coll. - OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2017-2026

The food and agriculture sector is faced with a critical global challenge: to ensure access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food for a growing world population, while at the same time using natural resources more sustainably and making an effective contribution to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Through this annual collaboration and other studies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are working together to provide information, analysis and advice, to help governments achieve these essential objectives.

This is the 13th joint edition of the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook . It provides ten-year projections to 2026 for the major agricultural commodities, as well as for biofuels and fish. The pooling of market and policy information from experts in a wide range of participating countries provides a benchmark necessary for assessing the opportunities and threats to the sector. This years Agricultural Outlook includes a special focus on Southeast Asia, a region where agriculture and fisheries have developed rapidly and undernourishment has been significantly decreased, but also a region that is on the front line of the effects of climate change and where there are rising pressures on natural resources.

The Agricultural Outlook comes in the context of a wider set of international efforts to address food security and agricultural issues. Two global initiatives stand out:

• The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set ambitious targets to be achieved by 2030. Among these, the first goal is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere, while the second goal pledges to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture. The two goals are related as more than three-quarters of the worlds poor depend on agriculture not only for their food, but also for their livelihoods.

• Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Changes 2015 Paris Agreement, 195 countries have committed to take action to contain the increase in global average temperatures to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels. Climate change poses a threat to sustainable food production, but agriculture, which accounts for more than a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, can be an active part of the solution

The Agricultural Outlook supports these global initiatives by providing a benchmark against which to assess the implications of alternative policies that seek to increase the availability of food sustainably while mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions. Such policies include both supply-side measures, such as measures for increasing sustainable productivity growth in agriculture, and demand-side measures for encouraging the reduction of waste and overconsumption.