The future will therefore hold many more people with a lot more money to spend than today. Generally, increased purchasing power leads to increased consumption of fish, meat, eggs and milk.

The forecast is that worldwide demand for meat will have doubled by 2050, and half of that demand will come from East and South Asia.

On 6 April 2011, Watt Publishers organised an Internet Forum about the obvious question: how to feed the globe? One of the presentations there addressed the question what animal breeding (cattle, pigs, poultry) can contribute to the solutions.

Dr Pieter Knap of PIC described realized genetic improvement in production traits and in fitness traits, sketched the historic development of animal breeding goals, discussed ways to overcome genetic antagonisms and genotype by environment interaction, and ventured a forecast of how much genetic potential is still unexploited by current technologies.

To see Dr Knap's presentation please click here.