Global food production

Today’s food producers fall mostly into four uneven categories. Several thousand
large agribusiness companies, most of them in North America and Europe, control extensive areas of food and feed crops and highly concentrated meat production in giant feedlots. Their production goes directly to large-scale food processors or is destined for export. Several million highly mechanized family owned farms in affluent countries rely on intensive practices to achieve high crop and animal productivities.
Tens of millions of the most successful farmers in the most productive agricultural
regions of many developing countries (e.g., China’s Jiangsu and Guangdong or India’s
Punjab) use generally high levels of the best locally available inputs in order to produce food beyond their family’s and region’s need. And hundreds of millions of subsistence peasants, either landless or cultivating small amounts of often inferior land, use inadequate inputs, or no modern means of production at all, to grow barely enough food for their own families.
Cereal grains continue to dominate the global crop harvest. Their annual output is now just above 2 billion tonnes. Developing countries produce nearly 60% of all grain, with twice as much rice as wheat (about 570 vs. 270Mt in 2000), but in per capita terms their output (about 260kg/year) is only about 40% of the developed countries mean (660kg/year). Most of the poor world’s grain (more than 85%) is eaten directly, whereas most of the rich world’s grain (more than 60% during the late 1990s) is fed to animals. Consequently, actual per capita supply of processed food cereals is still about 25% higher in developing countries (165 vs. 130 kg/year), reflecting simpler diets dominated by grain staples. Not surprisingly, rich countries enjoy even higher per capita disparities in production of nonstaple crops, with the differences being particularly large for sugar (30 vs. 15 kg/year) and meat (almost 80 vs. 25kg).
Per capita consumption of legumes has been declining for several generations in every country where pulses previously played a critical nutritional role. Only India’s annual per capita consumption of legumes remains above 10 kg/year (FAO, 2001).
In contrast, no other crop diffusion in agricultural history has been as rapid and as
economically far reaching as the cultivation of soybeans for feed. US soybean plantings rose from a few thousand hectares in the early 1930s to more than 20 Mha since the early 1970s, and they now produce more than 50 Mt/year. Brazilian soybean production rose even faster, from a negligible total in the early 1960s to more than 20Mt by the early 1990s. These two countries now produce two-thirds of the global soybean harvest, virtually all of it for animal feed.
Rising affluence combined with concerns about healthy diets has resulted in a steady growth of fruit production. Global fruit output has tripled since 1950, but this does not convey the unprecedented variety of fruits, including many tropical imports as well as winter shipments of subtropical and temperate species from the southern hemisphere, that are now available virtually year-round in all rich countries. The trend of rising fruit production recently has been most obvious in rapidly modernizing
China where fruit harvests (now also increasingly for export) rose more than 10-fold
(from less than 7 to more than 70 Mt) between 1980 and 2000 (National Bureau of
Statistics, 2000).
With global annual output of nearly 500Mt cow’s milk is the most important animal
food. Annual output of all kinds of milk amounts to about 570Mt. Per capita availabilities of dairy products are large in North America and Western Europe (in excess of 250kg/year) and negligible in traditionally non-milking societies of East Asia.
Pork, with about 80Mt/year and rising, is by far the most important meat worldwide, with China and the US slaughtering the largest number of animals. Total meat output,
including poultry, is now over 200 Mt a year, prorating to almost 80 kg/capita in rich
countries and to about 25kg/capita in the poor world. Poultry production (near 60Mt/year) is now ahead of the combined beef and veal output and it will continue to rise. Consumption of hen eggs is now at more than 40Mt a year, and recent rapid growth of aquaculture (its combined freshwater and marine output is now close to 30Mt a year, equal to nearly a quarter of ocean catch) has put cultured fish, crustaceans, and mollusks ahead of mutton.
After a period of decline and stagnation the global marine catch began rising once more during the mid-1990s and is now close to 100 Mt/year but major increases are highly unlikely. A conservative assessment of the global marine potential concluded that by 1996 the world ocean was being fully fished, with about 60% of some 200 major marine fish resources being either overexploited or at the peak of their sustainable harvest (FAO, 1997). Consequently, if long-term marine catches were to be kept at
around 100 Mt a year then 50 years from now the population growth would cut per
capita fish supply by more than half compared to the late 1990s level. The importance of this harvest is due to its nutritional quality. During the late 1990s the world’s average per capita supply of some 14kg of marine species contained only a few percent of all available food energy, but it supplied about one-sixth of all animal protein. More importantly, aquatic species provide more than a third of animal protein to at least 200 million people, mostly in east and southeast Asia (FAO, 2001).