World food and agriculture to 2030/50: How do climate change and bioenergy alter the long-term outlook for food, agriculture and resource availability?

Accumulating scientific evidence has alerted international and national awareness to the urgent need to mitigate climate change. Meanwhile, increasing and reoccurring extreme weather events devastate more and more harvests and livelihoods around the world. Biofuels development has received increased attention in recent times as a means to mitigate climate change, alleviate global energy concerns and foster rural development. Its perceived importance in these three areas has seen biofuels feature prominently on the international agenda. Nevertheless, the rapid growth of biofuels production has raised many concerns among experts worldwide, in particular with regard to sustainability issues and the threat posed to food security. As recent events have shown, a number of factors including the adoption of mandatory biofuels policies, high crude oil prices, increasing global food import demand, below average harvests in some countries and low levels of world food stocks resulted in sudden and substantial increases in world food prices. The consequences were food riots around the world from Mexico to Haiti to Mauritania to Egypt to Bangladesh. Estimates indicate that high food prices increased the number of food insecure people by about 100 million. This paper presents an integrated agro-ecological and socio-economic spatial global assessment of the interlinkages of emerging biofuels developments, food security, and climate change. The explicit purpose is to quantify as to what extent climate change and expansion of biofuel production may alter the long-term outlook for food, agriculture and resource availability developed by the FAO in its Agriculture Toward 2030/50 assessment