| I'm curled up with a World Bank report and I've come across the following statistics. Globally, as of 2007, here is the area devoted to each of several crops:
Maize: 158 million ha
Oil palm: 14 million ha
Rapeseed: 30 million ha
Soybean: 90 million ha
Sunflower: 27 million ha
Sugarcane: 23 million ha
Plantation forestry (paper & lumber): 139 million ha
Total: 481 million ha
Included among this is a little less than 36 million ha of biofuel feedstocks (the number was 36 million ha in 2008 and since the numbers above are 2007, the biofuel feedstock amount was presumably a bit less), which includes 8.3 million in the EU (mainly rapeseed), 7.5 million ha in the U.S. (mainly corn), and 6.4 million ha in Latin American (mainly sugarcane). And I believe I read recently that some 70% of corn is fed to livestock. If that's true, then about 40 million ha of corn goes to uses other than livestock and ethanol, i.e. feeding people.
In 2007, the total world arable area used for farming was 1554 million ha. Of that, the 441 million hectares of crops noted above used for oil, biofuels, livestock feed, paper, etc, make up about 28%. In addition to the 1554 million ha of cropland, there was 3,400 million ha of pasture. |
