A researcher at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science Mostafa Abotaleb together with his co-authors from India, Syria, and Egypt, proposed a methodology for forecasting the growth of the world potato market based on time series analysis. The result was published in the famous international journal Potato Research, included in the first quartile of Scopus.
The following leading countries in potato export and production were selected for analysis: China, India and the USA. Note that until 2022, the top five potato exporters also included Russia and Ukraine, but forecasts for them are not discussed in the article (because exports of products from these countries are limited now).
The authors rely on annual potato production data from 1960 to 2022. During this period, China and India showed generally steady growth in gross potato volume, while the US market experienced significant fluctuations: after reaching a maximum in 2000, subsequently rising one moment and declining the next.
To build a forecast of the world potato market for the near future, two time series analysis methods were chosen. The first is an autoregressive integrated moving average, or ARIMA model. The second is an exponential smoothing, or ETS (error-trend-seasonality) method. For different countries in different periods, one or the other model may be more suitable. Analysing data for China, India and the USA as of 1960–2022, the authors concluded that the ETS model would provide a more reliable forecast in this case.
According to the forecast built by Mostafa Abotaleb and his colleagues, by 2027, the volume of potato production in the United States will stabilize at 18,229 million tons annually. Potato production in India will continue to rise and will reach 61,882 million tonnes. China will also show sustainable growth, which by 2027 will cross the mark of one hundred million tons of potato (100,417,000 tons).
Thus, China will remain the planet’s leader in potato growing in the coming years, providing approximately a quarter of the world market volume – five times more than both the Russian Federation and the United States produce.