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This paper assesses the projected growth of food supply relative to population growth and estimated food demand growth over the next four decades.

World population projections are analyzed for the main developed and developing regions. Implied food demand growth is then compared to grain and oilseed supply projections from a few of the most reliable sources. Three of these are 10-year projections and two extend to 2030 and 2050. To the extent possible, comparisons are made among the alternative projections. Conclusions about food availability and prices are finally drawn.

Meeting the growth in demand for food, feed, and biofuels to 2050 will not be a steep hill to climb, but there will need to be continued private and public investment in technology to induce increased production growth rates through productivity enhancements and increased purchased inputs.

The main food security challenge of the future, as in the present, is not insufficient production but rather increasing access and reducing vulnerability for food insecure households. The dominance of future population growth in the food insecure regions of Africa makes this challenge even more critical between now and 2050 and even more so in the years beyond 2050 when climate change effects on resource constraints will be more severe.

Over the past decade, biofuels production in the European Union and the United States has boomed – much of this due to government mandates and subsidies. The United States has now surpassed Brazil as the world's leading producer of ethanol. The economic and environmental impact of these biofuel programs has become an important question of public policy. Due to the complex intersectoral linkages between biofuels and crops, livestock as well as energy activities, CGE modeling has become an important tool for their analysis. This chapter reviews recent developments in this area of economic analysis and suggests directions for future research.

The U.S. 2002 Farm Bill provides sizeable direct and indirect subsidies to U.S. farmers, which has created increased competition in markets where the United States and Canada compete. Target prices were reintroduced and the overall level of U.S. Government support was increased. Canadian farmers will find it more difficult to compete in grains, oilseeds, and pulses. Government support in Canada for these crops is significantly below U.S. support. Canada and the United States have a significant two-way trade in agricultural products, including beef and pork. The outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in Canada in 2003 clearly illustrates the need for cooperation between the two countries.

In the United States, successive farm bills and the 2007 Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) have largely defined domestic subsidy and conservation programs and U.S. food-aid initiatives over the past decade. This chapter examines the effects of the current mixture of U.S. agricultural policies and international food-aid programs on domestic and global food-insecure populations. A detailed research-based examination is carried out with respect to the impacts of U.S. subsidy programs on agricultural production, domestic and global agricultural commodity prices, and their implications for food-insecure populations. The impacts of the RFS are assessed along with the effects of current and potentially reformed U.S. international food-aid programs.

This study concludes that current U.S. agricultural subsidy programs have small or negligible impacts on the aggregate level and mixture of U.S. agricultural output, U.S. domestic prices and global prices, and domestic and global food insecurity among poor households. The RFS has increased prices for food and feed grain and oilseeds with adverse implications for the urban poor in developing countries and some poor U.S. households. The portfolios of U.S. food-aid programs are managed inefficiently because of congressional mandates designed to aid special interest groups that waste 30% of the current budget. While U.S. subsidy programs likely should be moderated for other reasons, they have few impacts on domestic and globally food-insecure households. However, in relation to global and domestic food insecurity, the RFS should be discontinued and major reforms to U.S. international food aid implemented.

This study adopts a narrative approach to understanding women’s life experiences from a feminist perspective. How Taiwanese women of different generations have lived their lives and what has and has not changed was investigated through a gender lens. The narrators include the author and her grandmother, born in 1975 and 1927, respectively. They each re-experience and reconfirm the markings of their pasts, psychological conditions, and bodies through deep dialogue. The two stories span approximately 50 years and manifest the patriarchal culture in Taiwanese society at different times.

This study finds that although the stories of these two women from different generations appear distinct in their own way, similar ‘dilemmas’ can be observed in their gender experiences: for example, women get married to men’s family; the value system of lineage and succession creates a tendency to expect to have boys; women need to get married to get their status recognition; and through home, women learn gender roles and gender norms.

However, the study shows progress: women’s education brings economic independence and yields a sense of accomplishment from work or school; women of different generations have different perceptions during the awakening of gender consciousness. The current findings contribute to understanding the working principles of gender relations, which reinforce the patriarchal system despite its appearance changing over time.

