As the world prepares to house, feed and care for 9.7 billion people, Ahead of the Herd founder Rick Mills is looking for the companies that will profit from the silent tsunami of demand creeping up on resource and healthcare providers. In this interview with The Gold Report, Mills reveals the six companies he thinks are well positioned in their respective sectors to ride this population wave to profits.
The Gold Report: What does the United Nations (U.N.) projection of a population tsunami of 9.7 billion (9.7B) people living on earth by 2050 mean for commodities?
Rick Mills: The statistics are mind-boggling and extremely scary. According to the U.N., the world’s population reached 7.3B in the middle of 2015. That’s 1B more people sitting at the dinner table in the span of the last 12 years. Some 60% live in Asia (4.4B people); 16% live in Africa (1.2B people); 10% in Europe (just over 700 million [700M]); 9% in Latin America and the Caribbean (634M). The remaining 5% live in Northern America: Mexico, Canada and the U.S. (358M). Compare those numbers to China, which has 1.4B people, and India, which has 1.3B. That’s 19% and 18% of the world’s population, respectively.
Growth has slowed from 1.24% 10 years ago to 1.18% this year, but it still means we are adding 83M people to the world’s population annually. Half of the global population growth between now and 2050 is going to occur in Africa. Most of the people born between now and 2050 will be in developing countries. When we look at the global demand for resources, the Western world doesn’t count. We here in the West are almost a rounding error in the world population.
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