Population growth, opportunities and challenges in China and a growing middle class are among the trends that economist Brett Stuart expects to shape global demand for food in the years to come.

“Productivity is key and free markets are key” to pursuing the opportunities and meeting the challenges, said Stuart, Global AgriTrends co-founder. “We will figure this out with free markets.”

Global dynamics will ensure growing demand ahead for global food producers, he told Idaho Farm Bureau members.

Productivity and total production capacity are sufficient to feed a world population that is adding about 70 million people a year, though hunger and food insecurity persist due to factors such as politics and wars, Stuart said.

“We’re on a pretty good trajectory, and it’s all about productivity,” he said.

Output will increase through efficiency gains, he said.

For example, the U.S. and Europe have 21% of the world’s dairy cows and produce 38% of the milk, Stuart said. Brazil, India and China have 60% of the cows and produce 42% of the milk.

“If we spread that productivity around the world, we can be swimming in milk pretty easily,” he said.

However, productivity is “the enemy of profitability,” he warned.

U.S. agricultural commodities are typically the cheapest on earth, he said. “We are the low-cost producer.” 

A growing middle class will increase demand for foods beyond the basics, he said. The global middle class in 2030 is expected to be 145% bigger than it was in 2014, he said.

Meat and poultry production will have to increase at faster rates in the next decade to keep up, Stuart said.

“There are opportunities all over” including a large and growing market for packaged foods in China, he said.

China’s economy will remain subdued, but the country continues to have a large population of consumers who need food and food products, Stuart said. A large pork consumer historically, China is now the biggest beef importer by a wide margin.

Beef demand “has absolutely exploded in China,” he said.

China is buying more commodities from Brazil “because of the political friction they have with America,” Stuart said. But China remains a “massive buyer of U.S. agriculture.”

Traditionally yield-driven, agriculture now has lower-yielding segments such as organic and all-natural. This is reconciled by letting people “vote with their dollars” and pay higher prices if they wish, he said.

A challenge is that “we’ve got a lot of noise in the market” by well-funded activist groups “trying to reduce choice,” said Stuart, who is based in Preston, Idaho. “They do not want to have to compete with conventional agriculture.”

Partly because 84% of the world’s population lives in developing countries, “we should never legislate yield-reducing practices,” he said. “We’ve got to feed the world.”

And with almost 1 billion food-insecure people, “we do not want to raise the cost of food,” Stuart said. “So conventional agriculture has its place, and everything has its place.”