World Cereal Production Set To Hit Record High In 2023

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

The UN Food & Agricultural Agency has started to update its database to include 2022 numbers.

Cereal output, which includes rice, was slightly down on 2021, but is still the second highest on record.

The value of agricultural output still has not been updated for 2022, but was at a record high in 2021, based on constant prices (ie excluding the effects of inflation

World Cereal Production

World Gross Production Value of Agriculture

https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare

More good news from the UN suggests that cereal output hit another record high in 2023:

https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/

It’s all a very different story to the one fed to us by the media, with their lies of how extreme weather and droughts are supposedly impacting food supply.

H/T bnice2000

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J Boles
February 3, 2024 6:08 pm

Should show a dual graph with C02 overlaid. More more more!

elernerigc
February 3, 2024 6:18 pm

Great–10% increase in cereal production in a decade. 11% increase in population. Per capita DECREASE in production 1%. Not so great. All due to climate change? Probably not–capitalist austerity and transfer of wealth to billionaires has a lot to do with it. But it is in the wrong direction, not the right direction.

pillageidiot
Reply to  elernerigc
February 3, 2024 6:32 pm

10% increase in cereal production is in the WRONG direction?

What?

Bryan A
Reply to  pillageidiot
February 3, 2024 9:34 pm

Simple solution… Stop using food to make fake fuel

leefor
Reply to  elernerigc
February 3, 2024 6:35 pm

And what was the consumption?

Bryan A
Reply to  leefor
February 3, 2024 9:39 pm

Well, about 40% was consumed by needlessly converting it to ethanol to unnecessarily supplement gasoline

Ethanol manufacturers use about 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop for ethanol and related co-products, with the majority of the ethanol being consumed in the domestic transportation fuel market

https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=105761#:~:text=Ethanol%20manufacturers%20use%20about%2040,the%20domestic%20transportation%20fuel%20market.

Reply to  Bryan A
February 4, 2024 11:58 am

US gasoline consumption(per EIA) has been flat for 20 years so……

Chris Hanley
Reply to  elernerigc
February 3, 2024 7:16 pm

What, Elon Musk is now taking food out of the mouths of starving children?
Westerners are generally overfed, any undernourishment (less than 2.5% in N America Europe etc.) would be due to addiction and the like.

Undernourishment (‘not consuming enough calories to maintain a normal, active, healthy life’) is worst in Sub-Saharan Africa next South Asia and is due to poverty that in turn is due to economic underdevelopment that can be solved by the availability of cheap abundant reliable energy that currently can only be supplied via fossil fuels.

Reply to  Chris Hanley
February 4, 2024 7:36 am

I upvoted you but why do you mention Musk? He’s not involved with ethanol production, is he? The subsidies and credits he gets don’t directly impact the cost of food unlike the ethanol requirements for gasoline.

Chris Hanley
Reply to  PCman999
February 4, 2024 12:33 pm

Because he was the first ‘billionaire’ that came to mind.

Scarecrow Repair
Reply to  elernerigc
February 3, 2024 7:45 pm

Perhaps you should harangue the governments which forbid sale of fruit and veggies which don’t look pretty enough for burrocrats, or require stores to discard food which has reached its burrocratic sell-by date instead of giving it to charities.

Rich Davis
Reply to  Scarecrow Repair
February 4, 2024 3:14 am

Some donkey will correct your spelling of burrocrat I’m afraid, but I chuckled.

Reply to  Rich Davis
February 4, 2024 4:28 am

I spell it that way on purpose here in Wokeachusetts- sometimes shortening it to just “burro”. Been doing it for a quarter century.

Reply to  Rich Davis
February 4, 2024 11:06 am

And make a total ass of themselves 😉

Rich Davis
Reply to  elernerigc
February 4, 2024 4:02 am

There has been a surplus of production over consumption for generations, despite governments paying farmers to take fields out of production in order to support prices.

As has been pointed out already, a substantial portion of the US corn (maize) crop is being converted to ethanol (I don’t have data to corroborate the 40% claim, but it may be correct).

That is not an environment that suggests a lack of viable agricultural land. If there has been a per capita decline in production it likely reflects the reduction in safety stocks made reasonable by the massive diversion of food to ethanol.

