Beyond land-use intensity: Assessing future global crop productivity growth under different socioeconomic pathways

Productivity growth is essential to meet the increasing global agricultural demand in the future, driven by the growing world population and income. This study develops a hybrid approach to assess future global crop productivity in a holistic way using different productivity measures and improves the understanding of productivity implications of socioeconomic factors by contrasting different shared socioeconomic pathway assumptions. The results show that the global productivity is likely to continue to grow, whereas the productivity growth varies pronouncedly among different future socioeconomic conditions. The fast growth of total factor and partial factor productivity can be reached when slow population growth and high economic growth entail moderate food demand and low investment risks. In contrast, high population growth and low economic growth could lead to relatively high land-use intensity due to the extreme pressure on agricultural production, however, associated with low total factor productivity growth. The model results indicate that the ratio of the total factor productivity growth to cropland expansion has significant impacts on food prices, with increasing prices when cropland increases faster than productivity, and vice versa. Investing in productivity improvement appears to be an effective means of ensuring food availability and sparing cropland, which can contribute to the achievement of sustainable development goals.