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Prospects for food and nutrition

2.1 The broad picture: Historical developments and present situation

2.1.1 Progress made in raising food consumption per person

Food consumption, in terms of kcal/person/day, is the key variable used for measuring and evaluating the evolution of the world food situation.1 The world has made significant progress in raising food consumption per person. It increased from an average of 2360 kcal/person/day in the mid-1960s to 2800 kcal/person/day currently (Table 2.1). This growth was accompanied by significant structural change. Diets shifted towards more livestock products, vegetable oils, etc. and away from staples such as roots and tubers (Tables 2.7, 2.8). The increase in world average kcal/person/ day would have been even higher but for the declines in the transition economies in the 1990s.

Table 2.1 Per capita food consumption (kcal/person/day)

 

1964/66

1974/76

1984/86

1997/99

2015

2030

World

2358

2435

2655

2803

2940

3050

    Developing countries

2054

2152

2450

2681

2850

2980

    Sub-Saharan Africa

2058

2079

2057

2195

2360

2540

    Near East/North Africa

2290

2591

2953

3006

3090

3170

    Latin America and the Caribbean

2393

2546

2689

2824

2980

3140

    South Asia

2017

1986

2205

2403

2700

2900

    East Asia

1957

2105

2559

2921

3 060

3190

Industrial countries

2947

3065

3206

3380

3 440

3500

Transition countries

3222

3385

3379

2906

3 060

3180

Memo items

1. World, excl. transition countries

2261

2341

2589

2795

2930

3050

2. Developing countries, excl. China

2104

2197

2381

2549

2740

2900

3. East Asia, excl. China

1988

2222

2431

2685

2830

2980

4. Sub-Saharan Africa, excl. Nigeria

2037

2076

2057

2052

2230

2420

The gains in the world average reflected predominantly those of the developing countries, given that the industrial countries and the transition economies had fairly high levels of per capita food consumption already in the mid-1960s. This overall progress of the developing countries has been decisively influenced by the significant gains made by the most populous among them. There are currently seven developing countries with a population of over 100 million. Of these, only Bangladesh remains at very low levels of food consumption. China, Indonesia and Brazil have made the transition to fairly high levels (in the range 2900-3000 kcal). In more recent years (from the late 1980s), India, Pakistan and Nigeria (but see Box 2.2) also started making progress and have now achieved middling levels of per capita food consumption after decades of near stagnation (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1
Per capita food consumption, developing countries with over 100 million population in 1997/99

An alternative way of looking at changes over the historical period is to observe the distribution of world population living in countries having given levels of kcal/person/day. The relevant data are shown in Table 2.2. In the mid-1960s, 57 percent of the population of the whole world (not only the developing countries), including both China and India, lived in countries with extremely low levels, under 2200 kcal, the great bulk of them being in countries with under 2000 kcal. At the other extreme, 30 percent of the world population (overwhelmingly in the developed countries) lived in countries with over 2700 kcal, two-thirds of these in countries with over 3000 kcal.

It was a world of very pronounced inequality, with at the bottom masses of poor, a very thin middle class and, at the other end, a sizeable group of well-to-do population. By the late 1990s, the situation had changed radically. Only 10 percent of a much larger global population now lives in countries with food consumption below 2200 kcal, while those in countries with over 2700 kcal now account for 61 percent of world population. The gains made by some of the very populous developing countries (such as China, Brazil and Indonesia, see Figure 2.1) were largely responsible for this massive upgrading of the world population towards improved levels of per capita food consumption.

Table 2.2 Population living in countries with given per capita food consumption

 

1964/66

1974/76

1984/86

1997/99

2015

2030

Kcal/person/day

Population (million)

Under 2200

1893a

2281a

558

571

462

196

2200-2500

288

307

1290b

1487b

541

837

2500-2700

154

141

1337c

222

351

352

2700-3000

302

256

306

1134

2397b

2451b

Over 3000

688

1069

1318

2464c

3425c

4392c

World total

3325

4053

4810

5878

7176

8229

a Includes India and China. b Includes India. c Includes China.

