Only Rich Will Eat Beef in 2050

Production costs could make it the 'caviar of the future'
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 30, 2010 4:42 PM CDT
Updated Oct 3, 2010 4:00 PM CDT
Only Rich Will Eat Beef in 2050
This is an undated Guinness World Records handout photo made available Thursday Sept. 16, 2010 of Swallow, right, an 11-year-old cow from Yorkshire posing next to Freddie the bull.   (AP Photo/Ranald MacKechnie/Guinness World Records, Ho)

You might want to have a hamburger while you can—beef is likely to become as pricey and exclusive as caviar over the next 40 years, predicts a UN agriculture expert. The production costs of raising cows, especially for water, are just too high to accommodate inexorable rises in world population and the hunger for beef, said Henning Steinfeld of the Food and Agriculture Organization.

By 2050, beef will cease to be a "mass product" and could become "the caviar of the future," he told a conference in Argentina. “The necessary resources for the production of beef will be three, four, five times higher than those of chicken and pork.” As a result, "beef will be what salmon was 50 years ago." Details at MercoPress and UPI.
(More beef stories.)

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