Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean Current Situation, Future Trends and One Policy Experiment

 The world demand for food and feed will increase by between 50% and 85% from 2009 to 2030,  and a  substantial part of the growth in demand is expected to be met by farmers in LAC by  intensifying production activities on existing agricultural lands and by expanding the agricultural  frontier.  A rapid expansion of the agricultural frontier in the region could easily undo any  progress made by REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and  other policies.  Thus, one challenge for LAC is to increase aggregate agricultural production to  meet this growing demand for food/fiber/energy without proportionally increasing greenhouse  gas emissions.  However, agriculture’s potential contributions to reducing GHG  in LAC  are  unclear, and the implications of policy actions (including publicly funded research on  technological change) to reduce agricultural GHG emissions for food production, food prices,  agricultural employment or agricultural income are not known.  Some of these implications may  be particularly important to the poor within and outside of LAC.  This research project begins to  fill some of these important gaps in knowledge.