The Plateau, Confirmed

The 2025 Global Agricultural Productivity Report puts global productivity growth at 0.76 percent a year against a requirement revised upward to 2 percent. This update marks our July position against the new data.

What changed

QR-01 concluded in July that global agricultural productivity growth had slowed sharply and that output was increasingly being met from inputs. The 2025 Global Agricultural Productivity Report, published this week, puts the latest decade at 0.76 percent a year and revises the growth rate required to sustainably meet 2050 demand upward to 2 percent.

Our July reading was directionally correct and understated the gap. We had the slowdown at roughly forty percent on the USDA series. On this construction it is closer to sixty percent, and the requirement has moved away from the outturn at the same time.

Two estimates, consistent direction

It is worth being precise about why two credible estimates differ by a factor of about one and a half. USDA's Economic Research Service and the Virginia Tech GAP programme use different country coverage, different input weighting and different periods. Splicing them produces a series that is an artefact of the join. We show them separately for that reason.

What they agree on is the shape: a rate that was close to 1.9 percent in the 2000s, and is now somewhere between 0.7 and 1.1 percent depending on construction. Both are far below the 2 percent requirement, and both show the gap widening rather than closing.

When two independent measurement programmes disagree on the level and agree on the direction, the direction is the finding.

The United States

The country with the deepest agricultural research base, the most mechanised sector and the most developed extension system has averaged an annual productivity decline of roughly 0.05 percent over the past decade, having topped 2 percent annually in the 1980s. Whatever is causing the global slowdown, it is not principally a developing country capacity problem.

This is the single most useful piece of evidence in the new report, because it rules out several convenient explanations at once. It is not about access to technology, or to credit, or to markets. The report attributes the slowdown to lagging research and development investment, slower technology adoption and mounting climate pressures, which is consistent with the decomposition we set out in July.

The requirement side moved too

Global agricultural demand is expected to grow around 1 percent a year through 2031, driven by rising incomes, population growth and expanding non-food uses including biofuels. Because the productivity shortfall compounds, the rate now needed to sustainably meet demand by 2050 has been revised up to 2 percent.

That is the part that changes the commercial picture. A gap of 0.76 against 2.0 is not a shortfall that closes with incremental effort. Meeting demand from that starting point means either a step change in productivity or a sustained expansion in land, water and fertiliser use. The second is the default, because it requires no coordination.

Assessment against our July position

1. Held. The claim that output growth is increasingly input-financed rather than productivity-financed. The new data strengthens it.
2. Held, and understated. The size of the gap. We should have flagged that the requirement itself was likely to be revised upward, since it is a function of the compounding shortfall.
3. Unresolved. Whether part of the measured slowdown is a capital services mismeasurement artefact. Neither programme settles this and we do not think it can be settled from published aggregates.
4. Watch item. The adoption discontinuity. Precision application, gene editing and biologicals remain the plausible falsifier, and nothing in this report changes that.

We will mark this again when the next full round is published.

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