Where previously there may have been a margin of production that just went into storage, now there is a huge margin of safety thanks to the use of corn for ethanol production. In an emergency, all that corn could be diverted to food supply.

Now many of us will argue that burning food is wasteful and/or immoral. My take is that if your aim is to make sure we are self-sufficient for food supply, we must keep farmers in business. If we’re already distorting markets, at least there’s merit in the policy also making the transportation fuel market less vulnerable to disruption of foreign supply.

We could probably spin off into an endless discussion about farm subsidies and whether it was justifiable on national security grounds to distort markets with the measures that have been in place in the US at least since Franklin Roosevelt’s first term.

As a libertarian-leaning conservative, I’m very skeptical of farm subsidies. But as an American and a realist, I am also very skeptical of a globalism that lowers Americans to a ‘least common denominator’ approach to trade.

It’s wonderful to see the world rise up to American standards of living. There is no virtue in lowering Americans’ standard of living in order to make things more equal.

old cocky
Reply to  elernerigc
February 4, 2024 9:20 pm

Farmers are hardly likely to increase cereal production if it isn’t profitable.
Cereals can be stored, but at a cost, and for a limited amount of time.

A 10% increase in production and 11% increase in population (implies a similar increase in consumption) are the same within the likely margin of error.

Ex-KaliforniaKook
Reply to  old cocky
February 6, 2024 6:13 pm

Or 10% less waste. Better storage/transportation.

February 3, 2024 6:32 pm

It’s all a very different story to the one fed to us by the media,

with their lies of how extreme weather and droughts are

supposedly impacting food supply.

_________________________________________________________

Needs to be shoved down their throats at every opportunity.

pillageidiot
February 3, 2024 6:52 pm

I post all of the time on WUWT that approximately 25,000 people die of starvation every day.

2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season 12 deaths. Pacific Hurricane Season 64 deaths.

That calculates to 0.2 deaths per day.

The global warming alarmists are hyping a tiny problem, while hiding a problem that is 125,000 times worse!

I don’t suppose you get to seize the means of production though if increased CO2 is beneficial to humanity?

Rich Davis
Reply to  pillageidiot
February 4, 2024 4:36 am

pi
Where are you getting a statistic that supports a claim that over 9 million people are dying of starvation each year?

I did a cursory look and it seems that there are a lot of sites posting misleading claims such as modeled data attributing deaths to ‘malnutrition’, but actual death due to a lack of food supply rather than lack of infrastructure to distribute food, corruption, and war? I find no evidence.

Sure, more CO2 is beneficial, on that I totally agree. We should not exaggerate in making the case.

pillageidiot
Reply to  Rich Davis
February 4, 2024 8:12 am

I have done a similar search to yours, and come up with multiple, independent sources that claim a number close to 9,000,000.

I agree, that is certainly a “modeled” number loosely based on aggregating many different years of famine, wars, and corruption. Any given year will NOT be 9,000,000 due to the great variability.

Further, it is a difficult number to know accurately because it is usually peasants in the hinterlands that are doing the most dying.

Finally, I agree that a very large number of starvation deaths are due to oppressive Left-wing governments.

However, I believe that if CO2 levels had been higher during Stalin’s Holodomor, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the dead would have had a slight to significant increase in their available foodstuffs.

I always try to use the word “approximately” before the number of daily deaths. My bigger point is that the alarmists will scream about the gnat in the room and ignore the 800 pound gorilla!

If a child is severely malnourished and then dies due to diarrhea dehydration due to a relatively benign rotavirus, what term should we use to describe that death?

Thank you for challenging my argument! Any improvements or clarifications you (or anyone else) would like to add to frame it more clearly or accurately would be greatly appreciated.

February 3, 2024 7:22 pm

Why do we produce all that mush, what’s wrong with growing some food here or there now & again?

Rich Davis
Reply to  Peta of Newark
February 4, 2024 4:45 am

What about the soil erosion that has turned the US corn belt into a permanent desert? Why the US used to feed the world and now we’re seeing millions starving in our streets…virtual skeletons walking, the typical American.

