The Future of Almost Everything, page 28
China will lead the way in the large-scale introduction of green technologies over the next two decades – mainly solar and wind – partly to develop and export, as well as to improve their national environment. At the same time, other nations will criticise China as the world’s largest carbon emitter.
In order to be fair, carbon rations would have to be a fixed amount per person per year, perhaps sold on the open market as a tax on all carbon consumption, with subsidies for the poorest and most vulnerable. But such a system would mean that villagers can no longer cut their own trees to make charcoal for cooking, and would condemn the poorest nations to a relatively carbon-free existence forever.
Emerging nations will continue to insist that they should be able to have their own carbon-based ‘industrial revolutions’, and that developed nations must accept responsibility for the largest contribution to the mess the world is now in, since this has arisen mainly from their own industrial activities over the last 200 years.
It will be argued that even though the wealthiest nations have reduced their carbon emissions to some extent, they have continued to ransack the earth’s limited carbon supplies, and they therefore need to make far more radical cuts in emissions.
Food for 11 billion people
One of the greatest concerns I hear is that we will be unable to feed a world population that could reach 11 billion by 2050. The good news is that we could probably feed many more.
Food production is the world’s largest industry, worth 10% of global GDP, or around $8 trillion a year, if you include farming, food packaging, restaurants, and so on.
According to the UN, 840 million people are malnourished and often go hungry. Although this number has fallen by 160 million in 10 years, this statistic is still one of the most shameful trends in this book, particularly as it is relatively easy to deal with, when we consider the wealth and technology we have today. We will look further at the ethical implications of global hunger in the next chapter.
Today, we already grow enough food to feed 9 billion people. But we waste 40% of it, worth $3 trillion – in fields, storehouses, factories, warehouses, shops and domestic rubbish bins. With advances in agriculture, better infrastructure, larger farms, better types of crops and livestock, and less food waste, there is no doubt that we will be able to feed everyone on the earth in 50 to 100 years’ time.
We will see more genetically modified crops in many regions, with crops resistant to disease, drought, and able to grow in salty soil. Genetically modified animals will be widely consumed in over 30% of the world by 2040.
The only question is how many kilograms of meat the earth can produce, and whether most people will continue to follow a largely vegetarian diet, as is the case today. Expect a rise in the proportion of global grain production used to feed animals to more than 45% beyond 2025. Already more than 70% of grain produced by wealthy nations is fed to livestock.
So how much more meat are we talking about? In Germany, for example, people will eat an average of 1094 animals during their lifetime: 4 cows, 4 sheep, 12 geese, 37 ducks, 46 pigs, 46 turkeys, 945 chickens. Expect similar levels of meat consumption by over 4 billion people in 2040, compared to a fraction of that today.
As world population has grown, and as more wealthy people eat more meat, the total area of land being used for agriculture has doubled since 1961. But there are absolute limits on the availability of suitable land. Therefore, we can expect the price of farm land to continue to rise over the next 20 years, as it has over the last decade.
Green revolution in Africa – and China’s land grab
A number of African nations will embark on a ‘green revolution’ similar to that seen in India in the 1970s and 1980s (India’s grain production has hardly increased over the last few years). This will be accelerated by nations like China that are buying up huge areas of fertile African land to secure their national food supplies.
Over the last decade alone, 177,000 square miles of farmland has been bought in 734 deals – that’s almost the size of Spain, or Thailand – from nations such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Sudan. But nations like Ukraine are also selling. In 2013, the Chinese bought a 50-year lease for 11,500 square miles in Ukraine, 5% of the nation’s land area, equivalent in size to Belgium or the state of Massachusetts.
Two-thirds of those who are hungry are small-scale subsistence farmers living off their own patch of land, and it will be impossible to radically improve food yields across Africa without large-scale consolidation of farms, to allow mechanisation. This will be traumatic for those whose tribes have lived on that land for generations. At the other end of the scale, many areas unsuitable for large-scale farming are returning to bush as workers migrate to cities.
Growing more fish and protecting the seas
Globally 3 billion people get around 20% of their protein from fish. Demand for fish will grow faster than for meat, not only because of increasing wealth, but also in the fight against obesity and heart disease.
A third of wild fish stocks have been over-fished and 25% of all fishing is illegal or unreported. Global populations of large fish such as tuna, swordfish and marlin have fallen by over 80% over the last 60 years.
Future generations will regard the idea of feeding towns and cities on ocean fish as bizarre. They will think it even stranger if developed nations are still handing out $35bn a year in ocean fishing subsidies.
Fish farming will become a global obsession. This is potentially a great sustainability story, supporting hundreds of thousands of low-income coastal dwellers growing high protein, healthy food, and protecting wild fish stocks. But at present it takes several tons of fish from the ocean to grow a ton of fish in a fish farm. The only advantage is that fish farms can use all kinds of weird-looking creatures from the sea that consumers would not dream of eating.
