Sandrine Paillard

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.

Agrimonde 1 and Agrimonde GO: Comparison, Coherence, Drivers of Change

This chapter examines the quantitative scenarios built, so as to define their qualitative dimensions, left undetermined by the quantitative analysis. Initially, for each region and globally, the scenarios were tested for their internal coherence and conclusions were drawn from their comparison. The aim was to establish whether, on both a regional and global scale, the quantitative assumptions for the different variables make it possible to put together truly coherent scenarios, that is, compatible with the principles chosen initially, particularly the principle of sustainability in the case of the Agrimonde 1 scenario. Comparison of the two scenarios (Agrimonde 1 and Agrimonde GO) enables us to oppose two very different strategies, both of which (theoretically) allow for a food resource-use balance on a global scale, as shown in Chap. 8.