The food production and consumption balance in sub-Saharan Africa under different SSPs, from 2010 to 2050

Abstract:

Forcing with the population growth and consequently increasing food requirement, food security in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most emergent and challenging issues. The purposes of this work are 1) what’s the future food requirement and their food security status in each sub-Saharan African countries? What is the distance from current and future food security status, corresponding to the food requirement, to the targeted food security status? 2) To what extent Sub-Saharan countries could meet their present and future food requirement, and whether they have potential to improve their food insecurity status on currently cultivated land? 3) Whether or, if there have, how the pressures on land resources from meeting the food requirements? To figure those questions out, we firstly use socio-economic pathways datasets, and historical food diet pattern classification to forecast the 2010-2050 food commodity and feed calories demand per country. A new food security indicator, which considered the influences of both the food energy and quality intake, was used to evaluate the food insecurity status and the distances to different targeted statuses of the specific country. The latest Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ) databases were used to estimate the current and future crop yield gap and crop potential production. For current to future scenario analysis, we considered population growth, dietary change, climate change, agricultural input level, and target food security status. Then the balance of food requirement with the current and potential crop production was analyzed for different scenarios. Land requirements were calculated for meeting those food requirements, and the pressures on land resources are evaluated. Our works are hoping to provide scientific-based evidences for policy recommendations for local government to tackle food insecurity problems in Sub-Saharan Africa.