Published 14 November 2022
Basseterre
Buckie Got It, St Kitts and Nevis News Source
Credited: sknnewssource.com
WORLD FOOD IMPORT BILL WILL CLIMB this year to US$1.94 trillion surpassing previous estimates according to a new Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report.
The new FAO forecast in the UN agency’s Food Outlook marks a 10 percent increase – an all-time high and – over the 2021 record level. While the FAO expects a slowing down of the spike due to higher world food prices, and depreciating currencies against the US dollar, these depend on the purchasing power of importing countries and, subsequently, on the volumes of imported food.
The UN’s FAO said high-income countries are behind the spike in volume and global spending on food. By contrast, economically vulnerable country-groups are more affected by the climb in global food prices. FAO statistics show aggregate food import bill for low-income countries will stay the same although they will buy a 10 percent less in items.
This suggests a growing accessibility issue for these countries, the UN body counselled.
“These are alarming signs from a food security perspective, indicating importers are finding it difficult to finance rising international costs, potentially heralding an end of their resilience to higher international prices,” the FAO report from its Markets and Trade Division warns.
It also warns that existing differences are likely to become more pronounced, with high-income countries continuing to import across the entire spectrum of food products, while developing regions are increasingly focused on staples. In this context, FAO welcomes the approval by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of a Food Shock Window – broadly based on FAO’s Food Import Financing Facility proposal – as an important step to ease the burden of soaring food import costs among lower income countries.
The UN report also assesses global expenditures on imported agricultural inputs, including fertilisers. This year’s e global bill is expected to rise to US$ 424B, up 48 percent from 2021 and a whopping 112 percent from 2020.
Soaring import-energy and fertiliser costs are driving the rise in global cost and ballooning import bills which didn’t surprise forecasters since both are vital in import bills, posing strains for the current accounts of low-income and lower middle-income countries.
Consequently, some countries may be forced to reduce input applications, almost inevitably resulting in lower agricultural productivity and lower domestic food availability.
Accordingly, “negative repercussions (are likely to extend into 2023) for global agricultural output and food security,” the FAO said.
Food trends
The FAO Report is published biannually and offers reviews of market supply and utilisation trends for the world’s major foods, including cereals, oil crops, sugar, meat, dairy and fish, and trends in ocean freight rates. Supplies of most of these major commodities are at or close to record levels, but multiple factors point to tighter markets ahead.
World wheat production is forecast to reach a record 784 million tonnes in 2022/23, buoyed by significant harvest recoveries in Canada and the Russia Federation. That should push global wheat inventories to record levels, although the report notes that the accumulations are expected mostly in China and the Russian Federation, while stock levels are predicted to dip by 8 percent in the rest of the world.
Coarse grain inventories are forecast to fall to their lowest levels since 2013 due to inventory drawdowns in major countries as a result of anticipated declines in production. Global coarse grain production is forecast to fall by 2.8 percent in 2022, to 1 467 million tonnes. While it will likely drop in 2022/23, world rice output is envisaged to remain at an overall average level, buoyed by resilient planting levels in Asia and recovering output in Africa. Global oilseed production is forecast to rebound and reach an all-time high in the 2022/23 marketing year, with increased outputs of soybean and rapeseed expected to offset a likely drop in sunflower seed production.
Global sugar production is also forecast to increase, buoyed by expectations of a significant recovery in Brazil’s production and larger crops in China and Thailand, while consumption is seen growing at a slower pace. Worldwide outputs of meat and dairy products in 2022 are both expected to increase modestly, while total fisheries and aquaculture production is expected to increase globally by 1.2 percent, with a 2.6-percent expansion in aquaculture output anticipated to more than offset a slight fall in capture fisheries output.
