Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
The present paper discusses the global trends and challenges in the agriculture sector with likely impacts on Russia and provides possible adaptation strategies.
As one of the key sectors of global and national economies with large political and strategic importance, agriculture will remain high on the strategic agenda. Numerous times in history, food shortages have led to extreme political instability, revolutions and civil wars in countries across the globe with ensuing great setbacks to institutional and technological modernisation. Today, up to $7-9tn or about 10 per cent of the gross global product is spent on food. One billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition (FAO, IFAD, WFP, 2015).
Taking into account the fact that the global food problem is far from an immediate solution, the challenges are likely to remain in the coming decades. By 2050, 60 per cent more food will need to be produced, including an additional one billion tons of cereals and 200 million tons of meat, to feed the world population with an additional 2.3 billion people (FAO, 2012a). Coupled with the limits on expansion of arable land together with land degradation due to unsustainable use and climate change, in the next 25 years, food demand growth will drive food producers to significantly increase yields and radically reduce post-harvest losses. Further, intensification of agricultural production, while enforcing sustainable practices in the sector, appears to be the only possible way to solve the global food problem (Davis et al., 2016). Biotechnology and precision agriculture are among the main drivers of the new wave of efficiency improvement in agriculture as the effects of mechanization and agrochemical application are nearly fully used (Moshelion and Altman, 2015). This could be concluded from the fact that globally, the rate of growth in yields of the major cereal crops has been steadily declining. The rate of growth in global cereal yields, for example, dropped from 3.2 per cent per year in 1960 to 1.5 per cent in 2000 (FAO, 2009b).
In the future, demand for food will change not only in terms of quantity but also quality. Changing diets, mainly driven by rising incomes, increasing quality of life and economically prosperous population, will lead to an additional demand on different types of food (Westhoeka