2.1.2 Failures

A significant number of countries failed to participate in this general thrust towards increasing aver-age food consumption levels. There are currently 30 developing countries where food consumption is under 2200 kcal/person/day. Figure 2.2 summarizes their historical experience: present (average 1997/99) levels are compared with the highest and lowest ones recorded in any five-year average (in order to smooth out distortions from yearly fluctuations) in the period 1961-1999. The following comments may be made about these 30 countries:

Figure 2.2
Developing countries with under 2 200 kcal in 1997/99 Highest and lowest
five-year average kcal recorded during 1961-1999

The historical evidence from these countries, particularly those that suffered severe declines from better nutritional levels in the past, is a crucial input into the analysis of the evolution of world food insecurity. War or otherwise unsettled political conditions are common characteristics in several of these countries.

Looking at the regional picture, sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Nigeria, stands out as the only region that failed to make any progress in raising per capita food consumption (Table 2.1). Not all countries of the region are in this dire food security situation. Besides Nigeria (but see Box 2.2), a number of other countries made significant progress to over 2400 kcal/person/ day (Mauritius, Mauritania, the Gambia, Ghana, Gabon, Benin and Togo) but their weight in the regional total is too small to have much effect on the total. The regional aggregate picture is dominated by the failures suffered by the larger countries. Of the 12 countries with a population of over 15 million, most have a per capita food consumption (latest five-year average 1995/99) that is lower than attained in the past - some of them much lower, e.g. the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania. Only Nigeria, Ghana and the Sudan among these larger countries have higher levels now than any past five-year average.

2.1.3 The incidence of undernourishment

The 2001 FAO assessment, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2001 (FAO, 2001a), estimates the total incidence of undernourishment in the developing countries at 776 million persons in 1997/99 (17 percent of their population, Table 2.3),3 when average food consumption reached 2680 kcal/person/day. The number of undernourished in the developing countries is estimated at 815 million (20 percent of the population) for the three-year average 1990/92. This was the base year used by the 1996 WFS in setting the target of halving the numbers undernourished in the developing countries by 2015 at the latest.

Table 2.3 Incidence of undernourishment, developing countries

 

1990/91

1997/99

2015

2030

1990/921

1997/99

2015

2030

Percentage of population

Million persons

Developing countries

20

17

11

6

815

776

610

443

    Sub-Saharan Africa

35

34

23

15

168

194

205

183

      excl. Nigeria

40

40

28

18

156

186

197

178

    Near East/North Africa

8

9

7

5

25

32

37

34

    Latin America and Caribbean

13

11

6

4

59

54

40

25

    South Asia

26

24

12

6

289

303

195

119

    East Asia

16

11

6

4

275

193

135

82

   

Undernourishment

Alternative country groups

Population
(million)

Kcal/person/day

Percentage of
population

Million persons

 

1997/99

2015

2030

1997/99

2015

2030

1997/99

2015

2030

1997/99

2015

2030

I. Countries with kcal in 2015

Under 2200 kcal
(15 countries)

289

462

671

1855

2055

2260

51

35

23

147

164

152

2200-2500 kcal
(26 countries)

358

517

676

2144

2340

2525

33

22

13

119

111

89

2500-2700 kcal
(12 countries)

257

336

395

2380

2580

2780

21

12

6

54

41

25

2700-3000 kcal
(23 countries)

1678

2171

2561

2545

2800

3000

18

9

4

302

190

109

Over 3000 kcal
(21 countries)

1972

2317

2537

3054

3200

3310

8

5

3

154

105

68

Total

4555

5804

6840

2681

2850

2980

17

11

6

776

610

443

II. Countries with percentage undernourishment2

Under 5 percent

349

1158

5129

3187

3130

3150

2

3

3

8

37

178

5-10 percent

1989

2162

524

2999

3066

2758

8

6

7

167

134

38

10-25 percent

1632

1939

948

2434

2644

2411

21

13

16

349

250

155

Over 25 percent

586

544

239

1988

2085

2149

43

35

30

251

190

72

Total

4555

5804

6840

2681

2850

2980

17

11

6

776

610

443

1 The estimates for 1990/92 given here differ a little from those used for the same period in the documents for the 1996 WFS (FAO, 1996a). This is due to the revisions after 1996 that take into account new data, mainly for population.
2 Different countries form each group in the different years.

