BSRS 2013 Keynote: Challenges and policy options for balancing competing demands on agriculture

David Blandford, Professor, Agricultural and Environmental Economics, Penn State University, USA

World agriculture faces major challenges. The prospect of continued growth in the demand for food will exert major pressure on the agricultural sector. Agriculture is a major user of natural resources, particularly land, water and energy. The need to expand production to meet the growing demand for food will generate increased pressure on these resources. Climate change will also have major implications for agriculture, both because its activities are so dependent on climate, but also because the sector is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation to climate change may pose a major challenge. In many developing countries the sector is a major source of employment, but the trend is towards a declining economic role for agriculture as people migrate from rural areas to the cities to work in other sectors. It will be difficult to sustain viable local economies in many rural areas. Finding a balance between the need to increase productivity in agriculture, enhance its contribution to environmental quality, and strengthen its contribution to rural economies will be extremely challenging.

In this lecture I shall outline key issues that we face in trying to balance competing objectives for agriculture and their implications for agricultural policies. The aim is identify the menu of possible policy choices and the extent to which these are mutually supportive or conflicting in terms of the economic, social and environmental roles that we expect agriculture to perform in the future.

For more information, contact advisor Øyvind Gjerstad.

E-mail: Oyvind.Gjerstad@adm.uib.no