since the early nineteen nineties there's been a notable and somewhat troubling slowdown in the productivity of global agriculture descriptions we prices since nineteen ninety expressed in terms of the general index you can see that in the mid to late nineties there's somewhat of an increase in food prices but there are two significant food price bikes one coming in two thousand seven and the other more recently in general food today on global markets it's much more expensive than it was twenty or twenty five years ago this is in contrast to the general trend following world war two starting from nineteen fifty in general food prices fell quite a bit there was even in fact a branch of development economics led by ralph crayfish which is scribe some of the fundamental problems of developing economies to the notion that their primary commodity exports often foodstuffs we're simply falling and falling today it's a very different story one fundamental cause of the higher prices for food is simply that many developing nations are much wealthier today than before china for instance has been growing very rapidly and chinese people are able to afford more food and also by morning this pushes up the prices of any food stocks of course this can be a problem for those nations such stays egypt which are not growing as rapidly as china because they face a higher world food prices but they don't have the same kind of growth in per-capita income if growing well for the only cause of rising food prices things would still overall be ok because there would be more food being consumed unfortunately there's a second culprit and that is a slowdown in productivity growth and global agriculture we can see this in the numbers for the major crops consider corn between nineteen fifty in nineteen eighty nine the yield for court has gone up by an average out two point eight three percent a year from nineteen ninety two two thousand seven their rate went up by only one point five percent a year of course that's much slower or consider yields per week in the immediate post-war era yields for weeks grew on average one point seven percent a year since nineteen ninety-three almost stopped growing from an average of skylab only zero point one five percent a year it's also been a slowdown of gains in rice production that's gone from two point two seven percent a year to the lower number of one point three seven percent a year it's not obvious why agricultural productivity is now improving at a slower rate it is true that globally the world is spending less on agricultural rnd_ nonetheless a greater number of countries are experimenting with agricultural or indeed that advanced levels it's not obvious why the overall rate of progress should have slowed down another possibility is that after world war two scientists were able to exploit the advances which work easiest to capture and most readily on the table sometimes this is called the proverbial low hanging fruit and that today we face tougher scientific problems that will take us longer to crack in due time further agricultural advances that the old rate may be forthcoming but in the meantime we are waiting for a comparable burst of scientific progress the slowdown in agricultural productivity growth may not seem like a very exciting or very sexy topic but it's actually one of the major problems that where the faces today we have growing demand for food and productivity is advancing somewhat in agriculture but not nearly as rapidly as we would like for further reading on this topic i would recommend to the listed sources here 