Obviously, the decline between 1990/92 and 1997/99 has been much less than required for attaining the target (see further discussion in Box 2.5). In practice, the entire decline has come from East Asia, which is well on its way to halving undernourishment by the year 2015. In contrast, the two regions with the highest incidence in relative terms (percentage of population), sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, both registered increases in the absolute numbers affected. If these trends continue, the halving target will certainly not be achieved and whatever other reductions take place will further accentuate the differences among regions and countries.

Changes in the incidence of undernourishment are close correlates of changes in food consumption levels (kcal/person/day), as explained in Box 2.1. The historical data in Table 2.1 show that food consumption levels have improved greatly for most regions over the last three decades. It can be deduced that such improvement must have been accompanied by a lowering of the incidence of undernourishment to the current 17 percent. By implication, the incidence of undernourishment must have been much higher in the past, e.g. in the mid-1960s when there were only 2055 kcal/ person/day on average in the developing countries. However, it is unlikely that the absolute numbers of persons undernourished declined by much, given that over the same period (1964/66 to 1997/99) the population of the developing countries doubled from 2.3 billion to 4.6 billion.

Box 2.1 Measuring the incidence of undernourishment:
the key role of the estimates of food available for direct human consumption1

The key data used for estimating the incidence of undernourishment are those of food available for direct human consumption. These data are derived in the framework of the national food balance sheets (FBS). The latter are constructed on the basis of countries' reports on their production and trade of food commodities, after estimates and/or allowances are made for non-food uses and for losses. The population data are used to express these food availabilities in per capita terms. The resulting numbers are taken as proxies for actual national average food consumption. For many countries the per capita food consumption thus estimated of the different commodities (expressed in kcal/person/day) are totally inadequate for good nutrition, hence the relatively high estimates of the incidence of undernourishment reported for them, most recently in FAO (2001a).

This conclusion is inferred from a comparison of the estimated kcal/person/day shown in the FBS data with what would be required for good nutrition. The parameters for the latter are well known, although not devoid of controversy. In the first place, there is the amount of food (or dietary) energy that is needed for the human body to function (breathe, pump blood, etc.) even without allowing for movement or activity. This is the basal metabolic rate (BMR). It is in the general range of 1300-1700 kcal/day for adults in different conditions (age, sex, height, bodyweight). Taking the age/sex structure and bodyweights of the adult populations of the different developing countries, their national average BMRs for adults are defined. These refer to the amount of energy as a national average per adult person that must be actually absorbed if all were in a state of rest. For children, in addition to the BMR, an allowance is made for growth requirements.

When an allowance for light activity is added - estimated to be about 54 percent of the BMR - this results in a range of between 1720 kcal and 1960 kcal person/day for the different developing countries, given their population structures in 1997/99. This will rise to 1760-1980 kcal by 2030 when the demographic structure will be different, with a higher proportion of adults. It follows that population groups in which an average individual has an intake below this level (the threshold) are undernourished because they do not eat enough to maintain health, bodyweight and to engage in light activity. The result is physical and mental impairment, characteristics that are evidenced in the anthropometric surveys. Estimating the incidence of undernourishment means estimating the proportion of population with food intakes below these thresholds. It is noted that the notion, measurement and definition of thresholds of requirements are not devoid of controversy. For example, Svedberg (2001, p. 12) considers that the thresholds used in the FAO measurement of undernourishment for the tropical countries are too high, leading to overestimates of the incidence of undernourishment.

