World agriculture towards 2030/2050: the 2012 revision - Fao

PROOF COPY
products facing finite natural resources such as land, water and genetic potential. Scarcity of
these resources would be compounded by competing demands for them originating in
urbanization, industrial uses and use in bio-fuel production, by forces that would change their
availability such as climate change and the need to preserve resources for future generations
through environmentally responsible and sustainable use.
Figure 4.3 Arable land per cap (ha in use per person)
0.700
0.600
0.500
0.400
0.300
0.200
0.100
developing countries
developed countries
world
Naturally, one could interpret the declining arable land per person in parallel with the
observed increasing average food consumption per person as a sign of ever increasing
agricultural productivity (crop yields). In practice, changes in arable land (in use) per person
will be the result of these countervailing forces (population / demand growth and increasing
crop yields) with the exact outcome differing among countries. This section will address a few
of the above-mentioned issues by unfolding the resource use implications of the crop
production projections presented in the preceding chapter but, as shown in Figure 4.4, an
advance conclusion could be that the average area of arable land in use per person is expected
to stabilize towards the end of the projection period.
The perception that there is no more, or very little, new land to bring under cultivation
might be well grounded in the specific situations of land-scarce countries and regions such as
South Asia and the Near East/North Africa but may not apply, or may apply with much less
force, to other parts of the world. As discussed above, there are still as yet unused large tracts
of land with varying degrees of agricultural potential in several countries, most of them in
sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America with some in East Asia. However, as noted, this land
may lack infrastructure, be partly under forest cover or in wetlands which should be protected
for environmental reasons, or the people who would exploit it for agriculture lack access to
appropriate technological packages or the economic incentives to adopt them.
In reality, expansion of land in agricultural use continues to take place. It does so
mainly in countries which combine growing needs for food and employment with limited
access to technology packages that could increase intensification of cultivation on land
already in agricultural use. It also has been expanding in countries with abundant land
0.462
0.242
0.186
0.440
0.218
0.166
0.422
0.197
0.150
0.000
1960 1980 2000 2020 2040
0.405
0.181
0.139
112