https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-productivity-crucial
Why is improving agricultural productivity crucial to ending global hunger and protecting the world’s wildlife?
By: Max Roser March 04, 2024
The use of land for agriculture has been the main driver of the destruction of the world’s biodiversity for a very long time.1 A look at our history makes clear why.
Our planet has a land surface of about 150 million square kilometers. Almost a third of it is free of vegetation. It is covered by rocks, deserts, and glaciers — especially the large glaciers in Antarctica. The remaining 71% of the planet’s land surface was once covered by wilderness: large forests, shrubs, and grasslands.
The world’s land surface 10,000 years ago:
How have things changed since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago?
The 10.6 billion hectares that were once covered by wilderness are called the world’s “habitable land”. The following chart shows how this land is used today. Almost half is used for agriculture. The global land area used for agriculture today measures 48 million square kilometers. For comparison, that’s an area around five times the size of the United States.2
The world’s habitable land today:3
Considering this immense transformation, this article’s first sentence is not surprising: agricultural land use has been the main driver of the destruction of wildlife and nature over the last millennia.
This environmental problem — agricultural land use — does not get the attention it deserves. It’s mentioned far less than other environmental challenges like climate change or plastic pollution. But if we want a future in which we preserve the world’s wildlife, this is the key problem we must focus on.
We can’t look at this problem in isolation. At the same time, as we protect the world’s environment, we also have to find ways to produce the food needed to end hunger and malnutrition. But — and this is the point of this article — these two goals are no longer at odds with one another.
For our ancestors they were at odds with one another: our ancestors had to take natural land and convert it into agricultural land if they wanted to produce more food. This is not the case for us today: we can produce more from less.
More from less
To increase food production while restoring wild habitats, we must find ways to produce more food on less land. We have to increase agricultural productivity.
This is possible. In fact, we have already achieved a lot, as the following chart shows.
After centuries of stagnation, humanity has recently achieved a large increase in land productivity. The chart shows that land use per person declined by more than half. At the same time, food supply per person increased in every region of the world.You can explore the changes in food production in hundreds of metrics in our Global Food Explorer.
The fact that land use per capita has declined does not mean the problem is solved. While agricultural land use has been strongly reduced in some regions, it is increasing in others. Global croplands have not yet peaked and are still expanding. And while total land use is lower than 20 years ago, it is still an enormous 4.8 billion hectares, as we saw above. If we want to see the planet’s wildlife thrive, we must reduce our land use further.
Closing the “yield gap” to produce more crops from less land
Achieving this future is not inevitable. It depends on what we do today.
Land productivity is measured as yield: the amount of food produced per unit of land.
With the modernization of agriculture, yields have increased substantially. 60 years ago, the world’s farmers produced around one tonne of wheat per hectare of land. Since then it has increased to three and a half tonnes. This means that wheat yields have increased 3.5-fold.
Big yield increases were also achieved in other important crops, as the following chart shows.5 Because of these productivity increases, the land area to grow a given quantity of crops has declined more than three-fold in the last sixty years.
WorldWheat19612021198020000 t/ha2 t/haRice19612021198020000 t/ha2 t/ha4 t/haBarley19612021198020000 t/ha2 t/haMaize19612021198020000 t/ha2 t/ha4 t/haRye19612021198020000 t/ha2 t/haOats19612021198020000 t/ha1 t/ha2 t/haMillet19612021198020000 t/ha0.5 t/haSorghum19612021198020000 t/ha1 t/haPotatoes19612021198020000 t/ha10 t/ha20 t/ha
The world has already achieved large increases, but thanks to the research on “yield gaps”, we know that more is possible. Yield gaps are estimated by agricultural researchers and represent the difference between the current yields that a region achieves and the yields that are attainable using currently available crops, technologies, and farming practices. In our Crop Yields Data Explorer, you can explore the yield gap for countries around the world for crops, including wheat, barley, potato, and rice.
What stands in the way of closing yield gaps?
The binding constraints differ significantly between different regions. It often hinges on adopting technologies like irrigation, fertilizers, and better seeds. But one level deeper, what is needed are changes to the finance systems that make the adoption of technology possible and provide access to markets; political changes that enable fair trade arrangements and strengthen the land rights of farmers; and scientific efforts to produce high-yielding crops suitable for the climate and soil of each particular agricultural region.6
We could free up a lot of land if we could reduce global meat consumption
Not just changes to production can make a big difference. Changes in consumption, too, could spare much more agricultural land.
Most of the world’s farmland today is used for the production of meat and dairy, either as grazing land or cropland to grow animal feed.7 77% of all agricultural land is used to raise livestock for meat and dairy.
In total, this is an area of 38 million km². For comparison, that’s the size of the total land area of the Americas — from Alaska in the North all the way to Tierra del Fuego in the South.8
But, as you can see in the chart below, the food produced on this land only contributes about 40% of the world’s protein and just 18% of the world’s calories.10 This shows the problem: meat production is a particularly inefficient way of using land for food production.
This is because, at each level of the food chain, some energy is lost. It is more efficient to eat plants rather than animals that eat plants.
