FAO data (via OWID) for “Cereal production” (top 30 sovereign and dependent territory rows by most recent year). Values in million tonnes (two decimals). Aggregates excluded.
Chart ready. Press play to start.
How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Cereal Production by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by Our World in Data (mostly re-published World Bank / UN public statistics) (OWID Grapher slug “cereal-production”). Values are expressed in million tonnes.
What to watch. Start in 1961 with the United States far ahead at 164 million tonnes, then watch China and India climb past it as the Green Revolution and population growth shift the centre of grain production from North America to Asia.
Caveats. Production is not the same as supply to the world: China and India grow mostly for domestic consumption, while the big exporters are the United States, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine. “Cereals” also aggregates rice, wheat, maize and more, so single-crop rankings can look very different.
Trends in the data
China overtook the United States earlier than most people assume. In 1961 the gap was wide — the United States at 163.62 million tonnes against China’s 107.00 — but China first pulled ahead in 1970. The United States then reclaimed the lead in 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982 and 1985; the two swapped places 20 times in all, and China only settled at the top from 1986. The half-century trend is a move towards Asia, but the path was not a straight line: it contained more than twenty years of trading places.
The steepness of China’s start deserves a note as well. It rose from 107.00 million tonnes in 1961 to 174.50 million by 1966, up 1.6× in five years. That the series begins in 1961 matters: the years immediately before were the great famine under the Great Leap Forward. The starting point is therefore historically low, and much of the early surge is recovery. A low left-hand edge should not be read as the country’s capacity at the time.
There is a step in coverage too. There are 26 countries with values through 1991, 29 in 1992 and 30 from 1993. The main addition is Russia, whose values appear from 1992, the year after the Soviet Union dissolved. The absence of a Russian line before then is not an absence of production but of independent statistics. The left and right halves of this chart cover different populations of countries.
The 30-country total grew 4.6×, from 604 million tonnes in 1961 to 2,754 million in 2024, and not one country produced less at the end than at the start. Ranks still moved sharply: France fell from 4th to 12th, Germany 5th to 16th, Poland 7th to 18th, the United Kingdom 15th to 28th and Romania 14th to 29th — all while increasing output, simply outpaced by emerging producers. Climbing the other way are Pakistan (22nd → 10th), Brazil (8th → 4th, 9.24×), Argentina (10th → 6th) and Indonesia (11th → 7th). Note finally that “cereals” covers wheat, rice, maize, barley and more, and the mix differs completely by country, so two countries at the same rank can be producing entirely different things.
Trivia quiz
What mid-20th-century transformation sharply raised cereal yields in developing countries through high-yield varieties and fertilizers?
The Green Revolution. High-yield rice (IR8) and wheat varieties dramatically increased output in countries such as India. (Source)
Rice and wheat are two of the three main cereal crops. What is the third?
Maize (corn). It is the largest cereal by volume, used for food, animal feed and biofuel. (Source)
Which UN agency compiles global food and agriculture statistics like this one?
The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome. (Source)