The Agricultural Outlook is a collaborative effort of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It combines the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations with inputs from collaborating member countries and international organisations to provide an annual assessment of medium-term projections of national, regional and global agricultural commodity markets. The projections cover production, consumption, stocks, trade and prices for 25 products for the period 2014 to 2023. These projections constitute a plausible scenario of how global agriculture would develop under a certain set of assumptions about its main drivers, productivity, macroeconomic and population trends as well as agricultural and trade policy settings of countries around the world. Given the uncertainties which surround agricultural markets, the final section of the Overview discusses important assumptions affecting the future evolution of agricultural markets and the sensitivity of the baseline projections to selected conditioning factors.
This year’s edition contains a Chapter on India, the world’s second most populous country, which is fed by the largest farming community in the world. India’s agricultural sector has witnessed a considerable transformation in recent years, with significant gains in productivity and total production volume.With its predominantly vegetarian diet, large arable land base and slowly urbanising society, India presents unique opportunities and challenges. Most of the country’s agricultural policies in the next decade will be focusing on food security and how to invigorate agriculture to promote growth and employment in populous rural communities.