<article>Dupont is considering an increase in its research and development budget to 300 billion baht ($9.37 billion) by 2020 in a bid to create innovative food to cope with the food shortage problem in the future.</article>

Dupont is considering an increase in its research and development budget to 300 billion baht ($9.37 billion) by 2020 in a bid to create innovative food to cope with the food shortage problem in the future.
This project will raise the collaboration between Dupont Innovation Center and the government and the private sector worldwide.
Dr Somchai Laohverapanich, managing Director of DuPont Thailand, said the number of the population has grown every year and it is forecasted that the world population will rise to 9 billion in 2050 and food demand will also grow by 70% from the current demand. Meanwhile, the area for agriculture tends to decline.
“Because of more population, food security has become our big challenge in the 21st century,” he said. “Besides developing innovative food, it’s also a challenge for us to find out how to reduce the waste of food from every production process until it’s handed to consumers.”
Due to its long-term plan to spend a huge budget on R&amp;D by 2020, Dupont plans to develop more than 4,000 kinds of food and agro-products in order to meet the rising of the food demand globally.
It will develop the food by considering food and nutrition demand in each area, he explained. For example, people in Malawi, South Africa, has tapioca as their main food, so they face the lack of protein. Dupont, therefore, joined hand with the African government to distribute the soybean protein to people in the area.
For Thailand, he said that food industry is one of the important industries because it has exported more than 70% of total food production, but the sales value is pretty low because it is the basic cheap food. “I hope that our innovation will help add more value to Thai food and agro-products and generate more income to them,” he said.
Suntaree Taratikun, manager of Dupont Thailand Innovation Center, said that it has collaborated with 20-30 Thai companies each year for doing R&amp;D and half of them are in food and agricultural business.

Dupont to increase R&D spend on food

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Dupont to increase R&D spend on food

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