Issue 76: Feeding a hungry world

Much of the world's population is better fed and clothed than at any time in history. But for many millions of persons in the least-developed countries, hunger and malnutrition remain a grim reality of the present and a haunting specter of the future. For the poorest of the poor, security of food and fiber supplies is an immediate daily concern.

The citizens of the United States and many other parts of the developed world are more fortunate. Natural resource endowments mostly are bountiful in these countries and investments in science have yielded technologies to conserve resources or make them more productive when they are limited. Highly developed economic institutions have encouraged specialization and trade among countries. Public investments in education have enhanced the quality of human capital in agriculture as elsewhere in the economy. Public policies and market systems have provided strong incentives for agricultural development. Taken for granted, food security has become almost an entitlement for most Americans.

Assessing the future

The discrepancy between the developing and industrialized worlds is reason enough to try to glimpse the future and to make it better than the past. Nor is there any guarantee that U.S. problems always will be characterized by abundance. But from what vantage point do we peer ahead?

To the extent that people consider the future, they are tempted to give excessive weight to the circumstances of the moment: old lessons soon are forgotten. If relative scarcity is the present condition, people tend to see the future in the same light. When supplies are large and prices of resources relatively low, that too is projected. Agriculture, being inherently unstable, is more subject to such cyclical impressions of its future than are most industries. Witness the past decade, when forecasts ranged from near cataclysmic shortages to abundance.

Realistic perspectives of possible courses of development are essential to rational public and private planning. To assess what will happen if trends continue or change provides a basis for achieving socially desirable goals (or avoiding less-desirable outcomes). Such "indicative" or "contingency" planning is by now commonplace in business and is becoming increasingly so in governments. It is critical to both public and private investment decisions that have lengthy time horizons, and agriculture is a prime example.

This special issue of Resources, based on a report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture by RFF's Kenneth R. Farrell, Fred H. Sanderson, and Trang T. Vo, examines the future of U.S. agriculture, with primary reference to the next two decades and a more general assessment to 2020. The authors caution that their projections and assessments are based on past experience and that some trends probably will not persist as new constraints and opportunities emerge. But this is not to say that the future must merely "happen." The inability to forecast uncertainties inherent in the future should not inhibit present actions to shape its outlines.