Future World Food Research Articles

Will China's diet follow western diets?

Whether China's diet will follow western diets or not is an important question in predicting the future world food shortage. To address this question, world dietary patterns were grouped using the principal component analysis. The results show that China's dietary pattern is indeed moving from the developing country group toward the developed country group, but its direction is not towards the U.S. China's dietary pattern is moving toward Asian developed countries' like Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong, who depend more on seafood as protein sources than the western countries. Meats are replaced partially with fish in these countries. Estimated expenditure elasticities of meats and seafood also support the above results. This is important to consider in predicting China's future meat and feed grain demand. [Econ-Lit citation: C100, O530, Q110] © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Irrigation Water Distribution along Branch Canals in Egypt: Economic Effects

Over 75% of the world's irrigated lands are found in developing countries.' Given the need to expand agricultural output to meet the growing food demands in these countries and elsewhere in the world, it is apparent that improving the efficiency of irrigated agricultural systems is an important component of agricultural development strategies. Future world food needs depend on means to improve the efficiency of water use in irrigated agriculture. Analysts of irrigated agricultural systems around the world have observed a problem common to most, if not all, irrigation projects in which the amount of water for the available land is limited. The problem is to achieve a more equitable and efficient system of allocating water among lands, crops, or users. Often, a farmer's position relative to the head of a common branch canal determines his access to water; farmers near the start of the canal may receive ample water, but those at the distant reaches of the same canal are often poorly served. In his review of the need for economic analysis of irrigation, Taylor identifies a number of studies concerned with the allocation of

Meeting World Food Needs: Food Policy and Population Growth Among the Poorest of the Poor

The current and future world food problem is centered in low income nations and among low income segments of populations world wide. The thesis of this paper is that increases in income and food production in the poorer nations and among low income segments of rural populations elsewhere are likely to aggravate that problem in the first instance. It is after some minimum level of economic well being has been attained that further increases in income will result in reduced family size.

Castles of competence.

Australian Veterinary JournalVolume 57, Issue 7 p. 341-343 Free Access CASTLES OF COMPETENCE* First published: July 1981 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-0813.1981.tb05842.x An address to Australian College of Veterinary Scientists, at Queenstown, on 13 February 1981, by R. E. W. Elliott, Assistant Director-General, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, New Zealand. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat References Hutton, J. B. (1980)— Internal Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Report. Ojala, E. M. (1980). “ New Zealand in the Future World Food Economy”, Massey Uni. Agric. Policy Paper No. 4. Volume57, Issue7July 1981Pages 341-343 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Meat Preservation on the Farm in Missouri's "Little Dixie"

LIKE DIALECT AND ARCHITECTURE, food traditions are a main component in the intricate and impulsive system that joins culture and geography into regional character. Foodways researchers document and analyze the customary ways of dealing with the generation, harvest, preservation, preparation, and consumption of food. Food traditions indicate environmental and economic forces, but they also indicate wholly cultural ones as a functional and often symbolic threading of deep-seated patterns of thought and custom. This essay describes how farm families keep meat in a part of the Midwest known to many of its residents as Little Dixie.' Such information may help us see how food traditions work within a community and how they touch our understandings of American regions. There is too little field documentation of foodways in the United States, but in folklore's expansive mood there is fresh interest from various quarters. The growing scholarly attention comes from the comparatively new areas of cultural ecology, semiotics, concern for future world food shortages, and from such expected areas as folklife studies, anthropology, historical archaeology, geography, sociology, and agricultural history.2 The folklorists and archaeologists seem to be doing the most fieldwork now, but if there is a foodways movement afoot, it treads mostly through libraries and seminar rooms. There is little in print on food preservation, but members of the American Folklore Society's foodways section are conducting research which may lead to publications, and a serious atlas project combining the energies of geographers and the folk atlas committee of the American Folklore Society plans to publish the findings of their extensive questionnaires.3 The fine European folk atlases

Constraints on Future World Food Supply — Real or Imaginary?

Constraints on Future World Food Supply — Real or Imaginary?

Problems of world food and agriculture: Projections, models and possible approaches

This article is concerned with the global implications of recent work in food and nutrition planning. It is based on the realisation that the world food situation is critical. Two distinct explanatory/ action paradigms that have been adopted by food/nutrition planners and other professional writers are identified and discussed. These approaches are then assessed in the light of forecasting techniques used to explore the future world food situation and more appropriate techniques are proposed.

