The U. S. Grains Council recently released a report highlighting predicted changes in food and agriculture in East Asia over the next three decades. The report, Food 2040: The Future of Food and Agriculture in East Asia comes amid a growing number of reports on the future of the world’s food supply.
The report is a based on five main areas of research: consumer trends, competitive and regulatory landscape, food technology, agriculture and food distribution and packaging, and the environment and resources. The result is a forward-looking approach at how the interacting forces of the globe will drive the food system in the coming decades. It seeks to discover how ingenuity, technology, and resilience could create positive outcomes for East Asia.
The research considers trends like a predicted era of hyper-nichification in which specialty and value-added foods dominate the East Asian market, and the projected increase in demand for food as a result of a growing middle class throughout East Asia.
Contributed by Arielle Golden, a research intern with the Nourishing the Planet project.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
