EA - Ticking Clock: The Rapid Rise of Farmed Animals in Africa by AnimalAdvocacyAfrica

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ticking Clock: The Rapid Rise of Farmed Animals in Africa, published by AnimalAdvocacyAfrica on September 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.As humanity continues its era of rapid population growth and rising economic prosperity, the demand for animal protein is anticipated to reach unparalleled heights. This surge in consumption is set to drastically impact the lives of farmed animals worldwide. Nowhere is this growth more pronounced than in Africa.The evidencePreviously, our anticipation of Africa's sharp increase in livestock numbers was primarily grounded in the historical global expansion of farmed animal populations over the past decades, coupled with human population growth trends across the African continent. This post, however, delves into the specific projections of farmed animal numbers and animal farming intensification from 2012 to 2050, as outlined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which is based on many more factors than just historical changes in animal agriculture and human population growth, providing us with more detailed estimates than previously available. If not stated otherwise, all figures named in this blog post refer to these projections, which can be found here.The FAO's projections encompass a range of future scenarios, including both a "business as usual" model and a "towards sustainability" model. For the scope of this post, we focus on the "business as usual" projection, which assumes the absence of any significant efforts to reduce the extent of factory farming. This allows us to explore the potential ramifications of the current trajectory of animal agriculture. Notably, even upon considering the projections from the "towards sustainability" model, the prospects for Africa remain largely unaltered. In contrast, for all other continents, we can observe a noticeable reduction in farmed animal numbers in comparison to the "business as usual" model. Although far from certain, this may indicate that the FAO assumes that growth in animal agriculture in Africa is close to unavoidable or that nothing will be done to hinder its growth.The FAO provides data for farmed land animals, including cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, poultry, and buffaloes, but omits figures for other mammals, such as rabbits, horses, and dogs, as well as insects, fish, and seafood. This exclusion is noteworthy since the protein yield from smaller animals demands significantly greater numbers of individual animals per kilogram in contrast to large mammals like cows and pigs. Thus, while the analysis below offers crucial insights, it only represents a fraction of future developments.Africa in global comparisonAccording to the FAO's projections, the number of farmed land animals in Africa is anticipated to experience a remarkable surge in the coming decades. As shown in the graph below, the population of farmed land animals for the entire continent of Africa will rise from around 2.6 billion in 2012 to around 9.4 billion in 2050, an increase of 262%. Consequently, Africa would surpass all other global regions in terms of the total size of farmed animal populations by 2050, except for Asia, and reach roughly twice the total number of animals of other regions like Europe or North America.At present, Asia leads and will continue to lead all continents in terms of the total number of farmed land animals. This can largely be attributed to factory farming in China, Indonesia, and India. Nevertheless, Africa's livestock numbers are expected to increase by a much larger absolute number and at a higher rate than Asia's projected 26% rise from 2012 to 2050.Note that these numbers (along with all following numbers in this post) refer to the count of live animals at a given time in a year, which is not to be confused but should be highly c...