There are just over 1.5 billion Hectares of agricultural land currently being used for food production in the world today. That is roughly 30% of all available land, split 23% to 7% livestock to crops. (Source: Our World in Data with their data coming from the FAO/ World Bank.)
If we use the current world population of 8 billion people (OK rounded up from 7.8 billion, but we're not far off!) then that gives us an acreage per person of 0.44.
(That's 1.5 billion Hectares divided by 8 billion people converted to acres.)
Or in terms of a football pitch that's this much productive land per person in the world today:
That's all of the commercially productive land that's currently devoted to growing all your food!
Now it's probably very obvious that isn't anywhere near enough land to feed a person, which kind of shows you the importance of subsistence growing today which isn't included in the World Bank's/ FAO's data, and I guess we have to add in fish stocks to this as well, which won't be counted.
But even with throwing in a few fish and counting what is probably quite a small amount of subsistence land (most land is owned by the rich, after all) it doesn't seem like there's much land for food per person. Maybe just enough.
According to the FAO (here) the maximum amount of land that could be turned to agricultural use is 3 times what it is today, or 4.5 billion HA -
that's everything from good to marginal, so I guess we're talking land for grazing mountain goats here.
That would be this much of a football pitch per person:
There doesn't seem to be enough land to feed everyone!
That's my take away (no pun intended) from these basic statistics.
At least nowhere near enough land to feed everyone with a diverse diet in a sustainable way.
I mean imagine you'd just bought your share of land - 3/4s of a football pitch - if that were representative - around 20% of it would be 'marginal' - so grazing only, you'd have enough room for a few fruit and nut trees and some fertile land for a few veggies - but you'd struggle to crow enough potatoes, wheat, let alone rice, to feed yourself on that acre of land!
Moreover, there is little evidence that we're ever going to have that much land bought under cultivation - not on current trends, and not with increasing amounts of land being degraded and our desire to maintain as much land as possible for conversation purposes.
And of course there's the market - farmers are only going to cultivate new land for production IF there's a market for it - and they're going to direct their efforts towards those food products there is a demand for, and increasingly that means more meat, which is at least 3 times more area-intensive per calorie compared to vegetation.
(NB I'm not going to go on a big pro-vegan rant here, just noting that meat cultivation is more land intensive!)
So we have a situation of basic scarcity compared to a population who want a more varied diet, and also a reduction of the number of people growing their own food (with urbanisation) so all of this means the price of commercially available food is probably going to increase into the future, and this probably means the price of agricultural land is going to increase too.
It thus kind of makes sense to me to go ahead and buy my own piece of productive land now, get my two acres, get it producing and then minimise my exposure to what should be increasing food prices going forwards.
Of course technological advances could lead to more productive acres and cheaper food going forwards, even more artificial food stuffs but that just ties my into big scale agriculture and biotech companies and I don't have much trust in or love for such institutions.
So I'll take my chances with a small land purchase in the not too distance future and get digging for economic victory!
I also like growing things too, which helps of course!
Find out more
If you like fascinating statistics about natural resources - this section of Our World in Data is well worth a browse - on the changing trends in land use globally.
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