The Intermediate United States Food and Agriculture Model of the IIASA/FAP Basic Linked System: Summary Documentation and User's Guide

Abkin, M.H. (1985). The Intermediate United States Food and Agriculture Model of the IIASA/FAP Basic Linked System: Summary Documentation and User's Guide. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-85-030

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Abstract

Understanding the nature and dimensions of the world food problem and the policies available to alleviate it has been the focal point of IIASA's Food and Agriculture Program (FAP) since it began in 1977.

National food systems are highly interdependent, and yet the major policy options exist at the national level. Therefore, to explore these options, it is necessary both to develop policy models for national economies and to link them together by trade and capital transfers. Over the years FAP has, with the help of a network of collaborating institutions, developed and linked national policy models of twenty countries, which together account for nearly 80 percent of important agricultural attributes such as area, production, population, exports, imports and so on. The remaining countries are represented by 14 somewhat simpler models of groups of countries.

Since the United States is a major actor on the world market, a special food and agriculture model of the United States was developed by the Michigan State University (MSU) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in collaboration with FAP to serve as the basic U.S. model in the IIASA/FAP basic linked system.

In this document Mike Abkin provides a summary description of the U.S. intermediate model and guidelines for implementing the model's computer program, as of its August 1984 version, and interpreting its results. It is intended to assist analysts in using this model for policy analysis as a part of the basic linked system.

This working paper is one of a series of Working Papers documenting the work that went into developing the various models of FAP's system of linked models.

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