Our World
in Data
Data

Is agricultural land expanding? Change over the prior decade

FAO
See all data and research on:
Agricultural Production

About this data

Is agricultural land expanding? Change over the prior decade
FAO
Percentage change in surface area devoted to agriculture with respect to 10 years before. Negative values imply that surface area has decreased with respect to the previous decade. This data is used to assess which countries may have already peaked in their agricultural land use.
Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 14, 2024
Next expected update
March 2025
Date range
1971–2021
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The FAOSTAT Land Use domain contains data on forty-four categories of land use, irrigation and agricultural practices and five indicators relevant to monitor agriculture, forestry and fisheries activities at national, regional and global level.

Data are available by country and year, with global coverage and annual updates.

Retrieved on
March 14, 2024
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RL
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use (2024).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • Assessing this by looking at annual land use data is difficult because there can be significant year-to-year variability. That land use for one or two years was lower than previous years would be insufficient to conclude that a country had peaked. For this reason we look at decadal changes in agricultural land. We look at land use in the latest year relative to 10 years before.
  • If land use is lower in the latest year then we suggest that land use may have peaked. If land use it the same or higher than a decade back, we suggest that it hasn't, or this is uncertain.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Is agricultural land expanding? Change over the prior decade”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agriculture-more-less-land [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Is agricultural land expanding? Change over the prior decade – FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use” [original data]. Retrieved November 1, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agriculture-more-less-land