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Abstract
Rapid trade-led economic growth in emerging Asia has been shifting the global economic
and industrial centres of gravity away from the north Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia
in world trade but also altering the commodity composition of trade by Asia and other
regions. What began with Japan in the 1950s and Korea and Taiwan from the late 1960s has
spread to the much more populous ASEAN region, China and India. This paper examines
how that growth and associated structural changes are altering agricultural markets in
particular and thereby food security. It does so retrospectively and by projecting a model of
the world economy which compares alternative growth strategies, trade policy scenarios and
savings behaviors to 2030. Projected impacts on sectoral shares of GDP, ‘openness’ to trade
and the composition and direction of trade are drawn out, followed by effects of the boom in
non-farm sectors on agricultural self-sufficiency and real food consumption per capita in Asia
and elsewhere. The paper concludes by drawing implications for policies that can address
more efficiently Asia’s concerns about food security and rural-urban income disparity than
the trade policy measures used by earlier-industrializing Northeast Asia.