I recently watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, a film that tackles the impact of industrialisation on the environment. During Al Gore’s presentation he happened to show a chart highlighting world population growth, the exponential growth in population and that we are heading towards critical mass. The advances in medical science and subsequent increase in life expectancy has led to an explosion in population. World population data shows that we’ve managed to increase from 1.6 Billion in 1900 to just over 6 Billion at the turn of the century and an estimated 7 Billion by the year 2010. This makes me question, where are they all going to live and work? How are they going to get there and in the materialistic society that we’ve become, where are they going to keep all the things that they own?

You only have to look around the area that you grew up in to see the impact of this boom in population, gone are many of the green fields and open spaces, turned over to developers for more housing, more offices and more infrastructure.

This month we consider how asset classes such as direct property and agribusiness have managed to provide value to investors in a falling market. We now have an endless need for land and building materials. We feel that the performance of these asset classes coupled with tax effective investment structures means that now is a good time to consider them as part of your overall portfolio.