Year of publication 2009

---

Author Josef Schmidhuber, Jelle Bruinsma and Gerold Boedeker

---

Product type Document

---

Edition 1

---

Synopsis (short abstract) Cumulative gross investment requirements for developing countries’ agriculture add up to a total of nearly US$9.2 trillion over the next 44 years (2005/07-2050). This amount would be necessary to remain consistent with FAO’s long-term outlook for global agriculture (World agriculture: towards 2030/50). Broken down by type of investment, more than US$5.5 trillion or 60 percent of the total would be required to replace the existing capital stock (or new capital items that are being added a nd subsequently depreciated over the 44 year period to 2050); the rest, i.e. about US$3.6 trillion would need to be added to the existing capital stock to increase (nearly double) output and raise productivity. Broken down by activity, primary agriculture accounts for about US$5.2 trillion of the total, while the remaining US$4.0 trillion is absorbed by downstream needs (processing, transportation, storage, etc.). Within primary agriculture, mechanization accounts for the single bigges t investment item (25 percent) followed by expansion and improvement of irrigation (nearly 20 percent). Broken down into annual amounts, the cumulative investments result in yearly averages of about US$210 billion gross and US$83 billion net, respectively. All estimates, gross and net, cumulative and annual, are in constant 2009 dollars.

---

Language English

---

Also available in:

No results found.

---