Global Agriculture

Built on the previous reports drawn up under the ESPAS project to date, this study seeks to map more comprehensively the five major trends that are likely to shape the future and will need to be taken into account by the Union as it defines coherent strategic options for the next governance cycle. They include:
- A richer and older human race characterised by an expanding global middle class and greater inequalities
- A more vulnerable process of globalisation led by and economic G3
- A transformative industrial and technological revolution
- A growing nexus of climate change, energy and the competition for resources
- Changing power, increased interdependence and fragile multilateralism

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.