Increasing agricultural output is important. Approximately 700 million people in the world live below the poverty line of $2.15 per day, and if that poverty line were raised to $3.85 per day, more than 2 billion people would be below it. It will be. Raising the living standards of the very poor requires higher agricultural outputs. Improving productivity in global agriculture is equally important. In most low-income countries, half or three-quarters of workers are still employed in agriculture, and as part of economic development, increases in agricultural productivity will help these workers to grow in other sectors. Facilitating migration to paid jobs. Even in high-income settings, it's worth remembering that agriculture is not just about food, but increasingly bio-based consumer and industrial products that are not edible.
Thus, the slowdown in the growth rate of agricultural output and agricultural productivity is big news. The U.S. Department of Agriculture maintains statistics. Keith Fuglie, Stephen Morgan, and Jeremy Jelliffe use it to create this chart in „Global Agricultural Output and Productivity Growth Slows.“ (USDA Amber Waves website, December 7, 2023)
The black line at the top shows the annual growth rate of world agricultural output. Of course, these annual percentage rates increase over time. A decline of 0.8% per year over 10 years (what happened from the period 2001-2010 to the period 2011-2021) means that gross agricultural production is more than 8% lower than it would have been otherwise .
The bar then breaks down that total increase into possible causes. Expansion of land, intensification of irrigation, and expansion of inputs (machinery, labor, fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) are measurable. The common approach is that anything that cannot be explained by measurable factors is called „productivity improvement,“ but this includes everything from improved cultivation practices to better seeds. It's an ambiguous category. As you can see, the 0.8% annual decline in production growth essentially all reflects lower productivity growth.
The problems of low-income groups and economies where more than half of the workforce is employed in agriculture are particularly pronounced in economies across Africa. For an overview of the issues in improving technology there, see below. Tavneet Suri and Christopher Udry. 2022. “African Agricultural Technology.” Economic Outlook Journal36(1): 33-56. They highlight the problem of large heterogeneity across the agricultural sectors of African countries, which makes it difficult to discover and diffuse new agricultural technologies.