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

PROOF COPY
for both food and non-food uses, but with the latter including only moderate increases in the
use of crops as feedstocks for producing biofuels. This conclusion reflects mainly the prospect
that global demand will grow at much lower rates than in the past, for the following reasons.
• First, population growth will be lower than in the past, and population will peak and
decline in several major countries and regions such as Japan, Europe, China and Brazil.
• Second, more countries and population groups will be gradually attaining levels of per
capita food consumption beyond which there is little scope for major further increases.
Structural changes in diets, at the same time, will continue to determine shifts from
staples to livestock products and fruit and vegetables.
• Third, while these factors will impact the bulk of world demand and make it grow at
rates lower than in the past, there are several countries which will need to increase food
consumption faster than in the past: they are those that start with low levels of food
consumption per capita and many of them will continue to have high population growth
rates. However, such potential may not be expressed fully as effective demand in all of
them because they may still have low incomes and significant poverty for a long time to
come. 45 of the 98 developing countries we project individually have presently incomes
per capita of less than $1,000; 15 of them may still have incomes under $1,000 in 2050
according to the economic growth projections used here. There are 65 countries with
food/capita under 2700 kcal/person/day and a population of 2.8 billion: 16 of them, with
a population of 800 million, may still have less than 2700 kcal/person/day in 2050.
These developments imply that world production would need to increase at rates much
lower than in the past, e.g. total agricultural output by 1.1 percent p.a. from 2005/07 to 2050,
down from 2.2 percent p.a. in the preceding equal period, and cereals by 0.9 percent p.a. vs.
1.9 percent. Notwithstanding lower growth rates, absolute quantities involved are substantial:
cereals production must increase by 940 million tonnes to reach 3 billion tonnes projected for
2050; meat by 196 million tonnes to reach 455 million tonnes by 2050; and oilcrops by 133
million tonnes to reach 282 million tonnes by 2050.
The fact that world’s natural resources and the yield growth potential may be sufficient
to attain these increases represents per se no guarantee that such increases will be
forthcoming. Underlying our projections is the assumption that the necessary investments will
be undertaken, and the right policies will be followed providing incentives to farmers,
particularly in countries whose food demand must be primarily satisfied by domestic
production.
These are global magnitudes, but they are built up from country by country and
commodity by commodity projections. If we had analysed the issues by treating the world as
one entity or a few major regions, we could stop here and conclude that all is well and there
are no major constraints to producing all the food required for the growing population and the
improvement of per capita consumption to levels that would eliminate hunger and some more.
However, as often, the devil is in the details. It is recalled that thirteen countries account for
60 percent of the 1.4 billion ha of the global land classified as prime or good for rainfed crop
production but not yet so used, and that are not in forest, protected areas or built-up. At the
other extreme, many countries have no such land reserves left, and often cultivate land of
marginal quality.
Addressing the issue how much and what food can be produced or imported in each
country, forces us to tone down such optimism. This is because, as noted, several countries
start with adverse initial conditions, of low national average food availability, high
undernourishment, high population growth and also poor land and water resource
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