1981 World wheat facts and trends Report one: analysis of changes in production, consumption, trade and prices over the last two decades

Abstract

CIMMYT's mandate covers two of the world's major cereal crops-maize and wheat. Wheat, the focus of this report, is important to more than three-fourths of the population in developing countries. Twenty-seven countries of the developing world have over 100,000 ha sown to wheat. In an additional 50 developing countries, wheat (usually imported) represents more than 10 percent of the caloric intake. Part I of this report sets forth in summary form a number of important facts about wheat production, consumption, trade, and prices, and trends in these variables over the last two decades. Part II is a fact sheet of 31 variables relating to wheat for each developing country in which the wheat area exceeds 100,000 ha. For comparison, these variables are also reported for developed countries with over 1,000,000 ha of wheat. To simplify the presentation of data we have divided the world into a number of producing regions. In the developing countries these consist of Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East Countries of Asia, North Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, East Asia, and three regions of Latin America. The developed countries are divided into the USSR and Eastern Europe, and the Developed Market Economies. Unless stated otherwise, we have used data from the FAO computer tapes on production and trade and from the recently published FAO Food Balance Sheets that provide detailed supply and utilization data. We are grateful to the staff of the FAO Basic Statistics Unit for their generous help in providing and interpreting these data. Nonetheless, we emphasize that FAO is continuously updating their data files on the basis of new information. In addition, we have drawn upon CIMMYT surveys of wheat-producing regions and farm prices. Trends over the last two decades have generally been calculated using 1961-65 as the base period and 1978-80 as the final period. However, because of the use of different data sources, we could not always be consistent.