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

PROOF COPY
developing countries would have declined to 740 million and some progress would have been
made towards the target of halving the numbers by 2015. We shall have occasion to revisit the
issue of India’s sluggish response of food consumption per capita to the high growth of per
capita incomes (Annex 2.1). Whether this pattern of response continues or not, India’s food
demand outcomes will have a profound impact on the assessment of long-term prospects of
world agriculture and nutrition.
Table 2.1 Per capita food consumption (kcal/person/day)
1969/
1971
New historical data Projections
1979/
1981
1989/
1991
1990/
1992
2005/
2007
Comparison
1999/2001
2015 2030 2050 New Old
World 2 373 2 497 2 634 2 627 2 772 2 860 2 960 3 070 2 719 2 789
Developing countries 2 055 2 236 2 429 2 433 2 619 2 740 2 860 3 000 2 572 2 654
-excluding South Asia 2 049 2 316 2 497 2 504 2 754 2 870 2 970 3 070 2 680 2 758
Sub-Saharan Africa 2 031 2 021 2 051 2 068 2 238 2 360 2 530 2 740 2 136 2 194
Near East / North Africa 2 355 2 804 3 003 2 983 3 007 3 070 3 130 3 200 2 975 2 974
Latin America and the
Caribbean
2 442 2 674 2 664 2 672 2 898 2 990 3 090 3 200 2 802 2 836
South Asia 2 072 2 024 2 254 2 250 2 293 2 420 2 590 2 820 2 303 2 392
East Asia 1 907 2 216 2 487 2 497 2 850 3 000 3 130 3 220 2 770 2 872
Developed countries 3 138 3 223 3 288 3 257 3 360 3 390 3 430 3 490 3 251 3 257
While developments in South Asia, with 30 percent of the total population of the
developing countries, explain a large part of the failure to make more progress, there are also
numerous other less populous countries that failed to make much progress. There are still 20
countries with over 30 percent of their population classified as undernourished (see below).
Their average food/capita was 1910 kcal/person/day in 1990/92 (the base year of the halving
target): it is about the same (1940 kcal) 15 years later (Figure 2.7). Sixteen of them are in sub-
Saharan Africa, no matter that the region as a whole has shown some timid signs of
accelerated rate of improvement of per capita food in the current decade, following some
acceleration in economic growth and declines in poverty rates (Figure 2.8).
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