We have come to a major crossroads for the world food situation. On the one hand, without significant changes in policies, public investments, and institutions, we simply will not achieve the 1996 World Food Summit goal--reaffirmed at the 2000 Millennium Summit and again last year at the World Food Summit: five years later--of reducing the number of our fellow human beings who are food insecure by at least half by no later than 2015. On the other hand, there are some encouraging indications that policymakers in both low- and high-income countries have heard this message and are prepared to do something about it.

Over the past two decades, the world has made remarkable progress in increasing food production and reducing food insecurity. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of food-insecure people in developing countries fell from 920 million in 1980 to 799 million in 1999 (the last year for which data are available), while the proportion of people living in food insecurity dropped substantially, from 28 to 17 percent. Moreover, global food production at present would be sufficient to provide everyone with his or her minimum calorie needs if the available food were distributed according to need.

But progress slowed considerably during the 1990s. And if China is excluded from consideration, the number of food-insecure people in the rest of the developing world increased by 50 million during the course of the decade (Figure 1). In Sub-Saharan Africa, the population living in hunger jumped nearly 20 percent, with 30 million more food-insecure people by the end of the decade.

Today we must recognize that incremental improvement in the world food situation is a more challenging task than what we have faced in the past. Freeing the next 400 million people from hunger will require more complex investments, innovations, and policy actions than those needed to free the previous 400 million people. As a result the goal of cutting hunger and achieving a food-secure world poses an increasingly complex research agenda for the CGIAR and its partners.

Moreover, new evidence suggests that the task may be larger than previously thought. IFPRI is working on a new approach to measuring food insecurity that goes beyond the current methodology based on national food availability data. We draw, in addition, on nationally representative surveys that gather information directly at the household level--the level at which access to food actually takes place. Preliminary results from this work are available for 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. In 7 of those countries, the new method shows a significantly higher food-insecure population, whereas in the others, the results are about the same. So the situation may be even worse than estimates based on food availability suggest.

Furthermore, hunger has dimensions beyond insufficient calorie intake. Hidden hunger due to micronutrient deficiencies poses a huge global health problem. The scope is reasonably well known: hundreds of millions of iron-, vitamin A-, and iodine-deficient people in the developing world fail to reach their full potential and are confronted with impaired livelihoods, illness, and death. Women and children are particularly affected. Improving diet quality is also a major element in assisting people living with HIV/AIDS. But detailed monitoring information on progress in cutting this hidden hunger remains obscured by lack of data. The CGIAR Biofortification Challenge Program--HarvestPlus--looks beyond production quantities and will address this information gap as part of its action-oriented research agenda. Here, better information, more efficient food retail systems, and advanced agricultural sciences can all contribute to deep and sustained improvement.

Increases in long-distance food trade, global concentration in food-processing and retail industries, and diet change are signs of the globalization of the world food system. New information and communications technologies, improved transport infrastructure, new global and regional legal frameworks (including trade policies), and consumer preferences are driving this globalization and changing the farming and food industries more rapidly than ever. So far, poor people in general, and smallholder farmers in particular, are poorly integrated into the globalization process, and they themselves increasingly recognize this. Important legal system changes include the World Trade Organization negotiations, biosafety policies (the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety entered into force last month), and the dynamic developments in some countries with respect to promoting the right to adequate food stimulated by the follow-up to the World Food Summit and the World Food Summit: five years later.

The collapse of global trade negotiations in Cancún last month will have a significant bearing on food security. In the absence of a new agreement on agricultural trade, current agricultural subsidies remain in place and barriers to trade may become even steeper. This situation is not conducive to advancing food security.

The governments of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries spend about US$75 billion annually on subsidies to their own farmers and agricultural industries and force their consumers to pay about US$240 billion a year extra for food because of their own protectionist measures. These combined payments depress global farm prices and are about six times more than these same developed countries provide to the developing world in official development assistance (ODA). Ending OECD farm subsidies would transfer US$40 billion in farm export revenues to developing countries, of which US$3 billion would accrue to Africa. For their part, developing countries have established agricultural trade barriers that similarly diminish the benefits that the developing world and its poor farmers can reap from trade in farm products.

A message from Cancún is that developing countries are no longer willing to accept a playing field for agricultural trade that is not level. New coalitions of developing countries challenged developed countries' subsidies and trade barriers alike. It seems clear that if the developed countries want the developing world to agree to the new investment rules pushed by the OECD countries in Cancún, they must be willing to negotiate on the current asymmetric rules of global agricultural trade, so that poor countries, and the poor farmers in those countries, can benefit from globalization. Moreover, the business of WTO negotiation itself will need redesign in order to achieve progress.