Scientists will find ways to feed fish without using large amounts of other ocean fish and sea creatures. New kinds of farmed fish will be created, with genes that allow them to digest food grown on land; or crops will be altered so that the proteins they make are suitable for farmed fish.
However, we will also see growing concern about genetically altered fish escaping into the ocean, upsetting food chains and ecosystems, especially if they are ‘unnatural’ mutants, created in laboratories. It is already the case that 25% of all ‘wild’ salmon caught in Scotland have escaped from fish farms in Norway, or are descended from fish that have escaped in the past.
Future of retail food and drink industry
We have already seen how grocery and food retailing is being transformed. The retail food industry will continue to be relatively conservative and risk averse, with long-enduring and much-loved brands that span several generations – foods that grandmothers remember feeding their own children.
We have also seen how sensitive the food industry is to issues of consumer trust, which will drive the continued growth of traceability, transparency, labelling, and so on. The entire food industry will be more tightly regulated in future. We will see a new focus on the health aspects of foods; expect new performance foods with claims that they build strength, or immunity, or improve memory.
Expect a rethink about food irradiation over the next few years, as a low-cost way to ensure long shelf life without altering taste, following a wave of research that suggests it is completely safe.
We will also see many more food scandals such as happened with the contamination of rice in China, and of animal feed by dioxin in Belgium. Each will cause a huge emotional reaction in consumers, with widespread, angry boycotts. Expect improvements in animal welfare across the EU and in other nations, and an increase in animal tagging for 100% traceability.
Anti-food for fat people
We have already seen how 50% of the world will be obese by 2030. Expect a new generation of ‘safe’ slimming drugs that kill appetite or prevent food absorption, for a market that could be worth at least $10bn a year in the US alone. An example is likely to be molecules similar to the hormone thyroxine that caused monkeys to lose 7% of their weight in a week on a normal diet, with few side effects. Meanwhile the so-called Fatlash movement will grow, promoting the erroneous belief that to be fat is healthy, and fighting stigmatisation of fat people. Expect lawsuits against food companies for alleged irresponsible promotion of unhealthy food, and a direct connection to sickness or death.
Expect to see a new food industry selling anti-food, or food with absolutely no nutritional value. The first anti-food was a new fat made from molecules that the body cannot digest. This can be used in cakes, ice creams or any other food. It cooks well, but comes straight out the other end unchanged. Bowel movements become greasy. A diet rich in this anti-food can produce vitamin deficiencies, as well as creating a generation of bingeing anorexics able to consume huge plates of food yet waste away to the point of death.
It will be another irony of the third millennium: one billion starving or undernourished and millions of others using scarce resources to make food that they will waste through total excretion.
Catering for anxious eaters
Expect growth of ‘natural’ foods and ‘natural’ packaging as people begin to worry about oestrogen-like chemicals leaching out of plastic, some preferring traditional, recyclable glass containers for milk and other products.
Expect anti-additive food companies to create entire kitchen environments where nothing ‘artificial’ ever contaminates what people eat or drink. Expect new ranges of meat substitutes with the right texture and taste for some who insist on it. Expect a rash of new health scares related to vegetarian diets, such as nutritional deficiencies and worries about additives.
Expect more stampedes by consumers from one food to another, following the latest food scare. Expect an end to the worst poultry factory farms, as worries over food poisoning add another chorus to animal welfare campaigns. Expect food retailers and producers who break the rules to be ‘punished’ by increasingly militant groups, threatening boycotts and intimidation as well as shareholder action.
Most changes in the food industry will come from consumer behaviour rather than regulations. Expect confusion over what is safe and unsafe. Millions fled from drinking ‘disgusting’ tap water only to find that the bottled water they bought at high cost had higher levels of bacteria, was impossible to differentiate from the tap in blind testing studies and, what’s more, was contaminated by pollutants from storage in plastic bottles. Expect carbon/transport taxes on bottled water imported from other nations, targeting premium brands.
Global sales of vitamins will continue to see spectacular growth, although controversy will rage over what doses should be taken by whom – or even if they should be taken at all.
Vegetarians and semi-vegetarians look for new products
The broader vegetarian market will grow from 5% to 30% of the US population by 2025, if you include people who eat meat occasionally, and millions of others who choose to eat far less meat than today. Red, fatty meat will be less popular, because of worries about bowel cancer and heart disease. In Britain, 40% of people often eat vegetarian foods as a conscious alternative to eating a meal containing meat or fish, ten times the number of strict vegetarians, and the industry is worth more than £1 billion a year.
Expect fast growth for certain ‘veggie’ products. For example, sales of vegetarian grills and burgers increased by 139% in 5 years in the UK, as technology and taste have improved. Expect new meat substitutes – meat-like substances made from wheat gluten and pea protein with the bite, character, flavour and look of meat. Their growth in market share will be modest, however.
