All the wheat-related statistics you can want

[fivemack]

The FAO wheat site offers one page per country, so I've taken the transpose to produce the table below.

One ton per hectare is 9.5 bushels per acre, these are figures from 2000.

It has been pointed out that they're in intercalated alphabetical order, which is in almost no case the right order to use. You can pick them up more usefully at Google Spreadsheet.

	kilotons	sq km	yield (tons per hectare)
Albania	330	1320	2.5
Austria	1313	2938	4.5
Belarus	950	4250	2.2
Bosnia	258	822.5	3.1
Croatia	1080	2400	4.5
Denmark	4700	6360	7.4
Finland	550	1590	3.5
Georgia	83.5	813	1.0
Greece	1770	8562	2.1
Ireland	706	810	8.7
Latvia	410.3	1580	2.6
Macedonia	320	1150	2.8
Netherlands	1183	1383	8.6
Poland	8276	26400	3.1
Romania	4320	19100	2.3
Slovakia	1266	4064	3.1
Spain	7319	23778	3.1
Switzerland	620	1000	6.2
UK	16530	21000	7.9
Belgium	1634	2287	7.1
Bulgaria	2800	11000	2.5
Czech	4116	9727	4.2
Estonia	147	690	2.1
France	37559	52690	7.1
Germany	21634	29709	7.3
Hungary	3709	10242	3.6
Italy	7464	23177	3.2
Lithuania	942	3265	2.9
Moldova	770	3200	2.4
Norway	293	600	4.9
Portugal	429	2490	1.7
Russia	36000	199520	1.8
Slovenia	150	357	4.2
Sweden	2530	4017	6.3
USA	60800	253000	2.4
China	99700	291000	3.4
India	76400	249000	3.1
Ukraine	10159	51515	2.0

Comments

[kaet.livejournal.com]

That's an interestingly random set of figures. If we assume that wheat is easy to trade and pretty fungible, then it would make sense to grow it in places where the yields were highest, if costs were strongly dependent on yeild. There should be a scatter of dots (depending upon fertility) along some horizontal line somewhere near the middle of the graph.

Presumably high costs per yield push countries up the graph, and (incidentally) to the left [eg high labour costs] (so that fields with potential for lower-end yields are not profitable in those countries), whereas subsidies on production push the country down the graph and (incidentally) to the right.

It would be interesting to see del_c's graph with this line drawn on it: total square kilometerage (x) times yield (y) equals total world demand.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what total world demand for wheat means, given that it's fungible against cereals-in-general, especially if what you want to do is feed it to a pig or ferment it down to bioethanol.

http://www.indiancommodity.com/Gen/wheat.htm says 550MT/year wheat production, of which 60% eaten by humans, so 300MT total world demand (fifty kilos per human per year; wheat produces about its own weight in wholemeal bread, so that's a loaf per human per week). That's a blue line half as far to the right of the rightmost one as the rightmost is from its left neighbour.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Total current consumption, then. You're right about the fungibility, I wasn't sure of the extent to which it was replaceable with other cereals. I'd not thought of the animal feed consumption (shows me what good I'd have been as cantral planner!). We need some formally indifferent pigs, clearly!

Even if it's fungible, though, I think the yield levelling should still take place, because wheat is easily transportable across markets, so each of the countries should be little more than a terroir and legislative regime in a single production market.