance of diseases
Climate change adaption
Urbanisation
Lack of infrastructure
Slow adoption of new technology
Poor supply chains
Population growth
Rising demand, eg for better and
more diversied foods
Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit.
RegionalChinaIndiaIndonesia
3744.8
41.124.6
3525.9
41.142.1
2215.5
21.428.1
1920.7
2517.5
1613.8
16.121.1
1622.4
10.712.3
136.9
12.512.3
1217.2
5.410.5
1112.1
5.47
1113.8
14.38.8
83.5
7.112.3
11.7
01.8。