Expect a gradual fall in resistance in many nations other than the US to genetically modified food, particularly in France, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Luxembourg, Poland and Bulgaria – while Germany will remain more cautious.
Huge consolidation in drinks market
Expect huge changes in the drinks industry over the next three decades as hundreds of millions of consumers shift away from carbonated sugary beverages to fruit juices and then to bottled water, for health reasons. We will see more research showing that diet drinks also carry health risks, stimulating release of insulin, with increased risk of heart attack and diabetes.
Radical changes to work patterns
In some way or another, every trend described in this book will affect many people’s workplaces directly or indirectly. Our future is of course all about people, at work or at home. But here are some wider workplace issues which will radically change several billion lives between now and 2050.
Many predictions have been made about the ‘end of work’, as we know it. Some say that most manual jobs will disappear, creating a huge underclass of unemployable people; most office jobs will also be automated; a high proportion of managers will work at home; many domestic chores will be done by robots who will also care for the frail and elderly; most manufacturing jobs will be lost to Asia, together with many service jobs such as banking, call centres and software development. This all makes for good stories in the press, but the reality of all this will be less dramatic over the next 25 years, even though we can expect many radical changes in the patterns of jobs that people do.
While it is true that hundreds of millions of jobs will disappear, many more will be created, as we will see. The most radical shifts in employment patterns will be in emerging nations, mainly related to urban migrations from rural areas.
As we have seen throughout this book, trends often balance each other out, and this balancing also applies in general terms to the job market. Here is an example: an economy sinks into crisis, the exchange rate collapses, and cost of labour falls on the international market. That means export prices also fall, then sales rise, jobs recover, the economy recovers, the exchange rate recovers.
Job creation in nations with high unemployment
During the 2008–2013 crisis, unemployment rates among young people rose to above 40% in parts of Spain and Italy, with people warning of a lost generation. Any nation with high unemployment rates will eventually see an adjustment, as local wages fall, because so many workers are chasing so few jobs. Things will then become more balanced again. And that is what Spain was already beginning to experience by 2015. Italy is likely to follow.
So where will new jobs come from? Many in developed nations will be in service and support roles for middle-class consumers. Homes will be redecorated more often, lawns will be mown more regularly, people will have their hair styled more frequently. An example in the UK is the boom in car valeting by hand and the death of cheap, car-washing robots in garages. As Parkinson’s famous law states: ‘work always expands to fill the time available’.
More women workers and part-timers in the UK
The real key to economic growth is the number of people in work, and in many nations, that number has soared, while the number out of work has also risen. Why is this, and what will happen in future?
More women are entering the workplace; more people who were not working are now working part-time; older people are working longer before they retire; students are working to pay for their courses; and more people are migrating into the country looking for work. So the most important indicator in future will not be numbers looking for work, but the growing numbers of people who have a job.
Insatiable demand to create more jobs
So what kind of jobs will be needed in future, to absorb all of these people, assuming they have the right skills? For a start, as anyone in government will tell you, there is an almost insatiable desire by the public in most nations for better public services.
That means more doctors, nurses, teachers, street cleaners, police, gardeners in parks, tree planters, graffiti cleaners, home carers, therapists, family support workers, counsellors, advisors, mentors, and so on.
And one of the main reasons all those jobs are not created is because of budget, which is in turn limited by what people are prepared to pay in taxes, and by the size of the economy in general.
Yet the strange thing is that in the very same nation you may have several million people on benefits of some kind, who would love to have a job. It’s all a question of pay scales, benefit structures, incentives and fairness. So there will be plenty of work to do in tomorrow’s world, and there will also be plenty of ‘paid’ workers in developed nations to do it. The problem will often be a structural one within society itself.
At the same time, as we will see in the next chapter, most people in the UK gladly volunteer to give their time at some point in their lives, for no financial reward, to do some of the tasks listed above. Yet if they are on benefits, in many parts of the world it becomes more complicated for them to do such voluntary work.
Internships as fast track to a great job
Expect sharper debate about the real value of training – university, apprenticeships, internships, second degrees, MBAs, and so on. One thing is certain: while business schools will continue to try to justify expensive MBAs, the fast-track route into many companies will be internships. In the US 63% of students already complete at least one internship before qualifying.
Why offices have a great future
As we saw in Chapter 3, just as with cities, the future is bright for offices. Teams love being together as tribes, breathing the same air, and video calls are no substitute for face-to-face trust-building.
Expect radical changes in how offices are used. Office space per worker has already fallen by 35% in 15 years, and will fall a further 25–30% in the next 15, with more hot-desking and partial homeworking, and very few workers using fixed desktop computers. And it is true that more informal meetings will be in coffee shops. But most major company activities over the next two decades will be via face-to-face meetings at offices, in most parts of the world.
Expect more corporations to completely outsource the management of their offices. Typical contracts for large banks or retail chains will be worth over $1bn a year. Facilities management will dominate hotels, manufacturers, airports, schools, hospitals and prisons as well as offices.
