The World Is Producing More Food than Ever—but Not for Long
Umair Irfan
created: June 28, 2025, 11 a.m. | updated: July 12, 2025, 9:36 a.m.
Globally, humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of breadbaskets.
And the largest drops aren’t occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers.
“It’s not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,” said Andrew Hultgren, an agriculture researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
To figure this out, Hultgren and his team looked at crop and weather data from 54 countries around the world dating back to the 1940s.
And the decrease in our food production could be devastating: For every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person per day.
8 months ago: Science Latest