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

PROOF COPY
(Figure2.6), at 7.4 billion in both projections. In conclusion, world population growth will be
increasingly dominated by that of sub-Saharan Africa. This will tend to make the goal of
ending hunger more difficult to achieve.
2.2.2 Overall economy
The long time horizon of the study means that the agricultural futures we shall be developing
must be visualized in a world that would be significantly different from the present one and,
according to some income projections to 2050, perhaps immensely richer and with less
pronounced relative gaps between the per capita incomes of the developed and (the present
day) developing countries. Here are some examples:
• van der Mensbrugghe et al., (2011) show a GDP growth baseline implying a 3.6-fold
increase in world economic activity from 2005 to 2050. The GDP of the developing
countries would grow 9.8 times, corresponding to a 6.6-fold increase in average per
capita income.
• Projections to 2050 for a large number of countries (including 73 of our 98 developing
countries) have been published recently by the French Research Institute CEPII (Foure
et al., 2010). The global growth rates projected from 2005-50 are near those of the
World Bank paper: a 3.3-fold increase for world GDP. For per capita GDPs, they have
high multiples for some major developing countries, e.g. 16-fold for China and 11-fold
for India and some extraordinarily high multiples for several countries, e.g.
Mozambique’s per capita GDP increases 47-fold or 22-fold for Mali and Nepal. In
contrast, per capita incomes in the OECD area are projected to grow only 1.75-fold.
They give projected per capita GDPs in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) $ of 2005, but
the projected absolute numbers are not very useful, since the PPP rates will change. For
example, a dollar in China has 2.3 times the purchasing power of a dollar in the United
States of America, but this relationship is bound to be much smaller in the future: the
ratio between the incomes measured in PPP rates and those in market exchange rates
tends to converge towards unity as incomes of the low-income countries rise faster than
those of the high-income countries and the distance between the two narrows23.
• A set of projections by the Goldman Sachs Global Economics Group (Goldman Sachs,
2007) covering the G-7, the BRICS and 11 other major countries, imply a 6.5-fold
increase in their aggregate GDP from 2006-50.
• A paper by Price-Waterhouse-Coopers (Hacksworth, 2006) explores several carbon
emissions scenarios to 2050 of global GDP growth rates in the range 2.6 percent to 3.2
percent p.a., implying global GDP increases 3.3 to 4.1-fold from 2004-50.
• There are more scenarios in the literature. For example, a wide range of world GDP
growth scenarios are explored for analyzing climate change issues in the IPCC 4th
Assessment Report. From 2000-2050 the increases in world GDP range from 2.2-fold to
7.1-fold; for 2000-2100 the range is from 7.4-fold to 20.8-fold (IPCC, 2007a: Table 1).
23 As shown in Table 2.4, currently the average GDP per capita of the developing countries valued at PPP rates is
twice as high as that valued in market exchange rates. For the developed countries the two measures are nearly
equal.
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