Africa’s Foreign Land Resource Challenge

Adding to the increasing focus on key future resource shortages, this article  in today’s Observer highlights how more African land is being acquired and leased by multiple external companies for the future. Adding to the previously covered reversal of South Korean Daewoo’s deal with Madagascar for 1.2m hectares (half the country’s arable land), John Vidal lists some of the main deals already in place including a contract between China and the Democratic Republic of Congo to grow 2.8m hectares of palm oil for biofuels and additional 3.9m hectares acquired by European biofuel companies. Right now, an extra 17.5m hectares of land are needed to hit the EU target to have 10% of fuel from biofuels by 2015. Much of this is likely to be outside the EU.
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Popularity: 4% [?]

Migration Magnets

As fertility rates continue to drop, dependency ratios accelerate and the desire for sustained economic growth continues in many developed countries, migration will be increasingly seen in a positive economic light. As such countries will increasingly compete for the migrants they need. Whereas today there are just a few nations such as Canada and New Zealand that are actively and openly seen to encourage immigration, over the next decade these will be joined by such countries as Japan, much of Western Europe and maybe even the US.
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Popularity: 26% [?]

Taxing Meat

One issue raised at this week’s Barcelona workshop was that we can see a probable need for the introduction of systemic solutions to reduce meat consumption. Not only does meat require more resources (land, water, animal feed) than any other food, but there are also multiple healthy alternatives to daily meat consumption. Added to this, as more economies develop and rise up the protein ladder, it is clear that having 5bn, let alone 9bn, people migrate to a meat based diet is unsustainable. As such why not introduce a meat tax to make it a premium food and so decrease consumption?
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Popularity: 42% [?]

Future Impact of Diabetes – Killing the US Economy

Good article on Forbes.com about the impact of diabetes referring to recent study from the University of Chicago. This ‘estimates’ that by 2034, 44m of Americans will have diabetes – largely as a consequence of the obesity epidemic. The cost of this to the economy will be $336bn!

Already labelled a public health crisis by the American Diabetes Association, the article quotes Dr Elbert Huang, the study co-author, as such:

“We are going to be faced with some enormous public health and financial challenges in taking care of this aging population with multiple chronic diseases”

The solution? Expensive and complicated – better glucose monitoring and new insulin delivery systems.

Popularity: 57% [?]

End of Chimerica

Linking across numerous topics from a future influence perspective, but also with specific influence to the future of currency, a new working paper from HBS is well worth a look. It compares the current US / China relationship with the previous export led rise of Germany and Japan. As one would expect, Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularisk have some useful comments to add to the mix.

Some key points include the following:

“Like many another marriage between a saver and a spender, Chimerica was not destined to last. We believe that the financial and economic crisis of 2007-9 has put the marriage on the rocks. The reduction in the imbalance between the United States and China – in short the dissolution of Chimerica – is now indispensable if equilibrium is to be restored to the world economy.”

“The financial crisis of 2007-2009 marks the beginning of the end of the Chimerican relationship. First, the Chinese authorities understand that heavily indebted American consumers cannot be relied upon to return as buyers of Chinese goods on the scale of the period up to 2007. Second, the Chinese dislike their exposure to the U.S. dollar in the form of close to two trillions of USD-denominated reserve assets.”

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Popularity: 66% [?]

More on Urban Farms

Adding to the debate on cities and food and the recent comments about vertical farms, of all places, Fortune magazine has a relevant article that is getting a lot of coverage.  In the current edition, there is a piece on Detroit and the potential to be gained in the near future from turning most of it over to food production. Some relevant numbers here –At 139 square miles, Detroit is three times the size of Boston and San Francisco and over five times Manhattan. But, as the car industry has scaled down, the population of Detroit has fallen from 1.5m in 1970 to around 800,000 today. As a consequence the cost of an acre of land in Detroit is now $3000 – Compare that to $4500 an acre for farmland in Iowa. So, the article suggests, why not turn Detroit into an efficient urban farm?
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Popularity: 70% [?]

Future of Clean Shipping

In the future of transport and energy debates, one of the increasingly popular targets for several commentators is the carbon emissions associated with shipping. While aviation and road transport have been the traditional areas of focus, as global shipping continues to rise, more and more attention is being paid to the associated challenges. The boarder opportunity for green / clean shipping – or environmentally enhanced shipping – is becoming a hot topic in itself. As one example, this Clean Shipping project in Sweden has been focused on reducing chemical / pollutant use.

 

In the specific arena of carbon emissions, there has been a growing focus on ships. For example, there is this sort of EU project focused on efficiency and emissions and concerns about future emission regulation as explained in this pre-Copenhagen article on Lloyds List. This article in the Guardian from 2008 quoted a UN report that annual emissions from the world’s merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO₂, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions of the main greenhouse gas – and twice that of the aviation industry. So what is the real story?
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Popularity: 80% [?]

People Tracking

When in 2004 the notion was shared that people could be tracked by their mobile phones – even when they are turned off – many who had not been watching 24 were a little surprised. Equally around the same time, when Hertz started using GPS to track where hire cars were driven, and into which states, some customers found this level of monitoring to be both unexpected and hence unacceptable. However, Aviva found that customers were not ready for Pay-as-you-Drive insurance.

 

Five years later, knowing where you (or others) are by your mobile phone has become as commonplace as GPS tracking of vehicles. Google’s Latitude app launched last year allows you to see where your mates are, Mobile Suica are commonplace in Japan and fast evolving into mobile tracking and payments, personal tracking services are burgeoning (Trackaphone, Mapamobile, IKids etc)and location based marketing services are finally coming into the mass market – for everyone from diabetes patients and Starbucks customers. The ‘future world’ of just five years ago is pretty well here today: Hospitals tag babies, and facial recognition systems are integrated into many CCTV systems so to track individuals; while RFID tags are finally providing a whole additional layer of data and surveillance options. So what comes next?
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Popularity: 86% [?]

Vertical Urban Farms

As the dual challenges and increasing urban populations and food security / supply align with the desire to minimise transportation costs and impacts for foods, one possibility for the future that is gaining increasing attention is that of vertical urban farms. Having been discussed for a few years now, many see that the time for the first prototypes at scale in on the horizon and, that be 2020, vertical farms will be a common feature in many urban environments.

 
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Popularity: 86% [?]

Mega-City Markets

One issue anticipated in the FMCG world of global brands and local varieties is a shift over the next decade in the role of mega-cities as discrete markets. Today, most multinational companies still consider their markets by national or regional boundaries – e.g. Turkey, Canada or EMEA. However with ever increasing urbanisation and more emerging mega-cities, some are starting to see that the global shift in population and economic wealth is fast creating a different focus. Given that there is more in common between many residents of Shanghai and those in New York, Mumbai and Tokyo that between residents of Shanghai and the rural Chinese population or the residents of New York and people in Montana, several companies are looking to follow other’s initial forays into creating products that are targeted solely at urban populations. While Metro, the largest and fastest growing free newspaper, is now available in 56 cities in 18 countries and has therefore become a lead signpost in this area, there are a number of other ‘city only’ products and services already on the radar – streetcar and Coca Cola’s Full Throttle energy drink are two other well recognised ones.

 
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Popularity: 85% [?]