Barnard Cautions Against Ag Hype

In Darwin last week, Peter Barnard softened up the live export industry with honeyed words about its competitiveness – but then socked home the message that its market is built on uncertain ground.

“One of the things I’m worried about is the enormous hype that now exists over agriculture generally, and Australian agriculture in particular,” Dr Barnard told the LIVEXchange conference.

There is a prevailing belief, the veteran meat industry economist said, “that agriculture represents a path to riches”.

“There seems to be a belief that all we have to do is produce more food, and the world will buy it, and the world will buy it at higher prices.”

The “sober facts”, according to Dr Barnard, a director of consultancy Oliver & Doam, is that the growth in global demand for food is slowing.

From 1960-90, annual compound growth in world food demand exceeded two per cent. It is now about 1.2 per cent. Growth is projected to fall to one per cent from 2020, and less than one per cent from 2030.

One obvious driver: population growth is slowing dramatically. In the 25 years from 1950-1975, the global population grew by 62 per cent. From 2025-2050, it will grow at about 29 per cent, in part because of the delayed fuse of China’s now-abandoned one child policy.

At the same time, world gross domestic production (GDP) is slowing. That’s particularly true of the Asian economic powerhouses, which pushed their GDPs to unsustainable highs in the last decade.

Put these trends together with growth in farm productivity, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) 2007 forecast that the world would need food production to increase by 70 per cent by 2050 looks “easily achievable”, Dr Barnard observed.

“Without allocating an extra hectare of the world’s land to agricultural production, all that’s required to meet that 70pc target is about 1pc growth in productivity per year.”

“Historically, we’ve been well in excess of 1pc – that’s why real prices for agricultural products have declined over time.”

Growth in agricultural productivity is slowing in the developed world, notably in Australia, but it isn’t slowing in the developing world. “And that’s the key issue”.

“I don’t want to pour too much cold water on the hype, but I think at the very least, some caution is warranted.”

Other nations are responding to the golden promise of emerging Asia, and they have more capacity to respond.

As former JBS Australia chief executive Iain Mars told LIVEXchange, Brazil’s physical capacity to capitalise on global beef demand dwarfs the Australian industry.

Brazil’s herd of 214 million cattle, nearly 10 times the size of the Australian herd, will in the next two years grow by about 12 million head – nearly half the total size of the Australian herd.

A lot of that new capacity will end up on ships aimed at markets dear to Australia.

Mr Mars, now chief operating officer of Minerva Foods, Brazil’s second-largest beef processor after JBS, pointed out that Brazilian beef exports are growing at exponential rates, especially in Asia.

In 2007, Asia took about six per cent of Brazilian beef exports. Last month, that figure had leapt to 40 per cent.

Australia has been able to relax about Brazil’s beef export capacity over the past decade because disease issues have locked the South American behemoth out of more than half of the world’s beef markets.

Mr Mars said that too is changing fast.

Saudi Arabia has just reopened its trade doors to Brazilian beef, and a vigorous campaign to open up countries like the United States and Japan could soon give Brazil access to threequarters of the world’s beef markets. More access would inevitably follow.