Policymakers, researchers, analysts and anyone interested in the past, present and future paths of food and agriculture now have an updated all-in-one tool to peruse the major factors at play in the agrifood systems of the world.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published its annual Statistical Yearbook, comprising hundreds of pages of organized data covering themes from agricultural employment, agrifood trade, fertilizer and pesticide use around the world as well as environmental and climate factors. This is a lot of key policy-relevant information at a glance, easily and quickly accessible.
The Statistical Yearbook World Food and Agriculture 2022 is available in a digital version, in a downloadable version, and as a pocketbook printed edition.
“FAO assigns tremendous importance to data and statistics as a global public good at the core of our efforts to advance sustainable development,” said José Rosero Moncayo, Director of FAO’s Statistics Division. “FAO is committed to ensuring free access to current, reliable, timely and trusted data, necessary to chart a course towards more sustainable and equitable agrifood systems and a world free of hunger.”
The 2022 edition is built around four thematic chapters: one on economic dimension; one on production, trade and price of commodities; one on food security and nutrition; and one on the sustainability and environmental aspects of agriculture. Along with assessments made at global and regional levels, it contains detailed data taken from the more than 20,000 indicators covering more than 245 countries and territories that the freely accessible FAOSTAT data platform contains.
Key facts
Dietary energy supply, a key indicator for food security, went up in all regions since 2000, and did so the most in Asia. The world average is now 2,960 calories per person per day, up 9 percent, with the level peaking at 3,540 calories per day per person in Europe and North America.
Today, some 866 million people work in agriculture, more than a quarter of the global work force, and produced $3.6 trillion in value-added. Compared to 2000, those figures represent a 78 percent increase in economic value, produced by 16 percent fewer people, with Africa posting double that pace of growth.
Since 2000, the production of primary crops, such as sugarcane, maize, wheat and rice, grew by 52 percent from 2000 to 2020 to reach 9.3 billion tons. Vegetable oil production increased by 125 percent over that period, with palm oil output growing by 236 percent. Meat output, led by chicken, grew by 45 percent, while the growth rate for fruits and vegetables was 20 percent or below.
Sugarcane is the world’s largest crop by volume, with 1. 9 billion tons annually. Maize is next at 1.2 billion tons.