Institute of Development Studies

What does the future hold for food and farming?

11 November 2009

Policymakers today face the immeasurable challenge of imagining what the future holds. Whether the policies they formulate now successfully improve the lives of future generations - or not - depends on how well they, and those that advise them, assess future challenges. IDS' Lawrence Haddad and Sherman Robinson are working with the Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures which is asking the question 'How can a future global population of nine billion people all be fed healthily and sustainably?'

Modelling future challenges

Foresight is part of the Government Office for Science and reports directly to the Government Chief Scientific Adviser and the Cabinet Office. Its role is to help the government think systematically about the future. There are currently six billion people living on Earth - one billion of whom are hungry - and the world's population is set to grow to nine billion by 2050. The main aim of this particular project is to consider how the global food and farming system may look by 2050, and which models could be put in place to address the future challenges.

Sherman Robinson and Lawrence Haddad, prominent development economists, have been active members of the Lead Expert Group (LEG), working alongside scientists and other academics. In the first phase of the project they have been considering the key drivers of change across the global food system and how these drivers will combine to create particular future challenges. As the project enters its second phase, they will consider how new science, policies and interventions could help address these impending challenges.

Why use models

Sponsored by the UK and US governments, a workshop is set to take place this week (9 and 10 November) at the Economic Research Service (ERS) in Washington, co-organised by Professor Robinson and Suchada Langley of the ERS. This will be the second modelling workshop to have come from the project which began in November 2008.

The workshop is entitled ‘ERS-Farm Foundation-Foresight Long Term Global Agricultural Modelling Workshop'. Attendees will be reviewing the existing global agricultural models and exploring potential links with climate change models. Sherman Robinson explained that ‘models simply reflect the current state of knowledge' he emphasised the necessity and importance of considering and discussing the current wide and varying ideas.

In explaining the theory behind modelling Robinson made the analogy that the ‘same theory of models applies to a mechanic building an aeroplane looking at what works, and what does not work. Models are formal ways of taking into account the effects of what happens in the world in an empirical way'.

Discussions at the workshop will inevitably coincide with the wide range of issues that have been identified as major factors in impacting the global food and farming system. These factors range from population, climate change and consumption to economics of globalisation - specialisation and trade, aquaculture and competition for water. Foresight states, ‘our experts will design scenarios and employ these models in order to assess vulnerabilities in the global food system, and to assess its resilience.' The project report will launch in October 2010.

 Photo: Svenn Torfinn / Panos