A model for prediction of world food production and allocation

Abstract

This report presents and documents a computer model of world food production and allocation whose purpose is to serve as an organizational framework, a heur istic tool, and a basis for development of future models in the study of the world climate/food system. The assumptions upon which this model is based are not fully realistic since they do not take into account the constraints of data availability; nor do they adequately deal with the yet-but-little-under stood components and linkages of the climate/food system. Yet this model provides a basis upon which successively better models will be built. It pro vides the starting point for the evolution of a series of models toward one whose response to the various climatic, technological, and human inputs is sufficiently similar to the response of the real system to make it useful as a predictive and heuris tic policy tool.