One of the most important charts in all of human history is one most people have never seen: the amount of food grown on a single hectare of land, rising decade after decade.
That climb is why a growing planet has, so far, kept itself fed.
TL;DR
- World rice production rose from 216 million tonnes in 1961 to about 776 million tonnes in 2022, a more than threefold increase.
- Between 2000 and 2020 alone, global yields of maize, rice, and wheat grew 33%, 19%, and 28%.
- Most of that gain came from producing more per hectare, not from clearing vastly more land.
The long-run production and yield figures here come from FAOSTAT, the FAO’s production database, as compiled by Our World in Data.
The Rise, Crop by Crop
The deeper story runs back to the mid-20th century.
China’s rice output roughly quadrupled between 1961 and 2020, and India’s more than tripled.
This was the Green Revolution: improved seed varieties, fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization together lifting how much a field could yield.
ALSO READ: Farmland Use Around The World: Crops, Livestock, and the Rest
Why the Long View is the Honest View
A single year’s harvest number tells you almost nothing, because weather swings it up and down.
The multi-decade trend is what actually matters, and it is unambiguous.
The world feeds billions more people today than in 1961 without having expanded farmland at anything like the same pace, because each hectare became far more productive.
Where the U.S. and Developed Nations Sit
The United States has long been near the technological frontier of this climb, with some of the highest cereal yields in the world thanks to advanced seed, machinery, and inputs.
For U.S., UK, and Canadian readers, that frontier is precisely why food has become a smaller and smaller share of household budgets over the same period: rising yields drove down the real cost of staple calories.
The flip side, explored in our companion piece on the yield gap, is that much of the world still grows far below what its land could produce.
ALSO READ: Which Countries Depend Most on Imported Food?
ELI5
A long time ago, a farm could only grow a certain amount of food on one field.
Over the years, better seeds, water, and fertilizer let farmers grow much more on the same field.
That is why the world can feed billions more people than it used to.
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