CURRENT ISSUES IN WORLD FOOD SECURITY
J. Poulisse
Land and Water Development Division, FAO, Rome, Italy

The major driving forces shaping future transformation of food and agricultural production will be appreciably different from those prevailing for much of the 20th century. Population growth and technological change aimed at raising yields were the main driving forces (DFs) for much of the last half century. This will continue to be the case in some developing country regions but increasingly in the future the main DF will be income growth, shifts in consumption patterns and technological change shaped by environmental objectives and social concerns about the safety of agriculture, rather than by yield maximisation. Moreover, the DFs will operate increasingly through the market, e.g., pricing of fertilisers and pesticides to reflect their full environmental costs, and consumer resistance to genetically-modified crops, respectively, and not only via regulatory measures,as was the case in the past.

One does not have to look back over the whole of the last century to detect major departures from the long-term trend. During the past decade or so there have been majors shifts in technologies and social pressures that have brought about dramatic changes in how agriculture is conducted and particularly how soil and plant nutrients are managed, e.g., the rapid adoption of no-till and organic agriculture, discussed later. Other breaks from the trend are possible, and the cone of possibilities becomes wider and wider the further one projects out into the future, with marked regional differences. The focus of this paper is therefore the next 30 years rather than the whole 21st Century, and in doing so concentrates more on developing rather than developed countries and on crop rather than livestock production. Particular attention is given to how improvements in fertiliser use efficiency (FUE) and water use efficiency (WUE) will play a major role in the transformation of agriculture, and to the inter-dependence of higher yields and better natural resource management.

With these restrictions in mind the main features of the agriculture transformation over next 30 years are considered to be:

• A slow down in the expansion of arable land in developing countries.
  
• Eighty percent of incremental crop production coming from higher yields and cropping intensity.
  
• Continued growth in the irrigated area.
  
• Improved WUE because of higher water charges and better technologies.
  
• Continued expansion of no-till and other forms of conservation tillage.
  
• Wider adoption of organic agriculture.
  
• Fast growth of the livestock sector.
  
• Adoption of climate change mitigation measures.

This presentation is devoted to an assessment of these features following a discussion of the major DFs for the agricultural transformation, and a brief overview of projected phosphate fertilizer use supporting future crop production.