My colleague Hannah Ritchie showed how much of a difference it can make if the world ate less meat. If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This shows just how much of today’s agricultural land use and destruction of biodiversity is due to our consumption of animals and their products.
Technology that allows for sustainable intensification of crop production and the reduction of meat consumption are two of the main ways to produce more food on less land.11 We can achieve additional gains by reducing food waste and the use of biofuels.
A world better fed where nature is rebounding
Research on the global demand for food in the future shows that we should expect a growth in demand. The meta-analysis by van Dijk and colleagues in Nature Food shows that global food demand is expected to increase by 35% to 56% by the middle of this century.12 An increase that we should be able to meet.
We have seen just how important the productivity of agricultural land is for achieving a sustainable future. Humanity has just entered a new era: after millennia in which increases in food production were only possible by turning the planet’s wilderness into agricultural land, today, we can increase food production while making more space for other species.
We can achieve a future without hunger and a future in which the planet’s wildlife rebounds if we can further increase the productivity of agricultural land.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Hannah Ritchie for her helpful comments on this essay and visualizations.
Further reading:
- For more research on this, have a look at the work of my colleagues at the Oxford Martin School’s Future of Food Programme, led by Sir Charles Godfray.
- On the question of how agricultural productivity on the African continent can increase see Tavneet Suri, Chris Udry et al. (2022) — Agricultural Technology in Africa, published in VoxDevLit.
- See also our page on crop yields, which includes our Crop Yield Data Explorer.
Endnotes
- We’ve written extensively about this problem here on Our World in Data. Articles that discuss the evidence and the scale of this issue include:
- Humans destroyed forests for thousands of years – we can become the first generation that achieves a world in which forests expand
- Cutting down forests: what are the drivers of deforestation?
- Wild mammals have declined by 85% since the rise of humans, but there is a possible future where they flourish
- The world has lost one-third of its forest, but an end of deforestation is possible
- Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
- See our world map for the land area of the world’s countries. For all data sources on the world’s land use, see our article: Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
- This data is taken from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). As discussed in our work on land use, there are considerable uncertainties around the estimates of how the world’s land is used. For detailed data sources on the world’s land use, see our article: Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
- Data on land use over the last millennia is taken from the HYDE database; the data is available here on Our World in Data.Data on land use from 1980 onwards is from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN; this data is available here on Our World in Data.
- Banana yields, tomato yields, and coffee yields have also all at least doubled globally in these 60 years.
- A very good overview (with a focus on Africa) is provided by Tavneet Suri, Chris Udry et al. (2022) — Agricultural Technology in Africa, published in VoxDevLit, 5.1, Dec 2022. The authors state that “Yield gaps across the world and Africa are largely a consequence of the dramatically different technologies being used” and then consider a wide range of technologies: “seeds, breeding stock, chemical inputs such as fertilizer, insecticides, and pesticides; agronomic practices such as following patterns and plant spacing; and equipment like hand tools, tractors or pumps and other irrigation and water management tools”. In the main section of their article, the authors then go on to present the empirical research on a large number of constraints that stand in the way of the adoption of different technologies in different contexts.
- When looking at the breakdown of global land use statistics, it is important to keep in mind that animals are not only fed from the plants that grow on pastures but also from crops grown on croplands. Today, almost half of the world’s cropland is used to produce animal feed. Because of this, cropland could be reduced if the world reduced livestock production. For the data sources on the world’s land use, see our article: Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
- The total land area of the Americas is 38.15 million km².
- For details on the data sources, see our article Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
- For the data sources see our article Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
- See Godfray et al. (2010) — Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People. In Science. For more research on this, see Nature’s focus issue on sustainable intensification and the links at the end of this article.
- See van Dijk, M., Morley, T., Rau, M. L., & Saghai, Y. (2021). A meta-analysis of projected global food demand and population at risk of hunger for the period 2010–2050. Nature Food, 2(7), 494-501.
- According to Wikipedia the land area of the Americas measures 42,549,000 km2, which corresponds to 4,254,900,000 hectares.
- Other studies come to the same conclusion or date this reversal even earlier: The study by Goldewijk et al. (2017) also suggests that the peak was reached around the year 2000, while the study by Taylor and Rising (2021) comes to the conclusion that the peak was reached a decade earlier. My colleague Hannah Ritchie reported the data in detail in her article: After millennia of agricultural expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’References to data on global agricultural land use from three sources:
- Klein Goldewijk, K., Beusen, A., Doelman, J., and Stehfest, E. (2017). Anthropogenic land use estimates for the Holocene – HYDE 3.2, Earth System Science Data, 9, 927–953.
- Taylor, C. A., & Rising, J. (2021). Tipping point dynamics in global land use. Environmental Research Letters, 16(12), 125012.
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Available at: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RL
- The data from these three sources can be explored in our interactive visualization.
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Max Roser (2024) - “Why is improving agricultural productivity crucial to ending global hunger and protecting the world’s wildlife?” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-productivity-crucial' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-agricultural-productivity-crucial,
author = {Max Roser},
title = {Why is improving agricultural productivity crucial to ending global hunger and protecting the world’s wildlife?},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2024},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-productivity-crucial}
}A further study on smallholder crop yields:
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