However, it does not represent a major threat to world food markets. With a population of 930 million in 1995, India is the second most populous country in the world after China. Like China during the late 1970s and early 1980s, India is in the midst of major economic reform. If it succeeds, incomes in India will rise much faster than they have in recent decades, with profound effects on food demand and food security. As incomes increase, the question is whether Indians will greatly increase their consumption of livestock products, or will they remain more or less vegetarian, as India's history and cultural traditions would suggest.
Views are mixed.
Given the extremely low initial levels of livestock consumption in India, rapid growth in absolute demand for livestock would require a dramatic change in eating patterns. In a scenario modeling the effect of such a change in Indian diets, India's demand for meat products is forecast to increase almost 10-fold from 3.8 million tons in 1993 to 36.4 million tons in 2020. This increase in demand would have to be met through trade, as meat production is not projected to increase beyond the 8.5 million tons shown in the baseline scenario for 2020. India's projected net meat imports of 28 million tons under this scenario are a far cry from the less than 0.5 million tons forecast in the baseline scenario. This increase in Indian net imports would increase world meat prices by 21 percent in 2020 relative to the baseline scenario and by 13 percent relative to 1993.