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

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CHAPTER 1
OVERVIEW
Introduction
The perceived limits to producing food for a growing global population have been a source of
debate and preoccupations for ages. Already in the third century AD, Tertullian, a church
leader, raised the issue. 1 The debate gathered momentum in the late eighteenth century,
following Malthus, and more recently with Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. Yet, world food
production grew faster than population and per capita consumption increased. Population
increased to 6.9 billion in 2010, up from 2.5 billion in 1950 and 3.7 billion in 1970. The UN
population projections –from the medium variant of the 2008 release employed here– indicate
that the world total could reach 9.15 billion in 2050. Thus, we expect an increase of 2.25
billion over the next 40 years, which is lower than the 3.2 billion increase that materialized
between 1970 and 2010. This deceleration will impact world agriculture by lowering its rate
of growth compared to the past.
World average per capita availability of food for direct human consumption, after
allowing for waste, animal-feed and non-food uses, improved to 2,770 kcal/person/day in
2005-07. Thus, in principle, there is sufficient global aggregate food consumption for nearly
everyone to be well-fed. Yet this has not happened: some 2.3 billion people live in countries
with under 2,500 kcal, and some 0.5 billion in countries with less than 2,000 kcal, while at the
other extreme some 1.9 billion are in countries consuming more than 3,000 kcal. The reasons
are fairly well known: mainly poverty, which has many facets, but is in many low-income
countries linked to failures to develop agriculture and limited access to food produced in other
countries.
This study aims to provide insights into how the situation may develop to 2050, based
on the exogenous assumption that world GDP will be 2.5-fold the present one, and per capita
income will be 1.8-fold. All projections are surrounded in uncertainty; but expected
developments in food and feed demand are subject to less uncertainty than other variables,
particularly demand stemming from novel uses of agricultural products and the underlying
land and water resources requirements. Recently, the use of such products as feedstocks for
the production of biofuels has been growing in importance: this is the case of maize use for
ethanol in the US, of sugar cane in Brazil, of vegetable oils and cereals in the EU to produce
biodiesel and ethanol. Should such trends continue, biofuels could prove to be a major
disruptive force, possibly benefiting producers but harming low-income consumers.
While at present the continuation of these trends does not seem likely, the high degree
of uncertainty suggests the need to analyze alternative scenarios, which are not handled in this
paper. We rather take into account whatever we know today about present and likely future
use of agricultural products for biofuels over the next ten years by relying on projections to
2020 produced by the OECD-FAO medium-term agricultural outlook (OECD-FAO, 2010).
Accordingly, we assume that current policies and mandates foreseen to 2020 in major
1 “The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded a blessing to
overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.” De Anima, quoted
in Hardin (1998).
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