In principle, a country having national average kcal/person/day equal to the threshold would have no undernourishment problem provided all persons engage in only light activity and each person had access to food exactly according to his/her respective requirements. However, this is never the case; some people consume (or have access to) more food than their respective«light activity» requirements (e.g. because they engage in more energy-demanding work or simply overeat) and other people less than their requirement (usually because they cannot afford more). Thus, an allowance must be made for such unequal access. Empirical evidence suggests that the inequality measure used in these estimates - the coefficient of variation (CV) - ranges from 0.2 to 0.36 in the different countries (a CV of 0.2 means, roughly, that the average difference of the food intake of individuals from the national average - the standard deviation - is 20 percent of the average). Even at the lowest level of inequality generally found in the empirical data (CV=0.2), the national average kcal/person/day must be well above the threshold if the proportion of population undernourished is to be very low. For example, a country with threshold 1800 kcal and CV=0.20, must have a national average of 2700 kcal/person/day if the proportion undernourished is to be only 2.5 percent, or 2900 if it is to be 1 percent. Naturally, if inequality were more pronounced, these requirements would be higher (see Fig. 2.4).

These numbers, or norms, are, therefore, a first guide to assessing the adequacy or otherwise of the national average food consumption levels in the FBS data and expressed in kcal/person/day. This latter number is the principal variable used to generate estimates of the incidence of undernourishment as explained elsewhere (FAO, 1996b).2 Numerous countries fall below the national average energy level (kcal/person/day) required for undernourishment to be very low, in many cases they fall below by considerable margins. Therefore, even if one knew nothing more about the incidence of undernourishment, the inevitable conclusion for these countries is that the incidence must be significant, ranging from moderate to high or very high in the different countries, even when inequality of access to food is moderate. It follows that progress towards reducing or eliminating undernourishment must manifest itself, in the first place, in the form of increased per capita food consumption. Naturally, this is not equivalent to saying that the food consumption shown in the FBS data is itself a variable that can be operated upon directly by policy. For it to rise, somebody must consume more food, and the food must come from somewhere - production or imports. The policies to raise national average consumption are those that enhance the purchasing power and more general access to food of those who would consume more if they had the means, for example, access to resources and technologies to improve their own food production capacities, access to non-farm employment and social policies. The point made here is that changes in the national average kcal/person/day recorded in the FBS data do signal the direction and magnitude of movement towards improved or worsened food security status. This is shown graphically in Fig. 2.4.

How reliable are the FBS data, since in many cases they show very low or very high levels of national average food consumption or sudden spurts or collapses? The answer is: they are as reliable as the primary data on production and trade supplied by the countries, as well as the population data used to express them in per capita terms (see Box 2.2). It is these data that are processed, in the form of the FBS, to derive the indicators of per capita food consumption as national averages used here. Given the primary data, the conclusion that many countries are in a difficult food security situation follows logically and inevitably.

1 Reproduced with amendments from FAO (1996a).
2 These key variables (kcal/person/day and the CV) are used as parameters of the lognormal statistical distribution (with kcal/person/day as the mean) to estimate the percentage of population undernourished.

Figure 2.4
Paths of change in undernourishment: raising average consumption versus reducing inequality

Box 2.2 Data problems and the estimation of undernourishment:
the case of Nigeria

In this chapter, Nigeria is singled out as being one of the most populous developing countries, and an exception in sub-Saharan Africa. Along with China, Indonesia, etc., Nigeria has been making progress in raising significantly its per capita food consumption and, by implication, in reducing the incidence of undernourishment. This was not so in earlier projection work (Alexandratos, 1995), nor was it considered that Nigeria could be making significant progress by 2010. At the time of the earlier exercise (1992/93), Nigeria's population was reported in the 1990 UN Assessment (UN, 1991) as being 105 million in the base year of the projections, the three-year average 1988/90. With this population and its food production and trade data, the FBS indicated per capita food consumption of 2200 kcal in 1988/90. These data implied that Nigeria was in a dire food security situation, just like most other countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Under these initial conditions, and given the very high growth rate of population (projected at 3.15 percent p.a. to reach 201 million by 2010), one could not have been optimistic about the prospects for significant improvements. Even as late as 1996, Nigeria was given as having 43 million undernourished in 1990/92 (38 percent of its population) in the documentation of the 1996 WFS (FAO, 1996c).

