Future cereal crop yield stasis or more yield growth? That is the question -- but not in Europe where innovation is shunned

Figure 5: Trends in grain yield of the three
 major cereal crops for selected regions
 since the start of the green revolution in the 1960s.

From Distinguishing between yield advances and yield plateaus in historical crop production trends
Patricio Grassini, Kent M. Eskridge & Kenneth G. Cassman
Nature Communications 4, Article number: 2918 doi:10.1038/ncomms3918
Creative Commons license, Open access to full article

Food security and land required for food production largely depend on rate of yield gain of major cereal crops. Previous projections of food security are often more optimistic than what historical yield trends would support. Many econometric projections of future food production assume compound rates of yield gain, which are not consistent with historical yield trends. Here we provide a framework to characterize past yield trends and show that linear trajectories adequately describe past yield trends, which means the relative rate of gain decreases over time. Furthermore, there is evidence of yield plateaus or abrupt decreases in rate of yield gain, including rice in eastern Asia and wheat in north-west Europe, which account for 31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production. Estimating future food production capacity would benefit from an analysis of past crop yield trends based on a robust statistical analysis framework that evaluates historical yield trajectories and plateaus.

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USDA ERS - Increased productivity now the primary source of growth in world agriculture

The average annual rate of global agricultural growth slowed in the 1970s and 1980s but then accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s. In the decades prior to 1990, most output growth came about from intensification of input use (i.e., using more labor, capital, and material inputs per acre of agricultural land). Bringing new land into agriculture production and extending irrigation to existing agricultural land were also important sources of growth. Over the last two decades, however, the rate of growth in agricultural resources (land, labor, capital, etc.) slowed. In 2001-10, improvements in productivity—getting more output from existing resources—accounted for more than three-quarters of the total growth in global agricultural output, reflecting the use of new technology and changes in management by agricultural producers around the world. This chart is found in the ERS data product, International Agricultural Productivity, on the ERS website, updated November 2013.
@ USDA ERS - Chart: Increased productivity now the primary source of growth in world agriculture: