Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available for human consumption

Paul West, James Gerber, Emily S Cassidy, Samuel Stiffman

Managing limited agricultural land to feed a growing population with changing diets requires understanding and managing tradeoffs associated with how crops are utilized. Here, we quantify the impact of how 50 crops are used for food, livestock feed, biofuels, and other non-food uses on available calories from 2010 to 2020. We find that, although total calorie production increased by 23.9% from 2010 to 2020, the available calories in the food system increased by only 16.6%. This decrease in efficiency was driven by increases in the changes in calories used for livestock feed (31.2%) and non-food uses (36.2%). Calories used for biofuel production, a subset of non-food uses, increased 27.9% and accounted for 5.3% of all calorie production in 2020. In comparison, crops consumed directly as food increased by only 14.9%. In 2020, half (50.1%) of calories produced on croplands were available for people to eat. The calories ‘lost’ to inefficiency of the food system (49.9%) is equivalent to 7.22 x 1015 calories per year, enough to support 7.2 billion people. 39.7% of the lost calories are from beef production, which requires 33 calories of feed for every calorie of boneless meat. If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT Lancet diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher income countries, the number lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people. The results presented here demonstrate that a few commodities, particularly beef and pork, are primarily responsible for the current inefficiencies in how croplands are used to produce food for people. Further, these inefficiencies are concentrated in a small set of countries. Targeting actions and policies for these commodities and countries can have an outsized impact on improving food security, health, and the environment.