The capacity to feed and supply from the land and sea: agricultural productivity, food and fibre processing and the primary sectors that remain the economic base of much of the world.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Agrifood & Primary Production as it stands today.
The share of the world's workforce engaged in agrifood systems declined from 52.2 percent in 2000 to 39.1 percent in 2022. Primary production alone still accounted for about a quarter of global employment in 2021, more than half in sub-Saharan Africa and almost 60 percent in low-income countries. FAO puts total agrifood employment at about 1.23 billion people, roughly a third of the global labour force.
The volume of agrifood trade more than doubled between 2000 and 2024. Greater trade integration increased the availability of food across borders while also transmitting shocks between national systems.
The gross value of agricultural output was estimated at US$3.5 trillion in 2018. Annual agrifood system production includes roughly 11 billion tonnes of food, 32 million tonnes of natural fibres and 4 billion cubic metres of wood.
A 2019 World Bank study quantified the hidden costs of foodborne illness from unsafe food in low- and middle-income countries. The figure helped establish food safety as an economic as well as a health issue within agrifood system accounting.
In 2019 almost 3 billion people could not afford a diet protecting against malnutrition in all its forms. A further 1 billion, mostly in lower- and upper-middle-income countries, would be unable to do so if a shock cut their income by a third. The finding established diet affordability as a core resilience measure for agrifood systems.
Protracted conflict, the economic fallout of the pandemic and weather extremes worsened food crises in 2020, raising the number of undernourished people by 118 million. Economic downturns dealt the hardest blow in decades to those suffering hunger. Food supply itself held up beyond initial panic-buying disruptions, attributed partly to government exemptions for the agrifood sector.
The State of Food and Agriculture 2021 – Making agrifood systems more resilient to shocks and stresses set out the first formal definition of agrifood systems and of agrifood systems' resilience. This gave governments and analysts a common conceptual frame covering primary production, distribution and household consumption, rather than treating agriculture alone. It underpinned subsequent measurement and policy work on food system shocks.
A 2021 study classified countries according to various aspects of their national food systems. It was designed as a complement to context-specific studies, and became the basis for FAO's later agrifood systems typology.
The 2023 State of Food and Agriculture produced a national-level assessment of agrifood system hidden costs for 154 countries, arriving at USD 12.7 trillion. It sat alongside earlier estimates of USD 12 trillion by FOLU and USD 19 trillion by Hendricks and colleagues, but was distinctive in its country-by-country coverage. The exercise moved true-cost accounting of food systems into mainstream international reporting.
The 2024 State of Food and Agriculture classified national agrifood systems as protracted crisis, traditional, expanding, diversifying, formalizing or industrial, using agricultural value added per worker, supermarkets per capita, diet diversity and urbanization. The scheme showed that different systems face distinct challenges requiring targeted interventions. It extended an earlier academic typology by adding a protracted-crisis category drawn from the Global Report on Food Crises.
FAO estimated that feeding a world population forecast at 9.7 billion in 2050 may require agriculture to produce 40 to 54 percent more food, feed and biofuel feedstock than in 2012, depending on the scenario. The projection framed productivity growth as the central long-run challenge for primary production.
The edition following the 2023 report detailed hidden costs arising from unhealthy dietary patterns that lead to non-communicable diseases, covering 156 countries. It found that in 2020 global health hidden costs reached 8.1 trillion 2020 PPP dollars, some 70 percent of all hidden costs of agrifood systems. This shifted the diagnosis of agrifood system failure towards diet quality rather than output volume.