The food and agriculture sector is faced with a critical global challenge: to ensure access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food for a growing world population, while at the same time using natural resources more sustainably and making an effective contribution to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Through this annual collaboration and other studies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are working together to provide information, analysis and advice, to help governments achieve these essential objectives.

The Agricultural Outlook 2017-26 is a collaborative effort of the OECD and FAO prepared with input from the experts of their member governments and from specialist commodity organisations. It provides a consensus assessment of the medium term (ten year) prospects for agricultural and fish commodity markets at national, regional and global levels. This year’s edition contains a special focus on the agriculture and fish sectors of Southeast Asia.

This chapter provides an overview of the latest set of quantitative medium-term projections for global and national agricultural markets. The projections cover production, consumption, stocks, trade and prices for 25 agricultural products for the period 2017 to 2026. The chapter starts with a description of the state of agricultural markets in 2016. In the next sections, consumption and production trends are examined, with a focus on regional developments. The chapter also reviews trade patterns showing the relative concentration of exports and dispersion of imports across countries for different commodities. The chapter concludes with global agricultural price projections and a discussion of uncertainty which might affect price projections. Growing demand for agricultural commodities is projected to be matched by efficiency gains in production which will keep real agricultural prices relatively flat.

This chapter reviews the prospects and challenges facing the agricultural sector in Southeast Asia over the next decade. In line with the focus of policy makers, agriculture and fisheries issues are primarily explored with reference to trade and food security. This chapter first considers the historical performance and current state of agriculture and fisheries in Southeast Asia before presenting the market and food security projections for the medium-term (2017-26). It concludes with a discussion of the challenges and uncertainties that may influence the medium-term projections presented. Countries in Southeast Asia have experienced significant improvements in their levels of development along with strong growth in their agriculture and fishery sectors. The outlook for agriculture is broadly positive, but could be further improved by consistent policies and strategic investments, particularly in rural infrastructure.

This chapter describes the market situation and highlights of the latest set of quantitative medium-term projections for world and national agricultural markets, for the ten-year period 2017-26. It provides information on prices, production, consumption, trade and main uncertainties for cereals, oilseeds, sugar, meat, dairy products, fish, biofuels and cotton. The quantitative projections are developed with the aid of the partial equilibrium Aglink-Cosimo model of world agriculture. The printed version of this chapter only includes the projection highlights for each commodity whereas further details and an extensive statistical annex are available online.