The potential and risks of insects usage as animal feed – the legislation in European Union and perspective for Serbia

Introduction The reports by FAO (The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) in 2018 highlighted the expectation that by 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion. Therefore, food production must increase by 70 percent in order to feed this larger, more urban and richer population (FAO, 2018). The other predictions are highlighting that meat consumption is not going to decline, moreover, the global meat production is projected to more than a double, from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes by 2050 (Steinfeld et al., 2006; Caparros Megido et al., 2016). After summarising this forecast, it is obvious that this increase will put a lot of pressure in the environment to produce animal products as weel as the feed used for animal production. During the last decade, the price of conventional feeds such as soybean meal (Asche et al., 2013), and fishmeals (Deutsch et al., 2007; Olsen and Hasan, 2012; Cashion and Manach, 2017) are increasing. Taking everything into account, there is a strict need for finding novel food sources to overcome the problems and feed the increasing population. According to Pali-Schöll et al. (2018), there are several alternatives that have been proposed: production of algae, fungi, in vitro meat, and the insects.