Researchers at Virginia Tech are sending a word of caution to the ag community worldwide. They estimate feeding the population will fall below sustainable levels within the next 30 years.
“Average TFP growth in the United States has dropped markedly from 1.49 percent annually during the 1990s to slightly negative from 2011 to 2021. Without a doubt, agriculture TFP growth must be revitalized in the United States. We need to enhance the environment for productivity, enhancing tools, reduce barriers to adopting those tools and find opportunities to reduce the impact of external shocks, to make innovations available to farmers at all scales of agriculture,” said Dr. Tom Thompson.
Thompson says in order to correct this, the world will have to boost its total factor productivity by about two percent each year from now until 2050.