The drastic revisions of Nigeria's population estimates came successively after 1996. By the time of the 2000 UN Assessment (UN, 2001a), the population estimate for 1988/90 had been reduced to 83.5 million and the 2010 projection to 147 million (having passed through a projection of 139 million for 2010 in the 1998 Assessment), a growth rate of«only» 2.73 percent p.a. These new data and projections put the assessment of present and future food security prospects of Nigeria in an entirely different light. Ceteris paribus, the downward revision of the population by 20 percent for 1988/90 should have raised per capita food consumption for that year, from 2200 to 2765 kcal. Yet this was not the case. The reason is that there have also been drastic revisions in the production data for some major food crops of Nigeria. For the 1988/90 average, the production of roots and tubers (which in the unrevised data provided over one-third of the national average calories) was reduced by 38 percent. In parallel, the production of maize was revised upwards no less than 165 percent. The end result is that the revised average kcal consumption for 1988/90 was 2300, only about 5 percent higher than the previous estimate.

The FBS for the most recent years suggest that Nigeria, after about the mid-1980s, made really spectacular progress and broke out of the long-term pattern of stagnation in per capita food consumption typical of the majority of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It moved from 2 050 kcal in 1984/86 (and the 2 300 revised kcal for 1988/90) to 2815 kcal in 1997/99, implying that undernourishment fell to 7.6 million persons, or 7 percent of the population (FAO, 2001a). Fifty percent of the increase in kcal/person/day came from roots/tubers, 12 percent from maize, 11 percent from rice and 17 percent from oilcrops (rapid production increases of groundnuts, soybeans, cotton seed). Production of all these crops registered three- to sixfold increases in the period from the mid-1980s to 1997/99. If these data are correct, we have a case of a large country registering growth of aggregate food consumption, measured in calories, of 5.4 percent p.a. for over ten years (1984/86-1997/99). At first glance, such rapid growth in food demand/consumption (and associated drastic reduction in undernourishment) would seem to be at variance with what one would expect from movements in other indices of the overall economy, e.g. per capita income. There was no economic miracle of the«Asian tiger» type in Nigeria during this period to explain the phenomenon. The country's per capita income was actually falling in the period 1984-99 (the gross domestic income [GDY] was growing at 2.1 percent p.a. when population was growing at 2.9 percent p.a.; data from the World Bank, 2001b). Nigeria is sometimes given as an example of the wider problem of development failures of sub-Saharan Africa (see The Economist, 2000).

One possible explanation for these trends in Nigeria is the rapid growth of food-crop agriculture, which probably has a large subsistence component, particularly in the roots and tubers sector which, as noted, accounted for 50 percent of the improvement1 (see also Chapter 3, Section on roots and tubers). Before we jump to any conclusions concerning the wider potential for food security improvements based predominantly on agriculture, there is an obvious need to validate the primary data on production as well as to find corroborating evidence (e.g. from surveys) that the improvements in consumption suggested by the FBS are real. If these developments proved to be true, they would imply that rapid progress in food-crop production and demand could be made, at least for some time, even when developments in the overall economy would suggest otherwise. Some data on poverty seem to lend support to this proposition. Rural poverty in Nigeria is reported to have declined from 49.5 percent in 1985 to 36.4 percent in 1992/93 and urban poverty from 31.7 percent to 30.4 percent (percentage of population below the national poverty line, World Bank, 2001b, Table 2.6). This was the period of the quantum jumps in food-crop production and consumption (from 2 030 to 2 660 kcal/person/day) according to the FBS data, while the overall economy was not doing particularly well with growth in GDY being only slightly above that of population.2 These findings provide some foundation for drawing tentative lessons about the food security future of the many developing countries with high dependence on agriculture and no buoyant economic growth prospects (see Section 2.2.3, below).

1 The numbers for apparent demand/consumption result largely from the production statistics, hence this explanation, being tautological, crumbles if the production statistics are unreliable.
2 It may be that Nigeria is a special case because of the heavy dependence of the economy on petroleum exports. This could have made for divergent trends between major economy-wide variables such as GDY (which is GDP-corrected for external terms of trade losses/gains, a correction of particular relevance for countries deriving a good part of their income from oil exports) and the food security of the majority of the population whose access to food depends more directly on local production of staples.

