Peer review for FAO, 1996, of Technical Paper:

"Food production and population growth. The role of population factors in projections for 2050"

Not previously published. - Item [9.11] in My Professional Life and Publications 1929-1998, 1999

The paper begins with a brief review of the past, i.e. the period 1945-95, followed by an estimate of the demand for food in 2050 measured in calories, and as annual rates of increase between 1995 and 2050. The estimates are based on expected changes in population size and population structure, including expected changes in activity rates due to increase in urbanization, and other expected changes in demand, including the increase needed to eradicate malnutrition (which was estimated by FAO in an earlier paper), and to cover increasing demand for fodder for livestock and other animals, due to improvement of diet.

The estimates are presented for the world and by continent, with strong emphasis in the text on the large regional differences, especially the precarious situation in South Saharan Africa. It is also emphasized that the increase of population size is by far the most important factor causing the very large increase of demand for food calories in 2050, and that the UN population forecast (used for this study) have proven to be globally reliable, although the regional forecasts have been less reliable. So, the paper defends the choice of the very long perspective of more than half a century and calls it "a prerequisite for elaborating food and agricultural policies" (p. 4). Bur the demand and supply in 2050 depends on the Government policies and other events in the intervening period, which are excluded from the analysis in the paper.

Development 1950-95

Earlier projections of food supply by FAO were unduly pessimistic, and contrary to the dismal forecasts, food supply per capita in developing countries increased 12-13 percent between 1960 and 1990, while population nearly doubled. Regional differences were large, with Asia doing best and Africa doing worst with an apparent decline of per capita food supply in the eighties.

The pessimistic outlook in the first part of the period no doubt helped to accelerate global supplies, partly by providing international finance for technological research, especially in seed improvement, and partially by providing popular support in developed exporting countries for gifts of food export of agricultural surpluses to subsidized prices (I come back to the long term effects of the latter below). However, the budgetary burden of agricultural support has become more and more unpopular in the exporting countries, so "a brake [has been] put on production by the big cereal exporters, through which their capacity to export is curbed" (p. 37-38). Moreover, after a peak in the investment in large scale irrigation in the seventies, and worries about environmental problems, for instance in India, large scale investment in irrigation seems to have decelerated. It seems to that these ups and downs make it much more urgent for elaborating food and agricultural policies to make solid forecasts for the next decade or two, than to make hazardous estimates for half a century.

Calories requirement and effective demand

Calories requirements, as calculated in the paper, is one thing, effective demand (in the paper called "solvent demand") is another, as demonstrated by the coexistence of malnutrition and obesity in all parts of the world. Inequality of income distribution may keep aggregate food demand in poor groups below nutritional requirements, but difficulty with covering nutritional requirements for economic reasons produce an effect which is overlooked in this paper: The composition of the diet is usually substantially different in poor and in rich income groups, and that does not necessarily imply malnutrition, because the poorer group consumes more cheap and less expensive calories. The paper assumes that diet changes until 2050 will require an enormous increase in per capita calories demand, because of a diet shift to more animal products in replacement of vegetable ones with a 4 to 11 times larger requirement ?? Including the fodder for the animals. But when population growth and related agricultural change (for instance the change from grazing to fodder-production for livestock) cause a shift in relative prices, consumers - and not only the poor ones - shift away from the products which have been relatively more expensive.

In the last fifty years, there has been a large shift in consumption from beef to pigs, poultry and fish in many parts of the world, protein-rich vegetable food replaced (or added to) cereal consumption among poor groups, for instance in India. Also in earlier projections of food demand, FAO failed to take such substitution of products into consideration. A forecast for 1985 counted on a huge deficit of oxmeet in 1985, but a that time there was a problem of surplus disposal.

The classification of countries by type of diet in tables 6 and 7 seems to be based upon the assumption that diets are stable cultural features. But replacement of old with new food items has been a characteristic feature, both historically and today, when new products became available and economically advantageous. Ignoring all such evidence, the paper says about the results shown in the table: "These results are not very different from those obtained in 1988 [i.e. two years earlier]. Very similar results would have probably been obtained, if even older data had been taken into account ... There is therefore a certain stability of diets in developing countries, on the other hand changes in dietary of ?? countries have been observed." (pp. 20-21).

Moreover, the table divides 119 countries in 6 groups according to the major food item(s) in the diet, making averages for their food supplies by group, and compares the results to averages for each of five demographic characteristics, concluding that fertility and other demographic characteristics are related to the type of diet. But this result is obtained by grouping together countries with widely different demographic characteristics, for instance Afghanistan and Ethiopia with Argentine and Chile, because they are "wheat countries". Another example: Kenya and Malawi are grouped together with Japan, because they are "maize countries", and the importance of seafood in the Japanese diet is ignored, because seafood, like the dynamic item of poultry, is left out of the calculations. This is not serious research.

Deficient supply or deficient demand?

The gifts of food and surpluses exported to subsidized prices were mentioned above. Some developing countries, for instance India, used this opportunity to add to home supplies in the period until promotion of their own production reduced the demand for imports. But, many other developing countries, especially Africa and the Arab ones, used such imports as a means to keep food prices low in the towns, obtain government income from counterpart funds, and avoid expenses to promote their own production of food. Without the increase of food imports, the gap between the rising urban demand for food and the less rapid increase of food supplies from the rural areas, would have shifted sectoral terms of trade within food deficit countries in favour of food producers, and this might have given a flip (?) to investment in agriculture and output of food, and have restrained the rural-urban migration. This did not happen because of easy access to grants of food and to exports subsidized by the exporting countries.

