Looking Into the Future for Agriculture and AKST | 309

of appropriate fishing practices and post-harvest technol­ogies.

     Rapid growth in demand for aquaculture products will also be adversely affected by growing scarcity of coastal land and offshore areas and water scarcity in land-based opera­tions. The most appropriate policy response to this problem is integrated coastal management that better utilizes these shared resources for wider benefit. Another policy option is promoting best management practices, which include look­ing into appropriate feeding strategies as fish oil, on which the production of high value species depends, becomes in­creasingly scarce.

7. Expected climate changes are likely to affect agri­culture, requiring attention to harmonizing policies on climate mitigation and adaptation with others on ag­riculture and forest land for bioenergy and on forestry for carbon sequestration. Climate change is expected to have increasing impacts on the agriculture sector. This im­pact can be positive or negative. For example, CO2 fertil­ization, increased precipitation and higher temperature can lengthen the growing season and improve crop yields in spe­cific regions. Elsewhere, however, with higher temperatures and more erratic precipitation, the impact on crop yield can be negative. Under higher climate sensitivity, climate im­pacts are very likely to be negative for all regions. Even with small climate change projections, impacts are projected to be negative for dryland areas in Africa, Asia and the Medi­terranean area. These climate impacts can be mitigated by climate policies, but very low stabilization experiments (450 ppmv CO2-equivalents) will likely require measures such as carbon sequestration and bioenergy plantations that com­pete for land. Therefore, climate mitigation policy options might require reprioritizing among alternative development and sustainability goals.

8. Food safety regulations can help improve the qual­ity of life, but need to be designed to avoid adversely affecting poor farmers' access to markets. Demand for products with high quality and safety standards is expected to grow in industrialized countries. This market will only be accessible to those developing countries with sufficient AKST capacity and knowledge to meet the higher standards, especially in post-harvest handling. Better quality standards are only likely to emerge in developing countries if con­sumers are educated about the benefits of consumption of perishable products, if public health regulation and liability laws are established, and if better laboratory infrastructure is built. Challenges in coming decades include ensuring safer food for consumers and raising the quality of life without reducing food availability, access and use by the poor or by creating barriers to poor countries and smaller producers by excluding their exporting produce through multinational companies. Implementation of quality and food safety con­trol programs with intensive internal and external supervi­sion can improve productivity without increasing costs for consumers.  Government actions toward product quality standardization should consider the effect on the distribu­tion of costs and benefits between actors.

9. Rural communities have a greater say in the future of small-scale agriculture as their access to information

 

via information communication and technology (ICT) and to financial capital via remittance investment plans increases. The attributes of ICTs are linked directly and indirectly with the sustainability and development goals. As internet access increases in rural areas, small-scale produc­ers will benefit from more readily available information, both traditional and local knowledge and technological and market information, if private and public institutions take up the challenge of providing climate, weather, and price data. In addition cellular phone use among national and international migrants will enhance information flows and their participation in decisions. As a result, migrant organi­zations in receiving countries will reinforce links with their home communities and most likely influence the choice of local development paths. Taken together, increased access to ICTs and migrant remittances will impact the land man­agement, food security and livelihood strategies of rural communities in new ways.

10. Society benefits from involving women in all lev­els of processes from education to decision making and work, increasing their access and contribution to AKST. In the developing world it is expected that an increas­ing share of women workers would participate in rural farm activities and in agro-based industries and agro-based ser­vice sectors. Investments in health services, child care, and education are fundamental to achieving the development and sustainability goals that support women's participation in agriculture and AKST. AKST policies and investments in rural infrastructure, which improve women's status, en­hance women's role, and reduce their burden through better water and energy supply, would help improve livelihoods while also supporting other AKST policies.

5.1 Scope of the Chapter and How to Use the Results

This chapter examines the potential future for agriculture and AKST using primarily quantitative methods combined with qualitative analyses of those issues that cannot easily be addressed in quantified models. For this approach a ref­erence run is developed from 2000 to 2050, based on the assessment of drivers of agriculture and AKST explained in Chapter 4. It builds on changes in drivers used in previous assessments and uses a set of modeling tools to sketch out a plausible future based upon past trends. This reference run is used to indicate how the development and sustainability goals (see Chapter 1) might take shape out to 2050. In sub-chapter 5.3 the reference run is described and the results are shown. No important policy actions are assumed in the reference run to show more sharply the consequences of a noninterventionist reference case.

     In a second step, in subchapter 5.4, a set of policy ac­tions are simulated in order to assess the impact these could have on the attainment of development and sustainability goals. Here, policy experiments on investments in AKST, cli­mate mitigation, extensive use of bioenergy, trade liberaliza­tion, changes in water productivity and in dietary changes, such as shifts to consumption of organic food or less meat, are implemented and analyzed. In this way, the quantified impact and tradeoffs of these specific policy actions can be