2.2 The outlook for food and nutrition to 2015 and 2030

2.2.1 Demographics

The latest United Nations assessment of world population prospects (UN, 2001a) indicates that a rather drastic slowdown in world demographic growth is likely. The data and projections are shown in Table 2.4. The world population of 5.9 billion of our base year (the three-year average 1997/99) and the 6.06 billion of 2000 will grow to 7.2 billion in 2015, 8.3 billion in 2030 and 9.3 billion in 2050. The growth rate of world population peaked in the second half of the 1960s at 2.04 percent p.a. and had fallen to 1.35 percent p.a. by the second half of the 1990s. Further deceleration will bring it down to 1.1 percent in 2010-15, to 0.8 percent in 2025-30 and to 0.5 percent by 2045-50.

Table 2.4: Population and GDP data and projections

 

Population

Million

Annual increments (Million)

1964
/66

1974
/76

1984
/86

1997
/99

2015

2030

1995
-2000

2010
-2015

2025
-2030

2045
-2050

World (UN)

3334

4065

4825

5900

7207

8270

79

76

67

43

World (countries with FBS*)

3325

4053

4810

5878

7176

8229

78

76

66

43

Developing countries

2295

2925

3597

4572

5827

6869

74

74

66

45

    Sub-Saharan Africa

230

299

400

574

883

1229

15

20

24

23

    Near East/North Africa

160

208

274

377

520

651

8

9

9

7

    Latin America and Caribbean

247

318

397

498

624

717

8

7

6

3

    South Asia

630

793

989

1283

1672

1969

23

22

19

12

    East Asia

1029

1307

1537

1839

2128

2303

20

16

9

-1

Industrial countries

695

761

815

892

951

979

5

2

1

0

Transition countries

335

367

397

413

398

381

0

-1

-1

-2

 

Growth rates, percentage p.a.

Population

Total GDP

Per capita GDP

1969
-99

1979
-99

1989
-99

1997/99
-2015

2015
-2030

1997/99
-2015

2015
-2030

1997/99
-2015

2015
-2030

1997/99
-2030

World

1.7

1.6

1.5

1.2

0.9

3.5

3.8

2.3

2.9

2.6

Developing countries

2.0

1.9

1.7

1.4

1.1

5.1

5.5

3.7

4.4

4.0

    Sub-Saharan Africa

2.9

2.9

2.7

2.6

2.2

4.4

4.5

1.8

2.3

2.0

    Near East/North Africa

2.7

2.6

2.4

1.9

1.5

3.7

3.9

1.8

2.4

2.1

    Latin America and Caribbean

2.1

1.9

1.7

1.3

0.9

4.1

4.4

2.8

3.5

3.1

    South Asia

2.2

2.1

1.9

1.6

1.1

5.5

5.4

3.9

4.3

4.1

    East Asia

1.6

1.5

1.2

0.9

0.5

6.1

6.3

5.3

5.8

5.5

Industrial countries

0.7

0.7

0.7

0.4

0.2

3.0

3.0

2.6

2.8

2.7

Transition countries

0.6

0.5

0.1

-0.2

-0.3

3.7

4.0

4.0

4.3

4.1

Despite the drastic fall in the growth rate, the absolute annual increments continue to be large. Seventy-nine million persons were added to the world population every year in the second half of the 1990s and the number will not have decreased much by 2015. Even by 2025-30 annual additions will still be 67 million. It is only by the middle of the century that these increments will have fallen significantly, to 43 million per year in 2045-50. Practically all these increases will be in the developing countries. Within the developing countries themselves, there will be increasing differentiation. East Asia will have a growth rate of only 0.4 percent p.a. in the last five years of the projection period. At the other extreme, sub-Saharan Africa's population will still be growing at 2.1 percent p.a. in the same period 2025-30, despite the drastic downward revision made in recent years in the region's population projections.4 By that time every third person added annually to the world population will be in that region. By 2050, every second person of the 43 million added annually to the world population will be in sub-Saharan Africa.

