World maize facts and trends, CIMMYT 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. Fifty-three countries of the developing world have over 100,000 hectares sown to maize; these countries represent three-fourths of the popu lation in the developing world. In an additional 16 developing countries, maize represents more than 10 percent of total caloric supply in human consumption. Part I of this report sets forth in summary form a number of important facts about maize production, consumption, trade, and prices, along with trends in these variables over the last two decades. Part II is a fact sheet of 24 variables relating to maize for each developing country in which the maize area exceeds 100,000 ha. For comparison, these variables are also reported for developed countries with over 1,000,000 ha of maize. To simplify the presentation of data, we have divided the world into a number of producing regions. In the developing countries these consist of Eastern and Southern Africa, Western Africa, North Africa, Mideast countries of Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and three regions of Latin America. The developed countries are divided into Eastern Europe and the USSR, and the Developed Market Economies. Unless stated otherwise, we have used data from the Food and Agriculture Organization's computer tapes on production and trade and from the recently published FAD Food Balance Sheets that provide detailed supply and utilization data. We are gratefu I to the staff of the FAD Basic Statistics Unit for their generous help in providing and interpreting these data. Nonetheless, we emphasize that FAO is continuously updating and improving their data files on the basis of new information. Trends over the last two decades have generally been calcu lated using 1961-65 as the base period and 1978-80 as the final period. Trade data are only available up to 1979; hence, for trade, 1977-79 was used as the final period.