000’ MT
Yeild MT / Hectare
FEEDING THE WORLD IN 2050
Headline forecasts from the UN’s ‘The future of food and agriculture’ forecast global population of just under 10 billion people and a 50 percent growth in agricultural demand to boot.
Despite population growth declining from its peak in 1960’s of just over 2 percent pa, growth is then forecast to expand from todays 7.6 billion people to over 11 billion people by the end of the century in 2090 and 2100. Much of this population growth will be centred on developing nations of Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia which, according to the UN’s forecasts; both continents will be inhabited by a combined 9 billion people from the world’s 11 billion residents.
The story, however, isn’t all about population growth which, in annual terms, has been declining for 5 decades since the 1960’s peak. Instead, urbanisation and transition of dietary patterns has already, and will continue to, radically change demographics. More people today live in cities than in rural areas and this is expected to increase further as populations grow. 35 years ago, 60 percent of the world’s population lived in rural areas compared to todays 54% that live in urban areas. By 2050 this shift is forecasted to continue with over two thirds of the world’s population living in urban cities and built up areas.
Part cause and part effect, urbanisation has resulted in significant reliance and progression of industrialisation and globalisation of food and agriculture.
Chart 1: Russian Wheat yields
90,000.00 80,000.00 70,000.00 60,000.00 50,000.00 40,000.00 30,000.00 20,000.00 10,000.00 0
3.5 Yeild Production Area 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 2007 Source: USDA / Russian Ag Ministry 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 0
The adoption of technology, scale and modern practices has helped underpin transitions in production of food with labour- saving processes, reducing rural workforces. Food supply chains have, therefore, increased in their significance with the physical distance from farm to plate increasing and the rising consumption of processed, packaged and prepared foods growing in all but the most isolated communities. This has brought increased dependence on global trade with statistics from the USDA showing world grain exports in 1990 of 270mlnt increasing 50 percent to 412mlnt this year, whilst global trade of soybeans has grown a massive 230 percent, from 46mlnt in 1990 to 152mlnt in 2017.
4 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | November/December 2017
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