Agriculture and food security in Asia by 2030

Rapid trade-led economic growth in emerging economies has been shifting the global economic and industrial centres of gravity away from the north Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia in world trade but also altering the commodity composition of trade by Asia and other regions. The industrial boom that began with Japan in the 1950s and Korea and Taiwan from the late 1960s has spread to the much more populous ASEAN region, China and India. Meanwhile, there have been agricultural export booms in some other emerging economies, most notably Brazil. This paper examines how those economies’ growth and associated structural changes are altering the world’s agricultural markets in particular and thereby food security. It does so retrospectively and by projecting a model of the world economy which compares alternative growth strategies and trade policy scenarios through to 2030. Projected impacts on global agricultural trade are considered, followed by effects on agricultural self-sufficiency and real food consumption per capita. The paper concludes by drawing implications for policies that can address more efficiently concerns about national and global food security and rural-urban income disparity than the trade policy measures used by earlier-industrializing Northeast Asia