Journal Article

World Agriculture Output and Productivity Growth Have Slowed

Morgan, Stephen, Jelliffe, Jeremy, Fuglie, Keith

2023

• Subject: Agribusiness / Agricultural Finance / Agriculture draws on significant land and water resources as well as manufactured goods to produce food and industrial raw materials for textiles and biofuel to meet the needs of a growing world population. Increasing agricultural productivity helps meet these demands using existing resources. The USDA, Economic Research Service data product on International Agricultural Productivity tracks the total volume of global agricultural output (the amounts of crop, animal, and aquaculture commodities produced at constant prices) and the total amounts of land, labor, capital, and materials (inputs) used to produce this output for the world as a whole and for individual countries. Over the last six decades (1961 to 2021), world agricultural output increased at an average annual rate of 2.3 percent, faster than the 1.2-percent average growth rate for input use. This means world agricultural total factor productivity (TFP)— the ratio of total output to total input—grew 1.1 percent a year. In other words, improvement in total productivity was responsible for nearly half the growth in world agricultural production / Crop Production/Industries / Industrial Organization / Land Economics/Use / Production Economics / Productivity Analysis