Introduction

In the last 10 years, we produced a total of 409896 billion kg of agricultural products. Which countries contribute the most to this number? What different types of products are there, and how big is their part? In this section, we will discuss how the production of these categories varies by country and evolves over time.

A global view

In the graph below you can see the evolution of the total amount of agricultural production per category. We can see that the ‘Cereals’ category is one of the biggest ones, this includes common wheat, maize, etc. Remarkably, sugar is the 2nd biggest category.

Of course, the production amount of agricultural products increases. With a global increase in population, also comes an increase in the need for food and thus agricultural products. However, taking a look at the production per capita, we can see that the production weight stays roughly the same. You could interpret that the average need for food stays the same. We might have have expected that it would increase as one could think that people eat more now, as opposed to 60 years ago, but this is apparently nog the case. We do notice a slight decrease in the production of meat. “We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” says Hans-Otto Pörtner, an ecologist who co-chairs the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.” [1] Apparently people are listening and getting more concious about their food choices.

Plants vs. Animals

The production categories can be split in two groups: plant-based agricultural products, such as vegetables, cereals, etc. and animal-based agricultural products, such as meat, milk, etc. In the figures below you can find the weight of the plant-based and animal-based agricultural produced goods per capita.

At first sight, the animal-based production map does not look very interesting. If you take a closer look, you can however see that there is one country that stands out: New Zealand. New Zealand has an exceptionally high animal-based food production per capita. The animal-based agricultural production in New Zealand almost entirely exists of milk.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7