By Chen Chunliang & Cheng Yu, Research Team on “The Estimation of China’s Peak Food Demand and Countermeasures”, Research Department of Rural Economy, DRC

Research Report, Special Issue, No. 34, 2016 (Total No. 1509) 2016-08-18

Abstract: To countries like China with a large population, inadequate resources and an increased ratio of import dependence, analysis on demand for food is of great significance in making mid-and-long term food security policies, and many scholars have made researches and explorations on that. Their study approaches can be roughly divided into three types: estimation of per capita nutrition intake, empirical and trend estimation and structural model prediction method. However, in current study approaches, there are some defects such as inadequate knowledge in grasping food consumption rules, lack of scientific outlook for the future and the incomplete consideration of factors relating to the influence of food demand, which would result in a relatively large forecasting deviation. Income increase and urbanization drive will push forward the upgrading of food consumption structure, and current methods based on the analysis of historical development trends cannot reflect the features of future food consumption structure in China. Food price inversion both at home and abroad has led to inventory surge and a growing deviation between food apparent consumption and real consumption. Thus, improvement in the forecasting methods of food demand and amendment to the current data is called to precisely forecast China’s future demand for food. Key words: demand for food, forecasting method, trend estimation