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

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vegetable oil imports for food purposes, while imports in developed countries will continue
primarily for non-food uses, including biodiesel production. Increasingly, exports will be
supplied by major exporters from Southeast Asia and South America. Developed countries as
a whole are expected to become growing net importers.
Trade in meat has been characterized by fairly rapid import growth in Japan and the
Russian Federation, as well in some developing countries. Developing countries as a group
have become growing net importers of meat from the mid-1970s, but this trend has been
reversed in recent years following the expansion of exports from Brazil. In the projection
period, it is expected that increases in imports by developing countries will be
counterbalanced by exports from the same country group. In parallel, import requirements by
the major developed importers are likely to decline in the long term as their consumption
slows down, following population declines and attainment of high levels of per capita
consumption. The net result will likely be that the major developed exporters of meat will see
little growth, a trend pointing to an eventual decline in their net exports in the longer term.
How will production respond? Some more land and water use, with yields slowing down
As mentioned above, resource constraints for agricultural production have become more
stringent than in the past while growth of yields is slowing down. This is a primary reason
why people express fears that there are growing risks that world food production may not be
enough to feed a growing population and ensure food security for all.
It is worth recalling, in this respect, that food security is only weakly linked to the
capacity of the world as a whole to produce food, to the point of becoming nearly irrelevant,
at least for two reasons:
(a) there are sufficient spare food production resources in certain parts of the world,
waiting to be employed if only economic and institutional frameworks would so dictate;
(b) production constraints are and will continue to be important determinants of food
security; however, they operate and can cause Malthusian situations to prevail, at the
local level and often because in many such situations production constraints affect
negatively not only the possibility of increasing food supplies but can be veritable
constraints to overall development and prime causes of the emergence of poverty traps.
The proposition that ensuring food security for the growing population will become
increasingly difficult because there are today fewer unused land and water resources and more
limited yield growth potential compared to the past is not a good yardstick for judging future
prospects. Rather, the issue is whether resources are sufficient for meeting future
requirements that, as noted, will be growing at a much lower rate than in the past.
This paper analyzes prospects for the main agronomic parameters underlying
projections of production.
Concerning land, information on the suitability for crop production – undertaken by
IIASA and FAO in the Global Agro-ecological Zones study (GAEZ) which updated an earlier
version (Fischer et al., 2002, 2011) – indicates that at the global level there is a significant
amount of land with rainfed production potential of various degrees of suitability: 7.2 billion
hectares (ha), of which 1.6 billion is currently in use for crop production, including irrigated.
Land-in-use includes some 75 million ha which in the GAEZ evaluation are classified as nonsuitable.
Part of such non-suitable land-in-use is made-up of irrigated desert. This leaves a
balance of 5.7 billion ha. However not all of it should be considered as potentially usable for
crop production, for two reasons. Firstly, 2.8 billion ha is under forest, in protected areas or is
already occupied by non-agricultural uses which will be growing in the future, such as human
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