Food production around the world. Where the impacts come from?

Sitting and eating, because it is midday and thinking about such a simple question - who produces my food? Who produces most of the food we are eating? It depends on different types of products.  And I took for help homepage of FAOSTAT. It is homepage of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 

Very interesting results can be found here. For example, the top producer of potatoes in the world is... China! Then comes the Russia, which is also seed producer of potatoes number one. However, the highest yields per Ha owns Belgium - Luxembourg, Belgium, New-Zealand and Netherlands. China is on the top of producers in different fields - peaches, pears, nectarines, rice, etc, but the top of the highest yields always gets somebody else. Does it means that China is working very hard on growing crops, but they can't rise a quality of production?

China is also number one in agriculture caused emissions - greenhouse gas Emissions from agriculture are dominated by non-CO2 gases methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) from crop and livestock production and management activities. Sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are mainly those from cultivated organic soils. China is also very active in irrigation systems, especially the last few years. There is a growing number of use of fertilizers - between 2002 and 2009 China is the fertilizers' consumer number one in the world. And production, of course, is growing as we can see, however, it costs more land use and makes more emissions. Meanwhile other countries use less fertilizers, but gains highest yield delivers. 

Numbers shows some really important features about agriculture and food production possible developments and is clearly visible that the quality and efficiency of land use is not linked with the quantitative results.

Visit http://faostat3.fao.org/home/index.html