Highlights:

IFPRI’s Outlook for Agricultural systems outlines global long-term projections to 2050, evaluating how yield advances, demand shifts, and environmental pressures impact global food security. The report models "middle-of-the-road" projections to 2050 across seven regions and seven commodity groups, stressing these are not fixed forecasts but pathways shaped by today's policy and investment choices. The core message conveyed is that substantial progress is likely, but outcomes diverge widely by region and by crop/commodity, with major hunger, nutrition, and sustainability challenges persisting.

Food security: an overall improvement is expected, but one region – namely West and Central Africa (WCA) moves the wrong way. Population facing insufficient food access declines globally and in most regions the hunger-risk population falls by more than a quarter to 493 million by 2050. The exception is WCA, where population growth is projected to outpace gains in food access – the only region where hunger numbers don't improve. Despite the long-run improvement, the report concludes that most regions remain off-track for SDG 2.1 (which aims to create a world free of hunger by 2030).

Climate change effects vary greatly by crop, and by region, with climate stress (including both heat and precipitation) is concentrated in Southern Africa, North Africa, Southwest Asia, East Asia, and North America. Crop-specific implications are found to vary, with rainfed maize yields still rising (~20–35% by 2050) but less than they would without climate change. By contrast, wheat yield grows faster than it would have in the absence of climate change, especially in temperate zones. Importantly, the report adjusts productivity implications on the basis of assumed technological improvements.

Technology narrows some productivity gaps, but it does not alter the existing regional hierarchy. Productivity growth is driven by ongoing investments in R&D, farm management efficiency, and mechanization, and remains the primary engine of production increases across all modelled regions. Although yield growth is projected to be fastest in low-yield regions like East and Southern Africa (ESA), the relative ranking of regions by overall yield levels largely persists through 2050.

Resource pressures on land and water directly track where production expands through land area rather than yield gains. Harvested area grows fastest in West and Central Africa, Latin America, East and Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia, pushing crop production onto pastures and forests with severe risks for tropical emissions and biodiversity loss. Irrigation (blue water) stress concentrates heavily in South Asia and East Africa, while rainfall-dependent (green water) use surges in West and Central Africa and South America. These environmental strains mark the physical sustainability costs of meeting demand growth, explicitly tying resource depletion to where and how agriculture expands.