This research is devoted to studying the dynamics of the commodity structure of the world edible oils market in 2001–2021, with subsequent identification of the role and importance of export deliveries of Russian products in the formation of global mechanisms of supply and demand in the segment.

In the process of writing the chapter, the author used functional and mathematical analysis, statistical and computational-constructive methods, and customs statistics data from reputable international organisations and national statistical bodies. Comparing the obtained results with relevant scientific studies provides a high level of reliability of the results of this research.

Russia is currently the world's second-largest sunflower oil producer. In the near future, the country has significant potential to become the largest supplier of this product, which can significantly contribute to stabilising supply in the global edible oil market.

Based on the analysis of the dynamics of change in the statistics, it is substantiated that as a result of the implementation of a balanced state policy, in two decades, Russia managed to overcome a large-scale crisis in agro-industrial production, significantly reduced its dependence on imports of oil and fat products and is currently one of the world's leading producers of sunflower oil, which allows it to play an important role in shaping supply on the world market of oil and fat products.

In this chapter, the authors contribute toward building a better understanding of farmers’ responses to behavioral drivers of land-use decision by establishing an alternative analytical procedure, which can overcome various drawbacks suffered by methods currently used in existing studies. Firstly, our procedure makes use of spatially high-resolution data, so that idiosyncratic effects of physical environment drivers, e.g., soil textures, can be explicitly modeled. Secondly, we address the well-known censored data problem, which often hinders a successful analysis of land-use shares. Thirdly, we incorporate spatial error dependence (SED) and heterogeneity in order to obtain efficiency gain and a more accurate formulation of variances for the parameter estimates. Finally, the authors reduce the computational burden and improve estimation accuracy by introducing an alternative generalized method of moments (GMM)–quasi maximum likelihood (QML) hybrid estimation procedure. The authors apply the newly proposed procedure to spatially high-resolution data in England and found that, by taking these features into consideration, the authors are able to formulate conclusions about causal effects of climatic and physical environment, and environmental policy on land-use shares that differ significantly from those made based on methods that are currently used in the literature. Moreover, the authors show that our method enables derivation of a more effective predictor of the land-use shares, which is utterly useful from the policy-making point of view.

The agribusiness co-operative sector in Canada has been affected by ongoing changes in economic, political, and social policies. Increased competition from local investor-owned firms and multinational companies, deregulation and globalization of trade and increased concentration of suppliers and purchasers have put tremendous competitive pressure on agribusiness marketing co-operatives. The enhanced level of competitive rivalry may force co-operatives into lowering costs and prices. Improvement in cost or operating efficiency of agribusiness marketing co-operatives may be crucial as changes in regulation, technology, and other market developments bring into question the long-term viability of co-operative businesses. Therefore, information as to the efficiency with which agribusiness co-operative firms operate would be useful.

Since 1985, Morocco's government has reformed the country's agriculture especially with respect to domestic agricultural markets. Drawing on available sources and our experience, we argue three related points. First, the impacts of reforms undertaken have, by and large, been positive. This reflects much more the dismal state of agricultural policy in 1985 rather than a positive rating of the reform process or the current policy environment. Second, further reforms, especially with respect to trade policy, are desirable. Third, future reforms involve important policy tradeoffs, especially with respect to price stability for strategic agricultural commodities (bread wheat, sugar and oilseeds).

The widespread introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops may change the effect of agriculture on the environment. The magnitude and direction of expected effects are still being hotly debated, and the interests served in this discussion arena are often far from those of science and social welfare maximization. This chapter proposes that GM crops have net positive environmental effects, while regulatory responses focus mainly on environmental concerns, giving an unbalanced picture of the regulatory context. This unbalance supports the hypothesis that environmental concerns about GM crops have been politically instrumentalized and that more attention should be paid to regulatory responses considering the environmental benefits of this technology. It is also argued that a number of environmental effects have not yet been quantified and more research is needed in this direction.