We must not just look at the food trends of today, but also at risks, which are less probable but not unlikely. There are a number of major risks to agriculture and uncertainties that have significant implications for food security and livelihoods. We focus here on three sets of such risks:

• Adverse resource management and technology interactions, including rapid climate change; mismanagement of water systems, soils, and forests; collapse of marine fisheries; and new plant and animal diseases.
• Health-related food crises, including further spread of HIV/AIDS, the onset of other epidemics that have significant direct or indirect implications for agriculture, and the expansion of unhealthy diets.
• Governance and policy crises, including civil unrest and wars, a decline in the quality of governance related to food and agriculture, erratic changes in the world trade system, and the collapse of small farms.

IFPRI has further developed its International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) to project future global food scenarios, and we have used these scenarios to selectively explore the potential implications of action and inaction in some of these areas (for health-related food crises, we lack the modeling basis at a global scale). Here we present three new scenarios of risks and opportunities. In view of the Millennium Development Goals, we project to 2015, but given the need for a longer-term orientation, we also look toward 2050.

1. In a progressive policy actions scenario, we assume a new focus on agricultural growth and rural development. In this scenario, developing countries' public investments and government expenditures on agriculture and rural development, appropriately supported by ODA, increase between 2005 and 2015 and stabilize thereafter. Investments in education, social services, and health are high. The rate of agricultural technology improvement is also high owing to increased investment in agricultural research and development. Irrigation efficiency is high in this scenario, water use efficiency improves, and the rate of irrigation expansion is moderate to high. Yield growth of cereals nearly doubles between 1997 and 2050. World maize prices (Figure 2)--which represent the cost of both food and feed--and beef prices (Figure 3) remain steady through 2030 and decline between 2030 and 2050. Global per capita cereal demand rises steadily over 1997-2050 (Figure 4). Global livestock production more than doubles during this period, while global per capita meat demand nearly doubles (Figure 5). By 2050 global per capita calorie supplies exceed 3,500 per day, well in excess of minimum requirements. In this scenario gains in child nutrition in developing countries are steady (Figure 6) and occur in all regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa, after 2015 (Figure 7). Latin America, West Asia and North Africa, and China virtually eliminate child malnutrition by 2030.
   
   
2. In a multidimensional policy failure scenario we have assumed trade and political conflicts, with no progress on global agricultural trade negotiations and increased levels of protectionism worldwide. As a result of political conflicts, investments in social services and agricultural R&D are low. Today, we cannot exclude political-economic forces from producing such outcomes. This scenario results in flat global cereal yields and maize prices, declining per capita cereal demand, and falling beef prices and flat meat demand. Average per capita daily calorie availability is only slightly above minimum requirements until after 2030, when availability increases. The number of malnourished children in developing countries rises between 1997 and 2015, after which there are modest declines. Child malnutrition increases in Sub-Saharan Africa throughout the period, although at a modest rate after 2015.
   
   
3. In a technology and resource management failure scenario, there are adverse technology and natural resource interactions, but agricultural trade protectionism does not increase, as in the preceding scenario. Pest problems plague agriculture, and these problems are combined with water mismanagement, declining irrigation efficiency, and lack of adaptation to climate change. Income levels are moderate in industrialized countries and low in developing countries. Investments in many sectors, including education, social services, and health, are low in developing countries. Low agricultural investments lead to low levels of agricultural technology development as well as low levels of irrigation efficiency and low improvement in water use efficiency. Yield growth falls even more than in the preceding scenario. Maize prices rise substantially through 2030 and fall off only gradually thereafter. Beef prices, which are affected by the price of feed, follow a similar pattern. These price trends result in flat global per capita meat demand and a decline in global per capita cereal demand through 2030, after which cereal demand flattens out. Developing-country per capita calorie availability is essentially unchanged over 1997-2050 and remains at a level of bare adequacy. Given unequal access to the food that is available, millions of people actually consume less than the minimum. Child malnutrition globally and in Sub-Saharan Africa follows a similar pattern to that of the preceding scenario but is even higher throughout the 1997-2050 period.
   
   

Scenario research carried out by the International Water Management Institute and IFPRI shows that insufficient attention to water-related investments and policies could produce a water crisis that would in turn lead to food system stress, given competing demands on scarce water. With increased water stress, relative crop yields decline, representing an annual loss in crop yields forgone. In such a water crisis scenario, cereal production declines by 10 percent, a loss equivalent to the entire Indian cereal crop. This decline would cause rice prices to rise by 40 percent, wheat prices by 80 percent, and maize prices by 120 percent by the year 2025. Price increases of this magnitude will dampen demand, contract trade, and hit poor people the hardest, especially the 1 billion people who live in urban slums and the many millions of rural poor people who are net purchasers of food.

