La planète agricole et alimentaire en 2030 : quels horizons ?

Faced with the urgency of an overheating food and agricultural planet shaken on all sides by crises and shocks, it is essential to ask ourselves how the world's agri-food systems will transform by 2030. During the FARM Foundation Conference “Agriculture(s): time for mobilization” At the OECD on January 17, 2023, future transformations in demographics, geopolitics and climate change were discussed.

The world of 2030

In 2015, the UN launched theSDG 2, The 2030 goal of ending hunger, achieving food security, improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. The overall rise in food insecurity, compounded by the health crisis and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict,[1], shows how difficult these challenges will be to overcome.

Faced with the threat of hunger, concerns turn to the ability of food systems to feed a growing human population[2]. According to François Moriconi-Ebrard[3], geographer and research director at the CNRS, this growth will in the future be concentrated mainly "in Africa, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa […]. The highest fertility record is in Niger with 6.82 children per woman […]. And in some Asian countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The world population, however, tends to decrease during the century, with other territories having low fertility, such as South Korea, Japan, Europe, etc. The geographer warns more about a future marked by the urbanization of humanity. The multiplication and consolidation of giant metropolitan areas, with already "on earth 70 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants", pose the risks of an erosion of food production areas and territorial political imbalance.

This tension between the center and the greater periphery is defined by Tania Sollogoub as primordial. Economist and Head of Coordination of Emerging Countries and Geopolitical Risks at Crédit Agricole, she paints a portrait of an unstable world, organized in "archipelagos" of interdependencies. There reigns a " rising conflict over all natural and essential resources and their value chains " Indeed, controlling a resource means having the ability to lock down production chains globally. A power that countries can wield to defend their geopolitical and economic interests. Recent events have shown that agricultural resources are among those essential to a country's security.

Paxina Chileshe-Toe[4], Climate Change Adaptation Specialist at IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), paints a picture of a world in 2030 where global warming impacts territories in contrasting ways, reducing the capacity of populations to produce food in the face of droughts, more violent and unpredictable rainfall, and more frequent natural disasters.

How to adapt to these transformations?

Building resilience among agricultural and food stakeholders in this turbulent world is multifaceted. Drawing on her experience as coordinator of the Movement Scaling Up Nutrition[5] and Dutch Minister of Agriculture Gerda Verburg calls for a shift to a food system approach[6], combining agricultural and food policies with strategies in terms of " health, climate, biodiversity, education » and opening them up to collective and multi-sectoral approaches.

Tania Sollogoub also encourages greater solidarity and collaboration, in the face of a world where every man for himself tends to prevail in a race to control limited resources. She notes significant activity in terms of collaborations at the regional level, with the construction of transnational infrastructures and the signing of trade treaties, particularly in Asia.[7]However, the economist is concerned about the format taken by the effects caused by ESG (environmental, social, and governance) indicators in terms of investment direction: they favor countries with " the best levels of governance” and the infrastructure needed to achieve good scores, leaving aside disadvantaged countries, which are nevertheless more vulnerable.

For Paxina Chileshe-Toe, building the adaptive capacity of agricultural producers in rural areas impacted by climate change is based on diversifying their crops, but also their sources of income. According to her, IFAD's approach is to support the establishment of agricultural systems locally adapted to geographical conditions and community needs, by making resources and seeds adapted to local conditions accessible, improving rural infrastructure, and developing “more targeted climate risk analyses” to inform farmers about their investments.

A planet dominated by urban areas: what about rural areas?

François Moriconi-Ebrard tells us that the distribution of the human population will be marked by the formation and expansion of giant metropolitan areas. The exact boundaries of these settlement areas are blurred and changeable, and are not always controllable by states, particularly in institutional contexts where land priority is not formalized.[8]These circumstances do not make agricultural production impossible, the metropolitan area remaining dotted with cultivated areas.[9]But these compete with the construction of housing and infrastructure. François Moriconi-Ebrard sees a paradox in this. "Since the mid-1970s, international institutions have supported decentralization." in Africa, which has led to the emergence of new agglomerations and the growth of small towns, without however managing to create balanced territories, due to the lack of a local scale having " control of one's own development tools".

The absence of cities large enough to act as relays and counterbalance metropolitan power can create great tensions and lead to the impoverishment and desertification of the rural world and smaller cities. The geographer gives the example of Peru, where with “a territory of 1,250 million km2”, “a third of the population lives in Lima”The metropolitan area of Lima represents “42% of GDP”, but only “0.6% of the area” of the country.

There are numerous demographic, geopolitical, and ecological challenges that must be addressed to transform agri-food systems to sustainably feed the planet.

[1] Food insecurity soars in 20 'hunger hotspots' | UN News (un.org)

[2] Demographic Change | United Nations

[3] François MORICONI-EBRARD | E-Geopolis Institute

[4] profile (ifad.org)

[5] Working together in the fight against malnutrition in all its forms (scalingupnutrition.org)

[6] Food Systems (ifad.org)

[7] Fifteen Asian and Pacific countries sign a free trade agreement around China (lemonde.fr)

[8] UN-Habitat in brief | UN-Habitat (unhabitat.org)

[9] Metropolitan Food Areas: A Solution for Africa? – FARM Foundation (fondation-farm.org)