The new population projections represent a rather fundamental change in the assumptions underlying this and other studies of food and agriculture futures. When our earlier projections study to 2010 (Alexandratos, 1995) was being produced in 1992-93, we were working with a world population projection of 7.2 billion for 2010. The new projections indicate 6.8 billion for the same year, 400 million fewer people. In principle, the lower population projection used now should make for lower growth of demand and production, ceteris paribus. Naturally, other things (incomes, poverty, pressures on resources and the environment) are not expected to be equal; slower demographic growth itself will be a factor for change, for example if it contributes to higher incomes. In this exercise, we assume that whatever effects slower population growth has on the overall economy have already been taken into account in the derivation of the income (or GDP) growth assumptions (see below). The latter, just like the demographic projections, are assumptions exogenous to the food and agriculture projections proper. This is not entirely as it should be, but practical reasons preclude any explicit consideration of the interactions between population growth and development (Box 2.3).

Box 2.3 Scenarios with alternative population projections

The issue of population-development interactions assumes particular importance if one wishes to explore scenarios of food and agriculture futures under alternative population projections. The demographic projections we use in this study are those of the United Nations Medium Variant. There are also High and Low Variants of future population. They suggest that the world population could be in the range of 7.0-7.4 billion by 2015 and by 2030 in the range 7.7-8.9 billion. Projecting the food and agricultural variables for these other population variants is not just a simple matter of scaling up or down the magnitudes projected under the Medium Variant population scenario. For example, world demand and production of cereals are projected to be 2.84 billion tonnes in 2030, or 344 kg per capita. We cannot just assume that under the High Variant population projection it will still be 344 kg, raising aggregate demand and production to 3.06 billion tonnes. If we did, it would be like saying that population growth does not matter for human welfare since per capita consumption (hence, in principle also per capita income) remains the same.

Such an approach would ignore the whole population-development debate concerning the positive or negative impacts of population growth on human welfare. Taking them into account requires that we estimate (or at least express a view) for each country what such impacts will be, i.e. in what direction and by how much the projected incomes will be different from those in the medium population scenario. We cannot simply adopt a blanket assumption for all countries that either: (i) total GDP growth will be the same, in which case it would mean that population growth is immiserizing because the higher it is, the lower the per capita income; or (ii) per capita income growth will be the same, implying that the population growth rate does not affect income growth. In some countries the effects may be positive, in others negative. Given the great diversity of situations existing in the world, all sorts of permutations between the growth rates of population and other variables are possible.1 Doing estimates for over 100 countries can be an impossible task, and this would only be the first step in the work required for estimating scenarios with alternative population projections. The great bulk of the additional work would come from revisiting the country-by-country evaluations of such things as nutritional consistency of a new set of consumption projections, or the agronomic considerations (land, water, yields, etc.) underlying the projections of production. These operations are not done mechanically by a model. They involve fairly detailed reviews by country and subject-matter specialists in an interdisciplinary context.

1 For example, in countries which shift to higher population growth rates mainly because of improvements in mortality and life expectancy, such higher rates would probably be indicators of improving economic and social conditions and should be associated with higher, not lower, per capita income. Similar considerations can be relevant for countries facing acute problems of rapidly ageing populations. The opposite case can be made for very poor countries with high population growth rates. A balanced view on the latter seems to be the following:«A slowing of rapid population growth is likely to be advantageous for economic development, health, food availability, housing, poverty, the environment, and possibly education, especially in poor, agrarian societies facing pressure on land and resources» (Ahlburg, 1998). For latest views on this topic see Population and Development Review (2001).

2.2.2 Overall economy and poverty

The latest World Bank assessment for the period 2000-15 takes account of the most recent data and views concerning the current (end-2001) slowdown in the world economy. Relatively slow growth in the first five years of the projection period is expected to be followed by faster growth in the subsequent ten years, 2005-15. The current assessment (World Bank, 2001c, Table 1.7) is definitely less optimistic than that of a year earlier (World Bank, 2001a, Table 1.6). Still, it indicates that for the whole period 2000-15 world economic growth is expected to be higher (1.9 percent p.a. in terms of per capita GDP) than in the 1990s (1.2 percent p.a.). Higher growth rates in per capita GDP than in the 1990s is foreseen for all regions and country groups (particularly the reversal of declines in the transition economies) with the exception of East Asia. These medium-term projections of the World Bank are shown in Figure 2.3. Earlier versions of these World Bank projections have provided the basis for defining the GDP projections used as exogenous assumptions in the present study. They are shown in Table 2.4.