Fish is one of the few food items whose prices are bound to increase even under the most likely scenario. To maintain or expand poor people's access to a healthy diet, including fish, will require major investments in productivity-enhancing technology. By 2020 developing countries will account for nearly 80 percent of fish production and consumption. Projections by WorldFish and IFPRI show that fish consumption in developing countries will increase by 57 percent between 1997 and 2020 as a result of rapid population growth, increasing affluence, and urbanization. Fish farming, or aquaculture, already a booming industry, will continue to expand in order to meet more than 40 percent of this demand, since most wild fisheries are tapped to capacity or beyond.

The World Food Summits sponsored by the FAO have initiated a new round of goal setting at the global, regional, and national levels. Happily, bilateral and multilateral donors are placing renewed emphasis on agriculture and rural development. The World Bank's new rural strategy, released in 2002, is an important example. The key question is whether donors will provide additional resources along with their development-friendly rhetoric. At the end of the 1990s, the level of ODA provided to agriculture was lower than at the beginning of the decade in real terms. Some time lag between new declarations and new actions must be assumed, but real action and sound implementation remain critical. What changes do we see at regional and country levels?

There are encouraging signs on the public policy front. Around the world, a new spirit of action to address food insecurity and undernutrition has emerged over the past two years. An ongoing review by IFPRI suggests that many of the governments of the 35 countries where most of the world's food-insecure people live have declared new policy goals regarding food security, and some have already taken steps to translate declarations into redesigned policy actions. But few--if any--have reallocated national budgetary resources, and it is still too early to expect significant change in food security on the ground.

Three months ago, the Heads of State Summit of the African Union agreed in its Maputo Declaration in the NEPAD framework to devote 10 percent of public expenditures to agriculture, in order to bolster food security on the continent. By contrast, in the 1990s African governments devoted just 5 percent of public expenditures to agriculture. It is extremely encouraging that African policymakers at the highest level are expressing a commitment to reverse the downward spiral in food and agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita food production has declined over the past 30 years and child malnutrition is forecast to continue to grow. The efforts of some countries in East Africa to achieve free universal primary education are particularly noteworthy because education, especially of girls, is critical for improving child nutrition.

Latin American ministers of agriculture meet in early November for a major initiative in response to a request by their heads of state to map out opportunities to improve food security. Also important to mention are the nutrition- and health-oriented conditional cash transfer programs in Central America and Mexico. One of the most ambitious new programs for eradicating hunger is Brazil's Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), initiated by President Lula da Silva.

It is also heartening that a number of countries--such as Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and the countries of Central America--have finally achieved peace after many years of war that uprooted people, led to food insecurity, and destroyed productive resources. The prospects for peace look good in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. But reintegrating displaced people and rebuilding devastated societies will be costly, and the restoration of sustainable food security is years away.

Throughout the developing world, policy reform is trying to reach out and more actively include rural poor people, who seek participation and voice, in decisionmaking. This trend toward decentralization and devolution is driven on the one hand by increased democracy and on the other hand by the forces of global competition, which demand efficient decisionmaking at locations of investment. Important examples of greater participation by rural poor people in Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Uganda, and elsewhere are changing the landscape of rural development. This new environment brings decisionmaking on public goods investments--so essential for food security--closer to poor people, including elected women representatives in some of the cases. Making decentralization and devolution work, however, requires massive capacity strengthening.

The world is not food secure. Although we know better than ever what needs to be done, the complex world hunger equations are not even solved on paper. New and old food risks are looming in unholy alliances. So what needs to be done?

An increasingly global food and agriculture system requires accelerated global investment in public goods, including agricultural research, broadly defined. The CGIAR is combining technology, natural resource management, and institutional innovations to produce international agricultural research with a focus on people and poverty. Not only does the CGIAR address the open and hidden hunger of today, but it also serves as a global insurance policy against food insecurity for the coming generation of more than 9 billion people.

At this crossroads in the world food situation, we cannot afford to make wrong turns. The governments of developing and OECD countries alike must back up their new declarations and promising policy initiatives on food security with resources and policy action. Civil society organizations in developing countries must get the support to play their critical roles. Agribusiness and the food industry must get the incentives to invest in poor people. Then--and only then--will real progress down the road toward sustainable food security for all be achieved.