World food and agriculture: Outlook for the medium and longer term

World food and agriculture: Outlook for the medium and longer term

Nikos Alexandratos

Global Perspective Studies Unit, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome 00100, Italy

Abstract

The world has been making progress in improving food security, as measured by the per person availability of food for direct human consumption. However, progress has been very uneven, and many developing countries have failed to participate in such progress. In some countries, the food security situation is today worse than 20 years ago. The persistence of food insecurity does not reflect so much a lack of capacity of the world as a whole to increase food production to whatever level would be required for everyone to have consumption levels assuring satisfactory nutrition. The world already produces sufficient food. The undernourished and the food-insecure persons are in these conditions because they are poor in terms of income with which to purchase food or in terms of access to agricultural resources, education, technology, infrastructure, credit, etc., to produce their own food. Economic development failures account for the persistence of poverty and food insecurity. In the majority of countries with severe food-security problems, the greatest part of the poor and food-insecure population depend greatly on local agriculture for a living. In such cases, development failures are often tantamount to failures of agricultural development. Development of agriculture is seen as the first crucial step toward broader development, reduction of poverty and food insecurity, and eventually freedom from excessive economic dependence on poor agricultural resources. Projections indicate that progress would continue, but at a pace and pattern that would be insufficient for the incidence of undernutrition to be reduced significantly in the medium-term future. As in the past, world agricultural production is likely to keep up with, and perhaps tend to exceed, the growth of the effective demand for food. The problem will continue to be one of persistence of poverty, leading to growth of the effective demand for food on the part of the poor that would fall short of that required for them to attain levels of consumption compatible with freedom from undernutrition.

Footnotes

↵ * It is, however, inclusive of post-retail waste and nonfood uses at the household level, e.g., food fed to pets—hence the very high levels of food availability generally found in the statistics of many high-income countries, often over 3,500 kcal⋅person⁻¹⋅day⁻¹.
↵ † The term developing countries comprises all of the countries of the world except those of Europe (both east and west) and North America, all the countries of the former U.S.S.R., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of South Africa, and Israel. This classification reflects, above all, traditional practice and is useful for historical comparisons. However, it leaves much to be desired when it comes to grouping countries by levels of development currently prevailing, a problem that has been intensified in recent years with the new low-income countries created in the wake of the collapse of many economies formerly centrally planned.
↵ ‡ One hundred eighteen to the developing countries other than Argentina, 33 to Japan and Israel, and 6 to the area former U.S.S.R./Eastern Europe.
↵ § Simpson’s paradox, meaning that the world can get poorer on average even though everyone is getting richer, simply because the share of the poor in the total grows over time. This can be illustrated as follows (example based on approximate relative magnitudes for the developing and the developed countries): in a population of four persons, one is rich, consuming 625 kg of grain, and three are poor, each consuming 225 kg. Total consumption is 1,300 kg, and the overall average is 325 kg. Thirty years later, the poor have increased to five persons (high population growth rate of the poor) but they have also increased consumption to 265 kg each. There is still only one rich person (zero population growth rate of the rich), who continues to consume 625 kg. Aggregate consumption is 1,950 kg, and the average of all six persons works out to 325 kg, the same of 30 years earlier. Therefore, real progress has been made even though the average did not increase. Obviously, progress could have been made even if the world average had actually declined. Thus, if the consumption of the poor had increased to only 250 kg (rather than to 265), world aggregate consumption would have risen to 1,875 kg but the world average would have fallen to 312.5 kg.
↵ ¶ Thus, the European Union (E.U.) production of cereals fell from 191 million tons in the 3-year average of 1989–1991 to 178 million tons in 1993–1995, before growing again to 207–208 million tons in 1996 and 1997 following the high world market prices and the relaxation of supply controls. Production grew further in 1998 to an estimated 212 million tons.
↵ ‖ The 1996 medium variant projection was for world population to reach 9.4 billion by 2050, up from 5.7 billion in 1995. The just released new U.N. assessment of 1998 shows even more steep deceleration, leading to a world population of 8.9 billion in 2050, about 0.5 billion below that projected in 1996. However, over one half of this reduction (270 million) is in the projected population of sub-Saharan Africa, in part because of the revised estimates of the impact of the AIDS epidemic. As such, this further reduction in projected population is partly associated with negative rather than positive developments in human welfare.
↵ ** Subject to the great uncertainties concerning the prospects of sub-Saharan Africa, following the drastic revisions of the demographic data. For some countries, not only the projections but also the historical data were revised drastically. For example, in the base year data of the Food and Agriculture Organization Study (14), the 1990 population of Nigeria was given in the 1990 U.N. population assessment as 108.5 million. Four years later (in the 1994 assessment), the population for the same year was given as 96.2 million. The most recent (1998) assessment reduced the 1990 population further to 87 million. One can easily imagine what these revisions imply for the estimates of the key variable of per person food availability and the incidence of undernutrition, a variable which, at low levels of foods availability, is very sensitive to variations of even 5%. The implication is that we shall have to reevaluate where we stand now and where we stood in the past, before we can start talking about the future.
↵ ‡‡ Problems with the land and yield data of China (3) made it necessary to project the country’s production directly, not in terms of land-yield combinations as it was done for the other developing countries. The resulting projection of China’s production of cereals implies a growth rate of 2.0% p.a. from 1988–1990 to 2010 (ref. 13, p.141). The actual outcome to 1998 has been 2.2% p.a.
↵ †† The latest (mid-December 1998) quote for wheat (U.S. No. 1 H.W., f.o.b. Gulf) is U.S. $126/ton, compared with about U.S. $210/ton in late 1996.