Water the key to Food Security in Asia

FOOD SECURITY is not about increasing production, says Werner Bauer, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Nestlé Deutscheland AG. “We do not have to produce more,” he says. “In reality, we have to use what we already produce more efficiently. This is the biggest battle for the years to come” . . . 

Water, or the lack of it, will determine how Asia and the world feed the growing population, says Werner Bauer, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Nestlé Deutschland AG.
According to the latest United Nations’ forecast, released in June, the world’s population will increase by one billion over the next 12 years — reaching 9.6 billion by 2050.
“The food discussion for me — and for Nestlé — is linked to the water used to produce food,” says Werner Bauer, who, until August, was the food giant’s Chief Technology Officer, with oversight of innovation, technology and R&D, including 34 research and development centres around the globe.
“If you think of water efficiency in producing one kilogram of meat, then you know you cannot feed the whole world on meat protein alone,” says Bauer. “The water footprint for vegetable-based protein is a tenth of meat protein. Increasingly, it will be more difficult to continue to produce meat — and the global fish stock is being depleted.”
Bauer, who has spent 23 years with Nestle’ working in research and development, says vegetable proteins can replace protein from meat or fish, and that current research and development in the food industry is focussed on transforming vegetable proteins, extracted from pea, wheat and so on, into food with the taste and texture of meat.
(Water preservation is a key policy of the 140-year-old Nestle’, which had global sales of almost US$100 billion last year. Over the past decade, it has halved water use per tonne of product. Nestle’ says water withdrawal was down 29 per cent between 2002 and 2012, while production went up by more than 70 per cent. “In future, vegetable proteins will play a much bigger role, and that is where technology will come in to create the texture, taste and flavours to resemble meat,” says Bauer.
“We have oodles of vegetable proteins of the highest quality which are not used today. One plant — quinoa — is a miracle. It can deliver all the amino acids that the human body needs. In quinoa, nature has given us all the tools and all the possibilities of proper nourishment. We just have to use it properly.”
He adds: “You can have hamburgers and everything made out of vegetable protein and they taste fantastic. Nestle is producing food like schnitzel made of vegetable protein. You would be amazed how much it tastes like schnitzel.”
(Taiwan is producing a range of food simulating the taste and smell of chicken, fish, and mutton from vegetable proteins for Asian vegans. It is said that one in 10 Taiwanese follows a vegetarian diet some of the time.)
Bauer will not mourn the day when meat protein disappears, because future generations will eat healthier food. “In future, researchers will look hard at how the body and nutrition interacts. I’m not talking about personalised nutrition, but generally about how malnutrition and diseases can be avoided.”
He explains that, with the diagnostics available today, scientists are getting a better understanding of how illnesses like diabetes, Crohne’s disease and cancer occur and how to manage them.
In many metabolic disorders, like Phenylketonuria (PKU), he says, research shows that the right balance of amino acids is needed to manage the disease.“We are also starting to study the science of nutrition, and how it can be used to control medical conditions like diabetes or obesity through specific nutrients in food,” he says.
“It is still difficult to prove this.  Nestlé has created its Institute of Health Sciences, where we are doing research on how to influence and prevent disease through food.”  While he believes food can help play a preventative role, he says it will take a long time to prove this. “Studies have shown that food can have a direct specific impact with the brain. This is a whole new story for the future.”
Bauer says traditional Chinese medicine, said to have a preventative impact on the body, should also be looked at more closely.
A new look at food, beyond the normal fuel for energy, is happening at the production level. “As a company, we have started many projects, especially in Africa, where we work on restoring micro-nutrients in food. We grow cassava, which is naturally enriched in vitamin A and minerals. With that, we can tackle one of the biggest issues in the world — malnutrition — lack of iron, zinc and Vitamin A.
“The banana you buy today is devoid of micro-nutrients. Certain varieties of bananas, grown naturally in the wild, are full of vitamin A and everything else that a child needs. We can solve a lot of health problems by simply going back to basics.
“The four basic micro-nutrients needed for healthy children are iron, iodine, vitamin A and zinc. When girls, lacking in these minerals and vitamins, get pregnant, their deficiencies will affect their babies. So it can become an inter-generational problem.”
Bauer says nutrition is more than nourishment of the human body with calories. Nutrition has a role in the prevention of disease, but this has not sunk in yet in current research and development in universities — or in the food industry. “It is our next battlefield,” he says.
The food industry must also respond to the needs of the world’s ageing demographics, he adds.  Some 20 per cent of the world’s population is already over 60 years of ago. “Our industry has to react to the trend and look at food from the perspective of the old.
“First, we have to produce nutritionally-complete foods for the aged. They eat less and, at that age, they need more basic nutrients to avoid problems like osteoporosis.”
Bauer says calories alone do not replace nutrients needed to keep old people healthy. In fact, many of the aged suffer from malnutrition.
Bauer envisages the day when something like an espresso machine can be invented to process food, like a highly nutritional soup with the appropriate taste, for elderly people. Food has to be easily swallowed because the incidence of dysphagia (swallowing disorder) increases with age. He expects a whole industry to emerge to support the ageing population.
The food industry today, he says, is wedded to what he calls the “classic approach” — feeding the world based on calories. This works on the basis that the world population is seven billion, and that therefore it requires 14 trillion kilo-calories each day – 2,000 calories for each person.“Calorific supply is only an issue in under-nourished countries,” he says. “And even in cases of malnourishment, the problem is not lack of calories. It is deficiency in the necessary vitamins and minerals.
“Over the past 10 years, we have had major programmes in our R&D to lower the calorific density of our products while keeping high nutritional levels. We serve 160 billion food portions each year in Latin America and Africa fortified with the four critical micro-nutrients.”   
In what he describes as a “calorie-dense” world, Bauer says the unintended consequence is “the obesity tragedy” in developed nations.
This leads him to another serious concern — food wastage in developed countries because food has become cheap and over-abundant.
He says that, in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, 30 per cent of all food is thrown away because of (short) shelf life and portion sizes. Some US$50 billion worth of food is thrown away each year worldwide.
“Future generations will have to work on issues such as post-harvest technology, where you think about how much raw food material is lost on the field through poor logistics on the path to the factories, on the plate and off the plate. It is a tremendous amount.
“As someone who has been involved with food R&D and innovation for 30 years, this (food wastage) has become one of our biggest challenges. I don’t see many technologies developed in the past three years which would reduce this wastage.”
In developing countries, half of the harvest is lost post-harvest through lack of distribution and poor storage. India has enormous wastage, he says. Overall, the United Nations talks about roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption worldwide being lost through spoilage.
“We are talking about 1.3 billion tonnes of food which is lost or wasted. This is a dramatic number. When we talk about food security, it is not about increasing production. We do not have to produce more. In reality, we have to use what we already produce more efficiently. This is the biggest battle for the years to come.
“The problem differs from country to country depending on the degree of urbanisation. When you have urbanisation as in Mexico or India, you get a further problem of food being produced away from where the population sits. Either the logistics do not work properly or post-harvest preservation technology is not available.”
Reflecting on the biggest innovations in the food sector, Bauer says technology has changed dramatically when it comes to preservation technology. “The biggest invention is clearly aseptic technology. It allows us to preserve foods of all kinds — to retain vitamins and all nutrients. It has allowed us to detect and destroy (harmful) micro-organisms.”
Bauer has also noticed how taste has changed over time, pointing to what used to be the extreme taste of foods like Korean kimchi (preserved cabbage), which have “smoothed” over time. “I come from Bavaria in Germany, which had the same sort of extreme fermentation methods.”
Based on trends in taste in recent decades, Bauer believes the world will have a more homogenised taste in food 100 years from now.
The food industry itself will continue to evolve, he says. He recalls that when he joined Nestlé, it was the largest producer of French fries and tomato ketchup. “We sold off that business as it did not fit with our nutrition strategy for the future.
“I mention this to show you how a company can transform from primary agro processor to nutrition house with clinical nutrition for premature babies and the aged and sick. This is part of our personalised approach to the needs of people — which I think is the most.