The world is producing more food, but it is a mixed bag in terms of improving diets
Per capita production of many staples, meat and fruit and vegetables is increasing, yet undernourishment has increased.
Written by Tom Campbell and Dirk van der Kley
Key Points
Global per-capita food production has consistently increased or remained stable across many staple crops, meats, fruits and vegetables since 2000.
Yet, the number of people who do not eat enough calories is increasing. Simply producing more food per-person has not solved the problem.
Conversely, a nutritional diet (enough vitamins etc) has become slightly more accessible in recent years, even though 2.8 billion people still cannot afford a nutritious diet.
This has significant strategic implications. Food security remains a top priority of Indo-Pacific nations. It will be a point of leverage and competition. The steep potential reduction in USAID will hand the initiative to Beijing.
More Food Production and More Undernourishment
When we think about food availability, we think of two things.
Can people access enough energy in their diets to meet basic requirements
Can people access enough nutrition (vitamins, minerals, fibre etc) to meet their basic health requirements.
On the energy side, there is an obvious conundrum. The world is producing more calories per-person than ever.
Source: Our World in Data
Yet, the number of people who do not receive enough calories is increasing, reversing decades of progress. In the graph below, you will see the world’s percentage of undernourished (by this we mean not enough calories) people in 2022 is the same as 2010. The total number has increased due to population growth. Worsening undernourishment in South Asia and Africa are driving the global trends.
Source: Our World in Data
On the healthy diet (enough minerals, vitamins etc) side, the share of the population that can afford a healthy diet has gradually increased in the last five years. Africa is lagging behind, with the global trend largely caused by improvements in South-Asia and the East Asia and Pacific region.
The graph below shows that over the past five years, the world has made modest progress on improving healthy diet affordability. But we need to be realistic 35% - more than a third of humanity cannot afford a healthy diet. It is a huge chunk. A healthy diet is a much higher target than just meeting caloric needs.
Source: Our World in Data
It is a bleak truth 2.8 billion people could not afford one in 2022. This has major ramifications - even when people are getting enough calories, the lack of a healthy diet leads to micronutrient deficiencies such as not enough iron, zinc, or vitamin C. These deficiencies are a major global health issue as they undermine childhood development and contribute to conditions such as anemia and night blindness.
Despite increasing undernourishment and remaining inaccessibility of healthy diets, per capita yields are increasing for most foods
We looked at production and yield of staple groups and major protein sources collected by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The charts below demonstrate that global production per-person of most staple crops, meat, fruits and vegetables (the fruit and veg graph is a little further on) production either increased or remained stable over the last twenty years.
Millet and sorghum, both staple crops in Africa, are exceptions. Both have steadily declined from 4.50 and 9.07 kg per capita in 2000 to 3.92 and 7.12 kg per capita in 2023 respectively. Potatoes too have very modestly declined.
We are producing more food because of increased yields not because of increased farmland
You can produce more food by expansion of cultivation areas or by improving yields - that is, produce more per hectare. Our global agricultural land use peaked around 2000, and so as land usage decreases we would expect our overall production to decrease all things equal. An increased yield per hectare therefore reflects that our agritech innovations (think fertilisers, irrigation, etc) are working effectively. This matters because 37% of all global land is used for agriculture.
While this growth has been consistent across a lot of the staple crops, sorghum yields have notably remained at levels similar to 2000. This reflects that a lot of modern agriculture techniques are failing to make their way to Africa.
For food production - this is a positive sign - increasing yields means that we can produce more food while simultaneously reducing the amount of land we use for agriculture, thereby mitigating habitat loss. There are downsides, agricultural greenhouse gas emissions are increasing and animal welfare remains dire (factory farming tends to be terrible for animals). But these are beyond our scope in this piece.
We need to look beyond staple crops and meat sources. According to the World Health Organisation, a healthy diet also includes at least 400g of fruits and vegetables a day. This helps to ensure an adequate intake of micronutrients that are essential for physical and mental development.
Looking again at FAO data, it shows that production of food and vegetables per capita has increased a lot between 2000 and 2022, although there are some signs that vegetable production is starting to plateau.
It seems that even with climate change, our global agricultural system is working - we are producing more food-per-capita.
What explains the conundrum of increasing undernourishment, yet improving access to healthy diets?
There are four reasons we can see.
Wars stopping access to food. This only affects the very poorest and thus affects undernourishment.
The places with the most undernourishment are war zones (not Ukraine though) - Sudan, Yemen and Gaza among others.
The broader world is still getting richer. And so the number of people who can afford a healthy diet increases.
Even though we are producing more, a healthy diet is simply too expensive. This figure by Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado for Our World in Data shows that in the poorest countries the cost of a healthy diet exceeds the median income. This means for most people in that nation, a healthy diet would be unaffordable, even if they spent all their income on food.
As median incomes have steadily risen around the world, more people that ever before can afford a healthy diet. But as the graph shows below.
Source: Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado, Our World in Data
Increased weather volatility creates localised shortages, again affecting the very poorest
El Niño events are associated with low rainfall in southern Africa and heavy rains in eastern Africa, and the recent 2023-2024 El Niño was among the five strongest on record. As a result Africa was impacted by both droughts and flooding which damaged crops, degraded the soil, and resulted in reduced yields. As a result, the price of staple foods has increased in most of sub-Saharan Africa - work by Lotanna Emediegwu shows that maize and sorghum are particularly susceptible to price increases during El Niño.
Agricultural yields have not increased in Africa at the same rate as the rest of the world.
The staples in Africa of Millet and Sorghum have not seen the same growth rates as other crops, and so localised food supply has not grown at the same pace as the rest of the world. Africa also has faster population growth than everywhere else. The graphs earlier in this piece show that Africa is going backwards.
Food is becoming strategic again
Food security is a central policy issue through most of South Asia and Africa which is about half of humanity. USAID is likely to pull out of its food commitments at exactly the time Beijing is committing more global resources to agricultural support globally. This will shape hearts and minds. To be clear, this is not just about provision of food, but provision of advanced agricultural techniques, seed development and fertiliser production to be done in recipients country.