Figure 2.3
Growth rates of per capita GDP, 1990s and 2000-15

There is great contrast in the prospects of the two regions with high relative concentrations of poverty and food insecurity, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; in the former, a continuation of the relatively high GDP growth holds promise of positive impact on poverty alleviation and increases in food consumption (see below). However, progress may be very limited in sub-Saharan Africa, with per capita incomes growing at only 1.3 percent p.a. in the period to 2015, according to the latest World Bank study (World Bank, 2001c). This is certainly better than in the past which was characterized by declining incomes. However, it will be far from sufficient to make a significant dent on poverty and food insecurity.

The exogenous economic growth assumptions used here, together with the growth of population, are the major determinants of projected food consumption,5 hence also of the incidence of undernourishment. One of the important questions we shall be asking below is the extent to which such projected food demand will be associated with reductions in undernourishment. Since undernourishment is more often than not closely correlated with poverty, it is relevant to ask to what extent the economic growth and development outlook used as exogenous assumptions is compatible with poverty reduction.

The World Bank has estimated what the baseline economic growth projections may imply for poverty reduction in the year 2015. Their estimates are shown in Table 2.5. They refer to what is commonly known as US$1/day poverty, i.e. the number of persons living in households with per capita expenditure under US$1/day, with dollars defined in units of purchasing power parity (PPP). (For more discussion on concepts and goals relating to poverty, see Chapter 8.) These poverty projections imply that:



Table 2.5: Estimates and projections of poverty (US$1/day, World Bank, baseline scenario)

 

Million persons

Percentage of population

1990

1999

2015

1990

1999

2015

Developing countries

1269

1134

749

32.0

24.6

13.2

    Sub-Saharan Africa

242

300

345

47.7

46.7

39.3

    Middle East and North Africa

6

7

6

2.4

2.3

1.5

    Latin America and Caribbean

74

77

60

16.8

15.1

9.7

    South Asia

495

490

279

44

36.9

16.7

    East Asia

452

260

59

27.6

14.2

2.8

Memo items

East Asia, excl China

92

46

6

18.5

7.9

0.9

Developing, excl. China

909

920

696

32.2

27.3

16.4

Source: Adapted from World Bank (2001c), Table 1.8. The definition of regions is not always identical to that used in this study, e.g. Turkey is not included in the developing Middle East/North Africa and South Africa is included in the developing sub-Saharan Africa.



continued


1 The more correct term for this variable would be«national average apparent food consumption», since the data come from the national food balance sheets rather than from consumption surveys. The term«food consumption» is used in this sense here and in other chapters.
2 The data used in Figure 2.2 refer to the aggregate Ethiopia and Eritrea, because there are no data for making historical comparisons for the two countries separately.
3 The term«undernourishment» is used to refer to the status of persons whose food intake does not provide enough calories to meet their basic energy requirements. The term«undernutrition» denotes the status of persons whose anthropometric measurements indicate the outcome not only, or not necessarily, of inadequate food intake but also of poor health and sanitation - conditions that may prevent them from deriving full nutritional benefit from what they eat (FAO, 1999a, p.6).
4 It is tempting to think that a lower population growth rate in the low-income countries where population growth is high would be contributing to improved development. However, in the current projections, the reduced population growth rate is not always a harbinger of good things to come, because in some cases it occurs, at least in part, for the wrong reasons. This is the case of demographic slowdown because of increases in mortality and/or declines in life expectancy, either in relation to present values or to those that would otherwise be in the projections. In the current projections, such cases of increased mortality and reduced life expectancy caused by the AIDS epidemic are a rather significant component of the projected slowdown. Thus, for the 45 most affected countries, the expectation of life at birth by 2015 is projected to stand at 60 years, five years lower than it would have been in the absence of HIV/AIDS (UN, 2001a).
5 Many other factors besides population and average GDP growth influence the demand for food and have to be taken into account in the process of all phases of analytical and evaluation work concerning nutrition, production and trade. See, for example, Box 2.2 (Nigeria) concerning issues involved in understanding the factors that influence changes in apparent food consumption.


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