The food and agriculture systems fulfil a wide range of functions vital to the well-being of humanity. Being at the heart of global food security, they are expected to provide the world with adequate and reliable supplies of safe, healthy and nutritious food. They are also crucial for the livelihoods of billions of people, including many of the world’s poorest, providing direct employment and income and contributing to the broader rural and overall economic development. To continue to fulfil these key roles, agricultural productivity has to increase in a sustainable manner.

The Agricultural Outlook 2016-2025 is a collaborative effort of OECD and FAO. It brings together the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations and input from collaborating member countries to provide an assessment of medium-term prospects of national, regional and global agricultural commodity markets. The Outlook provides supply, demand, trade and price estimates of major agricultural commodities for 41 countries and 12 geographical regions. The special theme chapter of this year’s edition focusses on the prospects and challenges of the agricultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This section provides information on the methodological aspects of the generation of the present Agricultural Outlook. It discusses the main aspects in the following order: First, a general description of the agricultural baseline projections and the Outlook report is given. Second, the compilation of a consistent set of the assumptions on macroeconomic projections is discussed in more detail. The third part provides reference to the underlying Aglink-Cosimo model. The final part presents the methodology developed for the stochastic analysis conducted with the Aglink- Cosimo model.