Agriculture will always have its ups and downs, but the long-term trend is for food producers to play an increasingly more important global role.
That’s clear from the useful statistical overviews in Vital Signs 1996: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future, a recent publication of the Worldwatch Institute.
Four decades of expanding world grain production, for example, peaked at 1.78 billion tonnes in 1990, then declined to 1.68 billion last year.
Meanwhile, the world’s expanding population meant that grain production, measured on a per capita basis, fell at a much sharper rate. Whereas there were 336 kilograms of grain produced for every person in 1990, in 1995 there were only 293 kg. It wasn’t a case of the 1990 figure being extraordinarily high – 1985’s much smaller production still provided 343 kg per capita.
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Increasing demand usually brings forward greater production, but other Worldwatch figures indicate that the world’s food producers are becoming increasingly limited in their ability to expand production.
The world’s grain-producing area peaked at 732 million hectares in 1981, then declined to 666 million hectares last year. Again, on a per capita basis the drop was much sharper – from 0.16 hectare of grain land per person in 1981 to 0.12 hectare last year.
Worldwatch noted that the U.S. and Europe could over five years bring as much as 17 million hectares of land back into production from being idled under supply management or conservation programs. But even if that entire amount were brought back, the world would still not be at the 688 million hectares being farmed in 1992.
And, remorselessly, the global population keeps rising by almost 90 million people each year. Most demographers predict there will be 85 million to 90 million people added each year for the next three decades, says Worldwatch.
What all this means for Canada is a future of growing opportunities to help feed the world – not just with grain, but with pork, beef and poultry to serve the growing demand for meat. And, if Canada is competitive, more of those products can be exported in value-added forms.
To realize these opportunities, one challenge will be to conserve Canada’s agricultural resources.
Soil-conservation and land-use policies will be important, but so too will be policies to help protect the viability of family farms – protection against unfair foreign trade measures; some form of income insurance; and marketing systems that capture for producers as much as possible of the value of their commodities.
