1.3 billion mouths to feed

This is something I’ve been mulling over for a looooong time, and it actually started when I saw an episode of the show The Nature of Things (from which I plagiarized the name of this blog).

That TV show laid out the consequences of an idea the Chinese government had: increasing the amount of protein the Chinese eat. Doing it with meat is, of course, extremely expensive, so the proposal was to give every Chinese person a couple of eggs a week.

China’s population is currently about **1,307,842,645 **(see http://www.cpirc.org.cn/en/eindex.htm).

Let’s do the monthly math: **8 * 1,307,842,645 = 10,462,741,160 **eggs a month!

If you run the numbers, you’ll find that reaching that laudable goal of 2 eggs a week for every Chinese person takes 26% of the world’s wheat production!!

Running the numbers

Well, hens lay one egg a day.
So we need 1 hen to feed about 3.75 Chinese people a month. We round down to 3, because we have to leave some eggs to produce more hens, so we only need 1,307,842,645 / 3 hens, that is, 435,947,548. Phew, good thing, that’s not so many hens….

But wait, how many hens are there in the world?

About 4,500,000,000 hens, so there are 10 times more in the world than we need. Of those, the Chinese have 800,000,000 hens.

But how much does it cost to feed those hens?

70% of the cost goes into feeding the hens; it is estimated that a hen eats about 0.13 kg of grain a day.

So to feed the 800,000,000 hens for a month you need: 300.13800,000,000 kg of grain, that is, 12,168,000,000 kg, or 12,168,000 tons, 12.168 million metric tons of wheat!! And over a year you would need 146 million tons of wheat!!

World wheat production is about 550 million tons a year, so the needs of the Chinese hens come to 26.54% of world production!!

In fact, China produces 119.76 million tons of wheat a year.

But it’s interesting to note that if we wanted to pull off that feat we would have to use twice the wheat production of the United States, or of India, and some 5 to 6 times the wheat production of Canada (home of the TV show I mentioned).

Of course, the Chinese don’t use all their wheat to feed their hens; a hen’s diet is more varied than just grains of wheat, it gets mixed with other ingredients.

But this exercise helps you grasp the proportions of just how gigantic China is and its impact on the world economy, and even other effects, like the impact of bird flu and others.

What do you think?

You discover interesting things when you use your head a little to think….