Australian pulse industry can help meet the world's growing protein needs

However, strategic investment will be required to capitalise on this demand according to two of the keynote speakers at the Australian Pulse Conference.

The three-day conference kicked off on Tuesday in Toowoomba, Qld.

Unigrain CEO Andrew May said there was absolutely no doubt there would be a food gap for the world during the next 30 years.

Between 2010 and 2050, there will be three billion more mouths to feed, as well as three billion people transitioning from undernourished to the middle class.

Hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in poverty.

Taking this into account, the World Resources Institute estimates 50 per cent more calories will be needed from crop production by 2050.

However, Mr May said farming 50pc more land to achieve this fundamentally would not work.

Instead it would come from a combination of avenues such as reducing the loss of food, increasing pasture productivity as well as from plant breeding and yield increases.

"There is certainly an opportunity here; the opportunity we think over the next couple of decades is enormous, but we need to be mindful that it is a long road," he said.

"It will be an overnight success that takes 15 years to get there."

The head of Austrade's Centre for Excellence for Agribusiness and Food, Anne Maree Weston, said sustainability and animal welfare concerns had also led to a groundswell of consumer sentiment toward looking at more plant protein based food.

When it comes to Austrade's investment and promotion work, alternative protein is tied with agritech and food technology as the number one priority.

In order to better understand Australia's position alongside other nations in the plant-based protein space, Austrade commissioned a report from market research provider Euromonitor International.

The study looked at Australia as well as Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and Singapore.

Ms Weston said if they were to conduct the study again, she would also add Israel to that list.

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One of the key findings was none of these countries were particularly well catered for with the processing facilities they required.

"A lot of the time for Canada, the Netherlands and the US, they will grow something, it's sent to China to be processed and then it comes back as an isolate or a concentrate," she said.

"Anecdotally I've been told 60pc of the midstream processing infrastructure in the world is in China."

Ms Weston said Canada was moving toward doing more of its own processing in country.

She said there had also been a big move to invest in processing and distribution facilities right across the US.

The US also had a really high level of co-manufacturing, which was something worth considering in Australia.

When it comes to advancing the plant protein sector in Australia, she said it was important to get the balance right between being commodity growers and suppliers as well as being ingredient and food packaging manufacturers.

"We see there is absolute capability gaps here in Australia in the fractionation space, but also in the manufacturing space, and off the back of that that is what we are promoting to overseas investors for plant protein in Australia," she said.

"We absolutely see it as an opportunity, it's not as easy as we thought, but it's certainly very realistic."

Mr May stressed the importance of investing in crops and processing facilities where Australia would be able to compete in the global market, such as faba beans.

"Australia has to be careful not to over invest in things that we are not going to be able to compete in because it still comes back to price," he said.

"Provenance and sustainability will only get us so far, the ingredient still has to be price effective."