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Crop production is among the most extensive human activities on the planet – with critical importance for global food security, land use, environmental burden, and climate. Yet despite the key role that croplands play in global land use and Earth systems, there remains little understanding of how spatial patterns of global crop cultivation have recently evolved and which crops have contributed most to these changes. Here we construct a new data library of subnational crop-specific irrigated and rainfed harvested area statistics and combine it with global gridded land cover products to develop a global gridded (5-arcminute) irrigated and rainfed cropped area (MIRCA-OS) dataset for the years 2000 to 2015 for 23 crop classes. These global data products support critical insights into the spatially detailed patterns of irrigated and rainfed cropland change since the start of the century and provide an improved foundation for a wide array of global assessments spanning agriculture, water resource management, land use change, climate impact, and sustainable development. 

Food production data — such as crop, livestock, aquaculture and fisheries statistics — are critical to achieving multiple sustainable development goals. However, the lack of reliable, regularly collected, accessible, usable and spatially disaggregated statistics limits an accurate picture of the state of food production in many countries and prevents the implementation of effective food system interventions. In this Review, we take stock of national and international food production data to understand its availability and limitations. Across databases, there is substantial global variation in data timeliness, granularity (both spatially and by food category) and transparency. Data scarcity challenges are most pronounced for livestock and aquatic food production. These challenges are largely concentrated in Central America, the Middle East and Africa owing to a combination of inconsistent census implementation and a global reliance on self-reporting. Because data scarcity is the result of technical, institutional and political obstacles, solutions must include technological and policy innovations. Fusing traditional and emerging data-gathering techniques with coordinated governance and dedicated long-term financing will be key to overcoming current obstacles to sustained, up-to-date and accurate food production data collection, foundational in promoting and monitoring progress towards healthier and more sustainable food systems worldwide. 

Abstract Yield gaps, here defined as the difference between actual and attainable yields, provide a framework for assessing opportunities to increase agricultural productivity. Previous global assessments, centred on a single year, were unable to identify temporal variation. Here we provide a spatially and temporally comprehensive analysis of yield gaps for ten major crops from 1975 to 2010. Yield gaps have widened steadily over most areas for the eight annual crops and remained static for sugar cane and oil palm. We developed a three-category typology to differentiate regions of ‘steady growth’ in actual and attainable yields, ‘stalled floor’ where yield is stagnated and ‘ceiling pressure’ where yield gaps are closing. Over 60% of maize area is experiencing ‘steady growth’, in contrast to ∼12% for rice. Rice and wheat have 84% and 56% of area, respectively, experiencing ‘ceiling pressure’. We show that ‘ceiling pressure’ correlates with subsequent yield stagnation, signalling risks for multiple countries currently realizing gains from yield growth.