The Global Supply and Demand for Agricultural Land in 2050: A Perfect Storm in the Making? AAEA Presidential Address

By Thomas W. Hertel. GTAP Working Paper, 2010

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past three years, there has been a convergence of interest in the global farm and food system and its contributions to feeding the world’s population as well as to ensuring the environmental sustainability of the planet. The 2007/2008 commodity crisis underscored the vulnerability of the global food system to shocks from extreme weather events, energy and financial markets, as well as government interventions in the form of export bans and other measures designed to avoid domestic adjustment to global scarcity. We have learned that a “perfect storm” in which all these factors coincide can have a devastating impact on the world’s poor, as well as putting considerable pressure on the world’s natural resource base. As we look ahead to the middle of this century, will such commodity price spikes become more commonplace? Will the world’s agricultural resource base be up to the task of meeting the diverse demands being placed on it?

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5c94cb900674f4a2cb99a789a7bb5be75f8b533

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Citations in the corpus

Challenges posed by the new wave of farmland investment (2011, background): “There is considerable debate about potential significant shifts in future demand and supply of land (Hertel 2010).”
Scarcity amidst abundance? Reassessing the potential for cropland expansion in Africa (2014, background): “Because the incentives for crop area expansion clearly depend on agricultural input and output price levels and ecological and social costs associated with land expansion, we agree with Hertel (2011) and Lambin et al. (2013) in posing the question as a function of such variables.”
Africa's changing farm size distribution patterns: the rise of medium-scale farms (2016, background): “The concept of quantifying PAC has sometimes been criticized because land available for agriculture is somewhat elastic with respect to the price of food and energy (Hertel, 2011).”
Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? (2011, background): “The scope for and desirability of land expansion For an accurate assessment of future trends in land use, it is important to look at supply as well as demand (Hertel 2010).”
The Poverty Implications of Climate-Induced Crop Yield Changes by 2030 (2010, background): “1 Agricultural price changes are a function of the total price responsiveness of the economy, including the scope for intensification of production, expansion of production into new area, as well as the price elasticity of demand (Hertel, 2011).”
Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050 (2013, background): “A portion of the production shortfall could also be met by expanding croplands, but at a high environmental cost to biodiversity and carbon emissions [4,43–45].”
Agriculture and climate change in global scenarios: why don't the models agree (2014, methodology): “Do these elasticities correspond to long-run responsiveness, or have they been calibrated to short- and medium-term responsiveness as hypothesized by Hertel (2011) who suggests that such models are overly influenced by the need to generate near-term forecasts (e.g., FAPRI, AgLink/Cosimo)?”