The World Food Situation in Perspective

MY TASK TODAY is to set the stage for a discussion of U. S. policies and policy alternatives for food, agriculture, and trade. I shall attempt to describe the past and present and to establish a perspective from which to view the likely future world food situation. My analysis will attempt to separate the short-lived events that so often draw the greatest public attention from the persistent underlying trends that will shape world agriculture of the future. This is no easy job. What is an aberration to one man is the beginning of a new trend to another. I shall conclude by listing some of what I believe to be the most important questions and issues suggested by the analysis. In reacting to production shortfalls throughout the world in 1972, we tended to lose sight of the fact that there has been much stability in the trends for food production over the past two decades. World food production per capita trended upward during the 1954-72 period, with an annual increase of about 3/4 of 1 percent (Table 1). The drop in 1972 was the largest during this entire period. Total food production increased at about the same rate in both the developed and developing world, but the very rapid pace of population growth in the less developed regions cut the per capita increase in production to less than Y2 of 1 percent annually while the developed regions enjoyed an annual per capita increase of about 12 percent. We cannot, of course, conclude from these indices that there has been an equivalent lifting in nutrition levels everywhere or a reduction in the number of hungry people or improvement in other measures of human welfare. Still, our data indicate the world's growing potential for improving diets around the globe. Cereals comprise the most important food staple group among the high carbohydrate foods upon which most of the world's population relies for a major share of its diet. Cereals are also the major protein source, although a somewhat less important source in areas where animal products are relatively plentiful. In less developed areas, dependence on cereals for protein is especially important. But they are more than foodstuffs. According to FAO food balances for 1964-66, 48 percent of cereals produced outside Communist Asia were used for food, 38 percent for animal feed, and 14 percent for seed, starch, liquor, and other uses. We can expect the total direct food use of cereals to rise in the future as poulation grows, but use of cereal food will decline in importance to other foods as incomes rise. When we look at the total production of grain over the last two decades, we see a great difference in the performance of the developed and less developed regions. In the developed countries grain production increased more than 60 percent while planted area was nearly unchanged at something under 300 million hectares-all the increase was from higher yields. Grain production of less developed countries increased even more, almost 75 percent, but it required a '3 increase in area since yields were increasing only about Y2 as fast as in the developed regions. While the area planted to grains in both the developed and developing countries is now about equal, average grain yields in the developing countries are now only about 60 percent of those in the developed countries. Another way to look at it is that average yields in the less developed countries now equal those recorded for the developed countries in the early 1950's. Have recent events signaled a fundamental deterioration in the world food situation? Unusually poor weather in 1972 contributed to severe DON PAARLBERG is Director of Agricultural Economics, U. S. Department of Agriculture.

The world outlook for conventional agriculture. More emphasis is needed on farm price policy and plant research if future world food needs are to be met.

1) The worldwide demand for food will continue to be strong in the coming decades. Two forces-rapidly growing population and, in much of the world, rapidly rising incomes-are expected to result in increases in the demand for food even more rapid than those that have occurred during the past. 2) Conventional agriculture has assured an adequate food supply for the economically advanced one-third of the world. The challenge now is to assure an adequate food supply for the remaining two-thirds, where population is now increasing at the rate of 1 million people per week and where malnutrition is already widespread. 3) Economically feasible prospects for significantly expanding the world's area of cultivated land in the 1960's and 1970's are limited and largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon Basin. Even here, agronomic problems will limit the rate of expansion. When the cost of desalting seawater is substantially reduced-probably not before the late 1970's or early 1980's at best-it may become feasible to irrigate large areas of desert. 4) Given the limited possibilities for expanding the area of land under cultivation, most of the increases in world food needs must be met, for the foreseeable future, by raising the productivity of land already under cultivation. Food output per acre, rather static throughout most of history, has begun to increase rapidly in some of the more advanced countries in recent decades. All of the increases in food production over the past quarter century in North America, western Europe, and Japan have come from increasing the productivity of land already under cultivation. The area under cultivation has actually declined. 5) Achieving dramatic gains in land productivity requires a massive investment of capital and the widespread adoption of new technology. A similar effort must now be made in the less-developed nations if these nations are to feed their people. The most important single factor influencing this rate of investment is food prices, more particularly the relationship between the price farmers receive for their food products and the cost of modern inputs such as fertilizer. 6) In some of the more-developed countries where per-acre yields have been rising for a long time, there is now evidence that the rate of yield increase may be slowing. Nonrecurring inputs may have made their maximum contribution to output in the case of some crops, pushing yield levels past the middle of the S-shaped logistic curve. Although this cannot be determined with any certainty, the possibility that the middle of the curve has been passed in some instances should be taken into account in viewing the long-term future. 7) If the rate of increase in yield per acre does in fact begin to slow in some of the agriculturally advanced countries, additional pressure will be put on the less-developed countries-which have much of the world's unrealized food-production potential-to meet the continuing future increases in world food needs. 8) Man has not yet been able to bypass the process of photosynthesis in the production of food. This dependence on photosynthesis plays a significant role in determining the upper levels of the S-shaped yield curve. Additional research is urgently needed to increase the photosynthetic efficiency of crops and to raise the upper levels of economically feasible yields.

Fish culture in rice fields a world-wide synthesis

Fish culture in rice fields is an almost ideal method of land use, combining the production of both vegetal and animal proteins. Its development can make an important contribution to the future world food supply.

Problem of future world food supply.

Problem of future world food supply.

The British War Food Policy and the Future World Food Policy

The British War Food Policy and the Future World Food Policy