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“The daily supply of protein needed to feed this planet on a per-person basis is about 83 grams per person. Now that’s what is being consumed, that’s what’s basically needed on the supply side,” said Marshall. “So that means, across the whole planet, every day, we need just over 660 billion grams of protein.”

For those who avoid the metric system, that many grams is almost one-anda-half billion pounds of protein, animal and vegetable. Marshall, during an interview for a story in the magazine American Soybean, looked ahead to the year 2050, when, if the current growth trend continues, the globe’s population will have swollen by another 20 percent. “That means,” he said, “that supply share is going to grow by another nearly 150 billion grams of protein daily.” That brings us to more than 888,000 tons of daily global protein demand by 2050. Back to the present, Marshall says the war in Ukraine and other geopolitical issues have resulted in the number of food-insecure people climbing to 1.6 billion globally. The implication is that responsibility is increasing on able counties to be food suppliers for those countries that are less able to produce enough food to feed themselves.