Scenarios of Global Food Consumption: Implications for Agriculture

The global land base is under increasing pressure to provide food for a growing population. This report describes how increasing population, income, and agricultural productivity may affect the production and consumption of crops and food products by 2050. Rising incomes have historically implied increasing consumption of animal products, with large increases in feed calories relative to increases in calories consumed as food. Crop calories are the unit of agricultural production in this report, allowing aggregation across multiple crop types, comparison to calories consumed as food, and providing an indicator of cropland requirements. The following questions are addressed: How do increasing population and income affect global demand for crop and food calories by 2050? What is the effect of agricultural productivity growth on food prices and cropland area expansion? Results show that in an income-driven food demand scenario, production of world crop calories increases by 47 percent from 2011 to 2050. Demand for food calories and crop calories increases over time in all scenarios, with most of the adjustment through increases in crop yield (intensification). The amount of cropland also increases (extensification) but less on a percentage basis.