India to invest in the clean meat R&D sector
The Indian government looks interested in developing new technologies for the food industry. As a result, New Delhi officials are investing in research and development of cultivated meat, also known as “clean meat”.
A new research facility is to be built in Maharashtra as the result of a partnership between the government-funded Institute of Chemical Technology Mumbai and The Good Food Institute India. The second institute will be located in Hyderabad and will be subsidized with over $640,000 from the government-funded Department of Biotechnology to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and the National Research Centre on Meat.
This represents the largest ever investment in cell-based meat by a state government to support global food security research in the face of a growing world population. India itself currently has a rapidly-growing population of about 1.34 billion people, giving it a strong incentive to promote research into laboratory-grown foods in order to provide sufficient quantities of protein-based foods to its own population.
India is believed to be a country with a high rate of vegetarians but this is almost a myth. In reality, people are having their meat intake in small portions but that is about to change in medium-term as more and more people are consuming meat due to rising household incomes.
According to Data Baaz statistics, 71% (+900 million people) are meat eaters. Still, the country has the lowest meat consumption per capita in the world: 3.4 kilos. 65% of the animal protein consumed in India is poultry. In the next 8 years, analysts predict an increase of 13% in meat consumption in India.
Nevertheless, scarce resources of water are becoming a problem for animal farmers in this part of the world and clean-meat can represent a viable solution.
According to The Good Food Institute, public-private partnerships should be able to counteract this and promote research in this field. The Good Food Institute believes that cell-based meat products could soon be available at affordable prices for consumers in India and beyond. Projections made by the Good Food Institute show that, over the past ten years, investors have spent a total of more than 16 billion US dollars on companies producing plant-based and laboratory-cultivated meat alternatives, of which 13 billion US dollars alone was spent between 2017 and 2018. "For every dollar we currently invest in agricultural research, a total of 20 US dollars in profits will be made. In my opinion, it would be realistic to predict that cultivated meat could be even more profitable", explained Jessica Almy of The Good Food Institute for Vegconomist magazine.
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