Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

The aim of this paper is to provide policy-makers with a helpful overview of the technical and economic aspects of water use in agriculture, with particular emphasis on crop and livestock production. Through 2050, in many countries, agriculture will remain an important determinant of economic growth, poverty reduction, and food security, even as, over time, the proportion of agricultural revenue in national gross income declines. Water use in agriculture will remain substantial, irrigated areas will expand and competition for water will increase in all sectors. Most likely, overall supplies of land and water will be sufficient to achieve global food production goals in 2050; although poverty and food insecurity will remain pressing challenges in several regions and countries. Thus, the focus of this report is on the regional and national aspects of food security.

Anticipating future developments in global agriculture is by no means a simple exercise. In the last few years, many of the acute phenomena observed have complicated further the formulation of long-term prospects. The turbulence of world agricultural markets, the price spikes of 2008 and 2011, the wide climate variability experienced in important production regions, and the enhanced linkage among agriculture and other markets such as the energy and the financial markets have propelled interest in revisiting the relations among agriculture, its natural resource basis, economic development, food security and population growth. Discussions of the relationships among these phenomena are lively, as are those on what can be done to prevent the onset of more frequent and more critical conditions in the coming decades.
Given its various fields of expertise, FAO is at the centre of the technical debate on these themes. In 2009, FAO organized an expert meeting and forum around the question of “How to feed to the world in 2050”. This initiative was supported by papers authored by world-class experts. This work has been revisited, and is now presented in this volume.

"This paper is a re-make of Chapters 1-3 of the Interim Report World Agriculture: towards 2030/2050 (FAO, 2006). In addition, this new paper includes a Chapter 4 on production factors (land, water, yields, fertilizers). Revised and more recent data have been used as basis for the new projections, as follows: (a) updated historical data from the Food Balance Sheets 1961-2007 as of June 2010; (b) undernourishment estimates from The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010 (SOFI) and related new parameters (CVs, minimum daily energy requirements) are used in the projections; (c) new population data and projections from the UN World Population Prospects - Revision of 2008; (d) new GDP data and projections from the World Bank; (e) a new base year of 2005/2007 (the previous edition used the base year 1999/2001); (f) updated estimates of land resources from the new evaluation of the Global Agro-ecological Zones (GAEZ) study of FAO and IIASA. Estimates of land under forest and in protected areas from the GAEZ are taken into account and excluded from the estimates of land areas suitable for crop production into which agriculture could expand in the future; (g) updated estimates of existing irrigation, renewable water resources and potentials for irrigation expansion; and (h) changes in the text as required by the new historical data and projections.
Like the interim report, this re-make does not include projections for the Fisheries and Forestry sectors. Calories from fish are, however, included, in the food consumption projections, along with those from other commodities (e.g. spices) not analysed individually.
The projections presented reflect the magnitudes and trajectories we estimate the major food and agriculture variables may assume in the future; they are not meant to reflect how these variables may be required to evolve in the future in order to achieve some normative objective, e.g. ensure food security for all, eliminate undernourishment or reduce it to any given desired level, or avoid food overconsumption leading to obesity and related Non-Communicable Diseases."