Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data writes:
The world looks to be on track to produce more rice, wheat and soybean than ever before. Wheat just marginally; but soybean and rice by a long shot.
The chart below shows the historical data on global production of staple crops, with the latest projection for 2024/25.
Corn — the world’s most prolific crop — looks like it will not beat last year’s record, but will be comparable to output in 2021. [The chart below is from her essay]
She also linked to an earlier essay in which she highlighted the seriousness of the food production problem in Africa - especially the lack of agricultural productivity:
To grow food you need two things: some land and some of your time. These two – land and labor – are two of agriculture’s ‘inputs’. To build a food system that works for people and the planet, humanity needs to achieve high productivity in both of them.
To escape poverty, farmers need to increase labor productivity – to produce more food per hour worked. It is a deep societal problem when most of the population works in farming and gets little money in return. The farmers' families are unable to get a good education; improve healthcare; and to free up labor so that their children can become teachers or build new industries outside of agriculture.
To protect the world’s wildlife, we need high land productivity – to produce more food per unit of land area. Land productivity for crops is measured as ‘crop yields’. If humanity wants to reduce deforestation and protect habitats rich in biodiversity then we need to use less land to grow food.
Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the productivity of both input factors is low. Agricultural productivity across the region needs to improve to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity. This is why I think that it is one of the most important problems to tackle this century.1
During the eight years of Nigeria's immediate past president, agriculture policy was based on the fantasy that more farmers and money could increase domestic food production. Land borders were closed to food imports and large financial credits were extended to farmers. The hard problem of increasing yield was never seriously tackled. The result is that Nigeria is now experiencing the worst food crisis in decades.
Sadly, the new government has refused to change course. More Nigerians are starving, but policies that increase the food supply are in short supply - rather a narrow clique of producers who cannot meet the food demands of the country are always prioritised and protected. Under the nebulous slogans of “self-sufficiency” and now, ''food security'', the Nigerian government continues to choose scarcity in a world of abundance.