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

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cereals for ethanol 41 . In the present round of the projections we have assumed some expansion
of biofuels up to 2020 and no further increases in subsequent projection years. This “limited
biofuels” scenario is explained in Annex 3.1.
The fact that there has been this additional demand for crops as biofuels feedstocks does
not mean that equal amounts were subtracted from food and feed uses: most of the additional
demand was met by additional production that would not have been there but for such use,
certainly for sugar cane in Brazil and much of the rapeseed oil in the EU (the main feedstock
for biodiesel production in the region). If anything, effects on the food-feed use have been
indirect via the competition for resources that have raised the prices for these and other crop
and livestock products for instance by raising the price of maize used for feed and the prices
of livestock.
We present in this section a brief overview of what we can expect in terms of increases
of aggregate demand for, and production of, agricultural products. The figures we use refer to
the aggregate volumes of demand and production of the crop and livestock sectors. They are
obtained by multiplying physical quantities of demand or production by price for each
commodity and summing up over all commodities. Each commodity is valued at the same
average international price in all countries in all years.. The movement of these aggregates is
rarely sufficient for us to analyze and understand the forces that shape the evolution of
agricultural variables in their different dimensions. The commodities included (as listed in
Appendix 1) are very diverse from the standpoint of what determines their production,
demand and trade. Next sections analyze and present the historical experience and prospects
for the main commodity groups.
Box 3.1 Measuring change in agricultural aggregates
An often posed question is by how much agricultural (or food) production must increase in the
future to meet the demand generated by a growing population, income growth, etc. The figure
70 percent from average 2005/7 to 2050 has been widely quoted . It is important to realize what
it means: when speaking of growth rates of aggregate agricultural production or consumption, it
matters what units are used in the measurement of change, in particular whether quantities of the
different commodities are just aggregated in physical units (e.g. tonnes – which can be done for
commodity groups like cereals but not for summing up heterogeneous products such as cereals,
meat, oranges, pumpkins, coffee, cotton, palm oil, etc) or aggregated after making them
homogeneous by multiplying each quantity with an appropriate weighting factor and summing
up. The weights often considered are food-specific calorie content of each commodity (e.g. kcal
per kg.) or price. This study uses the international dollar prices of 2004/06 (the use of
international dollar prices by FAO to compute the Production Index Numbers and the growth of
aggregate production is explained in http://faostat.fao.org/site/375/default.aspx): the physical
weight aggregation would not make sense and the same goes for calorie weights (non-food
products have no food-specific calorie content, while high value commodities like tea, have
virtually no calories – let alone raw materials like cotton, tobacco or rubber). Anyone interested
in food and agriculture futures can use more meaningful metrics, e.g. tonnes of grain, of meat,
food consumption per capita in terms of kg/person/year or kcal/person/day, yields, land use, etc.
With shifts in the commodity structure of production and consumption away from staples and
towards higher value commodities, the price-based index of the volume of production or
41 Data for 2009 from European Commission (2011).
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