On October 29th, 2014, INAI (Instituto para las negociaciones agricolas internacionales) hosted their first conference on Agricultural Projections at the Cereals Exchange in Buenos Aires. INAI invited representatives from IFPRI and FAO, institutions specializing in Agricultural Projections and Foresight, and major agriculture exporting countries (USA and Brazil) to present their work and perspectives on agriculture in the future. These presentations were meant to provide context to the work done at INAI in creating an economic model focusing on Argentina and the release of INAI’s first 10 year baseline projections.
Overall, the presentations focused on the critical role that South America, and in particular Argentina and Brazil will play in the future in meeting the increasing demand for food and agricultural products that will arise from potentially an additional 2 billion people globally by 2050. Daniel Mason-D’Croz presented IFPRI work which investigates the role of future agricultural technologies in ensuring that the world’s food production system can continue to meet demand under and increasingly constrained world. He highlighted results, published earlier in 2014, in the book Food Security in a world of natural resource scarcity as well as upcoming analysis from the Global Futures and Strategic Foresight project considering the effects of 17 potential agriculture technologies. These bodies of work both suggest the important role that specific technologies can play in increasing agricultural productivity, and resource use efficiency. These 2 studies show the importance these technologies can play not only in mitigating the negative effects of climate change through greater resiliency to adverse weather shocks (due to drought and heat tolerance), but also in allowing for sustainable intensification through greater production while using less water, land, and fertilizer. The results suggest how investment in specific agricultural technologies can pay large dividends not only through greater agricultural production, but also through reducing pressure on the environment by reducing the potential agricultural footprint.
On October 30 a technical workshop was held, where groups interested in agricultural modeling from FAO, IFPRI, INAI, and local stakeholders discussed some of the challenges of economic modeling and of developing baseline projections. First there was a discussion of the requirements and challenges of developing a CGE model for Argentina, led by Valeria Piniero and Antoine Bouet of IFPRI’s MIRAGE modeling team. The second half of the technical workshop focused on partial equilibrium models where INAI invited FAO and IFPRI to present their respective models and open a discussion on methods of developing agriculture projections.
For more information, please contact Daniel Mason-D'Croz (IFPRI).
