The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released two reports in June. The first was the “Food Outlook,” and the second one is for the period between 2022 and 2031. Both were prepared jointly by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the FAO.
The two black swans, namely the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, caused record increases in the global food prices index calculated by the FAO. The term "black swan" is defined as an event or a process that causes irreversible and radical changes in the world economy and politics. The record increase in prices indicates that the global food import bill could reach a new record with $1.8 trillion in 2022. The FAO reiterated that the increase in freight costs due to the disruptions in the global supply chain is also effective on this record increase in addition to the price increase due to the war.
According to FAO data, many countries that are very fragile in terms of food security are facing heavier import bills and higher food-supply risk, which is a rather worrying picture. The record leap in the FAO's global food price index indicates that the global food import bill will be $51 billion more than that of 2021. The $49 billion of this jump will be due to price and $2 billion due to freight cost increases. Many countries dependent on food imports may completely lose their resilience against higher prices at the end of 2022 and in 2023. FAO's latest forecasts suggest that global food contraction may increase and food import bills may reach even higher record levels.
According to the OECD-FAO joint report published at the end of June, it is expected that the production in Ukraine in the 2022-2023 period will decrease and that the export opportunities of both Ukraine and Russia will diminish. The report predicts that global food consumption will increase by 1.4% annually in the next 10 years, in line with the global population growth. Most of the global food demand will continue to originate from low and middle-income countries. On the other hand, in high-income countries, food demand will be limited due to low population growth and saturation in per capita consumption in various food groups.
The increasing concerns about health and the environment in high-income countries trigger a decrease in per capita sugar consumption and a low rate of growth in animal protein consumption. In middle-income countries, consumers will increase their food consumption and nutritional diversity in the next 10 years, and they will focus on animal products and fats. In low-income countries, on the other hand, the diet will continue to be largely based on basic food products. A balance between global food consumption and production in order to achieve zero hunger, one of the U.N.'s sustainable development goals (SDGs), seems impossible to achieve by 2030. Over the next 10 years, global agricultural production is expected to increase by 1.1% on an annual basis, originating from middle and low-income countries.
However, the long-term increase in the prices of agricultural inputs such as energy and fertilizers produced from energy derivatives due to the pandemic and the war may adversely affect the annual average production growth forecast of the report by significantly increasing the production costs for a few years. Meanwhile, on a global scale, direct greenhouse gas emissions originating from the agricultural sector may increase by 6% in the next 10 years, and 90% of this increase will be due to livestock. In this case, in order to achieve the zero hunger and Paris Agreement targets, the average global agricultural productivity must increase by 28% in the next 10 years. A difficult target, no doubt.