Moreover, imports of cheap food reduced the market for commercial food exports from other developing countries. A team of Dutch advisors to Tanzania recommended promotion of rice and sugar production in unutilized fertile land, but was told by the Government that they knew of this possibility, but they were self-sufficient in both products, and it was impossible to export tem. Thus, the increase of food imports into developing countries cannot be explained solely as the result of increasing population pressure in these countries, factors wholly unrelated to this population pressure, i.e. farm income support, import restrictions, and export promotion of food in industrialized countries, helped to produce the large changes in the world trade in food products. As a result, subsistence producers were unable to become surplus producing commercial farmers, and landless labour had to emigrate, if they wanted to earn money incomes:

South Saharan Africa

The particularly difficult situation in South Saharan Africa is underlined throughout the paper, and within this region the peoples consuming mainly roots and tubers (dietary group 6) sticks out in tables and graphs as being in an even worse situation than any other group. Group 6 consists of 20 African countries together with Haiti. The estimates of the incidence of malnutrition in Africa are high, and the paper suggests that the combined effect of continued high population growth and eradication of malnutrition would require a five fold increase of food energy until year 2050, and a seven fold increase in dietary group 6, or an annual percentage increase of 3,6.

It is somewhat surprising that the food situation is supposed to be worst in the region where roots and tubers dominate in the diet. As stated in the paper (p. 58), "these countries generally dispose of important humid land reserves on which crops can be expanded ... In these conditions, the expansion of the cultivation of roots and tubers can constitute a solution´to their food situation". I am sure that a good part of the explanation lays in the unsatisfactory statistics in many of these countries. The main crops are subsistence crops and there are no real statistics for subsistence production, but only rough estimates, if it is not completely ignored. Since countries with the lowest income per head have the best chances for obtaining gifts and aid at favourable conditions, there is no motivation to make the statistics (except the population ones) as complex as possible.

Moreover, in some countries with large imports of American and European food grains, the urban population has changed its consumption patterns away from indigenous food, and this provides a disincentive to commercial production of these food items.

But what about malnutrition? Much malnutrition, particularly in children, is due to diarrhea and other illness, and child mortality is very high in these areas. Some tubers and roots are poor in proteins and some local diets may not contain sufficient vegetable or animal proteins. Moreover, the frequent violent conflicts between adherents of different warlords and politicians drive away many refugees unto the road and away from their usual source of food supply. This local fighting has rarely anything to do with increasing resource scarcity, it is a struggle for power between local leaders and their followers.

In regions which have been saved, at least for a time, from military conflict, increasing population density has often gone together with intensification of agriculture and increasing commercial production and incomes, as is witnessed by several recent studies (Mary Tiffin, Michael Mortimore and Francis Gichuki: More People, Less Erosion. Environmental Recovery in Kenya, Wiley 1994; B. L. Turner II, Goran Hydén, Robert Kates (eds.): Population Growth and Agricultural Change in Africa, University Press of Florida 1993; Robert McC. Netting: Smallholders, Householders, Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture, Stanford University Press 1993).

There is a tendency in the paper to identify intensification with increasing crop yields and scientific progress in agricultural research. But in Africa, there is still very large possibilities for intensification by traditional labour-intensive methods, and the producers' own efforts, if governments supply the necessary infra-structure for commercial production, and there is sufficient market either inland or in other countries at remunerative prices.

The problem of food security

I have already mentioned the growing resistance against the support policy for agriculture in the developed countries. If this support is abandoned or reduced considerably, agricultural producers in developing countries get a competitive advantage: there will be better possibilities for subsistence producers to take up remunerable commercial production for the home market or for exports, or both. But in the short run there is a great risk of food shortage in countries which have been dependent upon large scale food imports, especially if they are poor countries unable to finance food purchases in years where poor harvest in large parts of the world cause food prices to soar.

Hitherto the large surplus stocks have served as emergency stocks, but if they disappear, the exporting countries have little interest in keeping large stocks, since they gain by soaring prices in years of shortage. Therefore publicly financed emergency stocks seem the only way to provide food security for poor importing countries, financed either by the countries themselves or by the international community. In other words, the problem of food security for the poor is not one of the year

2050, but a much earlier one.

The need to choose

The need to cut budget deficits in the United States and the European Union did not only influence the attitude to agricultural support policies, but also the attitude to foreign aid and finance of international organizations. Faced with this situation, research programmes and other activities must be focused on the most important items, and desirable, but not so immediately needed activities must be delayed.

By contrast the paper, I find it "worrying" that the surplus production in the industrialized countries, that acted as a safety valve in poor harvest years and other emergencies, is being reduced without other measures being taken to avoid future hunger catastrophes among the poor in poor countries, which have become heavily dependent on large scale food imports. The FAO should give the highest priority to identifying these countries and other developing countries with unutilized export capacities, and help them to speed up their food production, so they could replace declining or disappearing imports. The focus must be, not on research and development which are likely to require decades before they yield additional output on a large scale, bur on possibilities for transfer and adaptation to local conditions that have made more progress in intensifying and expanding their agriculture than the ones with large food imports.

Hopefully, this can be done without cutting down on long term programmes aiming at a distant future, but if not, it seems to me that avoiding hunger and malnutrition in the next few decades is the highest priority.