Gary Pearse
February 3, 2024 7:35 pm

Here’s how the global governance boffins operate. They examine sceptics’ most irrefutable claims that impede the march to totalitarian control and then launch a campaign to deep-six it. It is embarrassing for the totes to be told that, largely courtesy of fossil fuel burning, world harvests have doubled and redoubled over 30 years, with both the fertilizer effect and the drought-proofing action of escalating CO2 in the atmosphere. The war then mounted against FF (defunding producers, withdrawal of resource lands, a wall of regulations, interference in markets, blocking pipelines, etc.,) led to shortages and sharply escalating prices, to obliterate the huge economic advantages of FF for power production.

The huge irony here manifested itself when the totes came to understand that actually renewables simply don’t work without enabling FF backup! Result? Renewable energy prices sky rocketed. The scramble for natural gas at spot prices 10 times contract prices of before the anti FF campaign were baked in by governance stupidity.

They also ‘learned’ that every other product including raw materials for making, delivering and installing renewables, sky rocketed. Food prices skyrocketed. Inflation pounded everything.Tampering with this base of the pyramid of the world economy has actually put Renewables, the Global Warming false front and the ‘elite dreams of governance of the world on an unstoppable downhill race to oblivion. These ‘elites’ have just given themselves a pathetic IQ test.

Reply to  Gary Pearse
February 3, 2024 8:11 pm

Increased energy prices aren’t a cause or symptom of inflation. Inflation is the result of an increase in the money supply, pure and simple. Presently money doesn’t even have a physical dimension, it’s now a complete abstraction. Rather than being minted or printed it’s enpixelated by digital keystroke. Practically speaking, the US Treasury has adopted Modern Monetary Theory. It seems to work after a fashion right now but that’s unlikely to continue into the future. It’s been tried before and never been successful. See Wiemar Germany, Zimbabwe or Mexico.

Rasa
February 3, 2024 8:05 pm

The growth in cereal production matches the CO2 Keeling Curve from the 1950s to 2023.
Damn……
Co2 is a wonderful plant food. 😁👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

February 3, 2024 9:48 pm

Story tip… German debt, and German climate policy.

Germany’s Budget Chaos Leaves Green-Energy Projects in Limbo
Germany’s climate and transformation fund faces a shortfall of as much as €10 billion ($10.8 billion) next year, according to people familiar with the matter, casting doubt on the nation’s goal for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/germanys-budget-chaos-leaves-green-energy-projects-in-limbo

February 4, 2024 1:40 am

News headline: Global warming not a cereal killer. Film at 11.

Rich Davis
Reply to  PariahDog
February 4, 2024 4:51 am

Very punny

Reply to  PariahDog
February 4, 2024 9:08 am

Snap, Crackle, and Pop found dead in a suburban kitchen. Police found several spent packets of sugar at the scene…

mleskovarsocalrrcom
February 4, 2024 7:53 am

The Globalists won’t like this fact. They’ll have to buy more farmland and fallow it to reach their goal of starving the world in order to save it.

jebstang66
February 4, 2024 8:33 am

But John Kerry says if we don’t curtail agricultural emissions we will increase temperatures and become unable to feed our 8 billion people. So let’s pass a bunch of new laws and taxes to force farmers to fallow more ground, increase organic farming and this helps us get to net zero. He fails to explain how this feeds our world. It appears Europe’s farmers get it and is why they are protesting in numerous countries of the EU.

Reply to  jebstang66
February 4, 2024 4:45 pm

Kerry still says the phony 97% of scientist say……What an idiot

February 4, 2024 1:28 pm

This site appears to have gone twice today. Anyone else?

Reply to  MIke McHenry
February 4, 2024 1:29 pm

down

Reply to  MIke McHenry
February 4, 2024 4:30 pm

I noticed it, too.

Edward Katz
February 4, 2024 6:21 pm

The alarmists will continue to claim that extreme weather events caused by climate change caused by excessive emissions caused by excessive fossil fuel consumption is leading to a global famine, Statistics like the above refute their claims yet another time, but don’t expect the mainstream media to publicize the facts because they get in the way of the doomsday scenarios.