Virginia Tech published the 2025 Global Agricultural Productivity Report this week. The headline number is that global agricultural total factor productivity growth has fallen to 0.76 percent a year over the past decade. The requirement, on the same report's estimate, is 2 percent. That is not a shortfall. It is a different regime, and it has arrived quietly enough that most long-range planning assumptions in the food system have not been updated for it.
Sources: Virginia Tech 2025 Global Agricultural Productivity Report; USDA Economic Research Service; Agri-Pulse reporting on the 2025 GAP Report. The two research programmes use different coverage and weighting and are shown separately rather than spliced.
Why total factor productivity is the number that matters
Yield per hectare is the measure most people reach for, and it is misleading on its own. Yields can rise while productivity falls, if the extra output is bought with more fertiliser, more irrigation and more machinery. Total factor productivity asks the harder question: holding the whole input bundle constant, how much more comes out.
When TFP growth falls and output growth holds up, the difference is being met by inputs. That is exactly the pattern in the data. USDA's Economic Research Service has world agricultural output growing 1.94 percent a year in the 2011 to 2021 decade against 2.74 percent in the previous one and a sixty-year average of 2.3 percent, with the slowdown tied primarily to the productivity component.
The United States is the surprising part
The country with the deepest agricultural research base and the most mechanised sector has posted an average annual productivity decline of roughly 0.05 percent over the past decade, having topped 2 percent annually in the 1980s. Whatever is causing this, it is not a developing-country capacity problem.
The report points to three contributors: lagging research and development investment, slower technology adoption, and mounting climate pressures. The first has the longest lag and is the most obviously a policy choice.
Why prices are not telling you this
The natural objection is that food prices are not spiralling, so how bad can it be. The answer is that productivity sets the trend and weather sets the year. A stalled trend does not produce a spike. It produces a distribution in which the good years are less good, the buffer stocks that absorb a bad year get thinner with each cycle, and the sector meets demand by using more land, water and fertiliser rather than by using them better.
Those input requirements have their own prices and their own environmental constraints. The cost of the productivity plateau is being paid, it is just not being paid at the supermarket yet.
What would change our mind
Two things. First, a measurement problem: if capital services are being mismeasured as machinery becomes more capable, true productivity growth is higher than reported. We think this explains part of the gap and not most of it. Second, an adoption discontinuity: precision application, gene editing and biologicals are all at a stage where measured contribution is small and potential is not. A step change in adoption across five years would show up as a TFP acceleration and would falsify this reading. Neither is visible in the data yet.
Sources
- Virginia Tech, 2025 Global Agricultural Productivity Report, summary
- Agri-Pulse, US agricultural productivity growth has slowed dramatically
- USDA Economic Research Service, growth rate of global agricultural output