THE date Oct 16 marks World Food Day, for which the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has this year chosen the theme “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” This points to a stark truth: the way we produce protein is colliding with the limits of land, water, climate and public health. Asia sits at the centre of that collision.
In 2025, 645 million people went hungry, 292 million of them in Asia. At the same time, diet-related non-communicable diseases in Asia are peaking.
Yet the system that is failing people is far from lean. Livestock occupies about 77 per cent of the world’s farmland but supplies only 18 per cent of its calories and 37 per cent of its protein, indicated online publication Our World in Data. The FAO noted that agriculture accounts for around 70 per cent of global freshwater withdrawals.