Bruno Dorin

Agrimonde. Scenarios and challenges for feeding the world in 2050

How will the world be able to feed close to 9 billion people in 2050 and still maintain the ecosystems? The 21st century has three challenges to meet concerning food and agriculture: food security in terms of both quantity and quality; protection of the environment and natural resources; and the increasing scarcity of fossil energies. In this perspective, INRA and CIRAD launched the initiative, in 2006, to develop a foresight project for analysing issues pertaining to the worlds food and agricultural systems on the 2050 timeline. The main objective was to anticipate the key issues with which tomorrows agricultural research will have to grapple. This book provides a synthetic presentation and illustrations of the main conclusions that this foresight project has yielded. First, it recapitulates the main statistical references for the period 1961 to 2003, before going on to describe the Agribiom simulation tool used to calculate food biomass resource-use balances. Two scenarios on the 2050 timeline are then considered: Agrimonde GO is a trend-based scenario that bets on economic growth to feed the world, in a context where environmental protection is not a priority. In contrast, the idea in Agrimonde 1 is to feed the world while preserving its ecosystems. This scenario explores assumptions that depart from current trends, and foresees a world in 2050 that has been able to implement sustainable agricultural and food systems. The aim is to afford a better understanding of the meaning of such development, with the dilemmas and the main challenges that it entails. This rigorous synthetic book will be of interest to decision-makers, professionals in the agricultural, environmental and food sectors, and anyone involved in research.

Agribiom: A Tool for Scenario-Building and Hybrid Modelling

Agribiom is a quantitative tool devoted to the analysis of the world’s production, trade and use of biomass. Its construction was initiated in early 2006 at CIRAD, with the aim of creating a tool for use in collective scenario-building, such as the Agrimonde project, and in hybrid modelling exercises.

Agrimonde: A platform for facilitating collective scenario-building

Between 2006 and 2008, the Agrimonde Expert Panel focused on building two scenarios. In the first, “Agrimonde 1”, we imagined a food and agricultural system designed to be sustainable by 2050. The aim was to explore the conditions required for achievement, the dilemmas and the main challenges that such a scenario entails. “Agrimonde GO”, the second scenario, is more trend-based. It consists of an application of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) Global Orchestration scenario (MA, Millennium ecosystem assessment, 2005b) into a food and agriculture scenario, whereas the MA built this scenario as a description of one of the possible futures of ecosystem management.

The Nexus Land-Use Model, An Approach Articulating Biophysical Potentials and Economic Dynamics to Model Competition for Land-Uses

Interactions between food demand, biomass energy and forest preservation are driving both food prices and land-use changes, regionally and globally. This study presents a new model called Nexus Land-Use which describes these interactions through a generic representation of agricultural intensification mechanisms. The Nexus Land-Use model equations combine biophysics and economics into a single coherent framework to calculate crop yields, food prices, and resulting pasture and cropland areas within 12 regions inter-connected with each other by international trade. The representation of cropland and livestock production systems in each region relies on three components: (i) a biomass production function derived from the crop yield response function to inputs such as industrial fertilisers ; (ii) a detailed representation of the livestock production system subdivided into an intensive and an extensive component, and (iii) a spatially explicit distribution of potential (maximal) crop yields prescribed from the Lund-Postdam-Jena global vegetation model for managed Land (LPJmL). The economic principles governing decisions about land-use and intensification are adapted from the Ricardian rent theory, assuming cost minimisation for farmers. The land-use modelling approach described in this paper entails several advantages. Firstly, it makes it possible to explore interactions among different types of demand for biomass for food and animal feed, in a consistent approach, including indirect effects on land-use change resulting from international trade. Secondly, yield variations induced by the possible expansion of croplands on less suitable marginal lands are modelled by using regional land area distributions of potential yields, and a calculated boundary between intensive and extensive production. The model equations and parameter values are first described in detail. Then, idealised scenarios exploring the impact of forest preservation policies or rising energy price on agricultural intensification are described, and their impacts on pasture and cropland areas are investigated.