Global food projections to 2020: emerging trends and alternative futures

In this report, the authors explore alternative futures for global food markets, including both a baseline scenario that gives their best estimates of the future and a number of alternative scenarios that assess the flexibility of world food markets and the robustness of baseline results.

It starts by providing a brief review of recent historical trends in the global and regional food situation. This is followed by a description of the global food projection model known as the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT). The authors then present an overview of the baseline demand and supply projections, including projections of crop area harvested and crop yields, food demand, price and trade projections for these commodities, and the effects of these projections on child malnutrition. Next they explore alternative regional and global scenarios, including optimistic and pessimistic paths for the future world food situation. Finally, the implications of these projections for future global food security and policy are considered

Key Findings

• While slower population growth will reduce overall food demand and alleviate stress on fragile production systems, it cannot fix the deeply rooted structural and technological challenges that confront the poor even in the present day.
• The wide price swings associated with the alternative yield scenarios show that yield growth will be a key determinant in ensuring that food is available at affordable prices to the world’s poor over the next several decades.
• The regional Asian scenarios provide insight into the ability ofworld markets, particularly grain markets, to respond flexibly to local production shocks.
• Many experts see the pessimistic scenario as the most likely outcome for Sub-Saharan Africa. Deteriorating natural resources, stagnant technologies, and rising population densities remain common features of the rural landscape throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa.
• The broader global optimistic and pessimistic scenarios show that better policy and more rapid economic and agricultural growth can lead to substantial food security improvements, but significantly worse outcomes are also possible ifkey drivers perform even slightly worse.

The report highlights concludes that irrigation, agricultural research, and rural roads are the three main investments that will drive agricultural production growth in the model, and it is projected that together these three areas will require $416.6 billion of investment between 1997 and 2020 to achieve baseline agricultural production growth rates.