Building on the CropWatch analyses presented in chapters 1 through 4, this chapter presents first early outlook of crop production for 2021 (section 5.1), as well as sections on recent disaster events (section 5.2), and an update on El Niño (section 5.3).

5.1 CropWatch food production estimates

The production outlook for the current bulletin includes only the major producers in the Equatorial region, the Southern Hemisphere, and some isolated Northern Hemisphere countries where crop development is sufficiently advanced to ensure that estimates are reliable.

CropWatch production estimates differ from most other global estimates by the use of geophysical data in addition to statistical and other reference information such as detailed crop distribution maps. Recent sub-national statistics are used for the calibration of remote-sensing-based models. It is also stressed that the assessments and underlying data are crop-specific, i.e. based on different crop masks for each crop and that, for each crop listed in Table 5.1, both yield variation and cultivated area variation are taken into account when deriving the production estimates.

Table 5.1 Preliminary 2021 production estimates in thousands tonnes for selected countries in Equatorial region, and Southern Hemisphere as well as early crops in the Northern Hemisphere. Δ% stands for the change in % compared with the corresponding season in 2020.

Affected by persistent hot and dry weather in Northwestern North America, Brazil, Central Asia, West Africa, and Southern Africa, global rice, wheat, and soybean production is expected to reduce. Global maize production in 2021 is expected to be 1.082 billion tones, an increase of 1.1%, 11.3 million tones. Global rice production is expected to be 751 million tones, a decrease of 1.3%. Global wheat production is expected to be 711 million tones, a 3.7% decrease of 26.99 million tones; global soybean production is expected to be 321 million tones, a 0.9% decrease.

Maize

In 2021, the United States, China and Ukraine ranked the top 3 in maize production, with maize production of 384.06 million tones, 231.60 million tones and 34.86 million tones, an increase of 9.8 million tones (2.6%), 5.52 million tones (2.4%) and 6.93 million tones (24.8%) respectively, mainly due to more favorable agro-meteorological conditions during the maize reproductive period and larger maize growing area. Brazil, the world's third largest maize producer, reduced 4.8% at 83.34 million tones. Brazil's high temperature and dry weather since the maize planting period continued to lead to a 4.5% decline in maize yield. Mexico's maize growing area and yield increased simultaneously, prompting the country's production of 1.95 million tones. Romania recovered from the 2020 drought year with an increase in maize production of 1.08 million tones. Changes in maize production in the remaining major maize producing and exporting countries were less than 1 million tones, with a relatively small impact on total global maize production.

Rice

Asian rice production accounted for more than 90% of the total global production. Agro-meteorological conditions vary widely among the major producing countries. Bangladesh, Myanmar and Iran were affected by drought conditions, and rice production decreased by 1.21 million tones (2.6%), 690,000 tones (2.7%) and 500,000 tones (17.0%), respectively. Pakistan was affected by the reduction of rice acreage; rice production fell by 1.08 million tones. China and India, as the world's two largest rice producers, the overall rice production situation is good, production increased by 1.62 million tones and 4.76 million tones, respectively. Under sufficient precipitation and other favorable weather, Thailand and Vietnam rice production increased by 900,000 tones and 760,000 tones respectively. The total rice production of the remaining major producing countries decreased compared with 2020, offsetting the increase in rice production in China and India, and the total global rice production is expected to decline slightly.

Wheat

Due to the continued dry weather, some wheat-producing countries in the northern hemisphere shrink planted area, most wheat-producing countries affected by drought yields fell, global wheat production is lower than 2020. China's total winter wheat production will increase by 0.9%. Since sowing period, precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere has been generally lower than the average of the past 15 years, with poor winter wheat growth and impaired yields in several countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Pakistan and India, combined with the reduction in wheat growing area in some countries, and wheat yields reduced by 26.0%, 25.0%, 22.4%, 15.2%, 14.7%, 13.1%, 6.1% and 2.5% respectively. In addition, wheat production in most countries in Western Europe also declined slightly. The severe drought in the northwest of United States only affected the production of spring wheat in the region, the country's total wheat production still increased by 0.7%. The good agricultural weather of Russia's winter wheat production areas prompted a 3.5% increase in production. Most countries in Eastern Europe also achieved an increase in wheat production. Morocco's wheat yields increased significantly compared to the severe drought year of 2020, with a recovery increase in wheat production of 43.2%.

Soybean

The widespread drought in South America led to a decline in soybean production in Brazil and Argentina. Affected by persistent hot and dry weather, Brazil's soybean slumped to 96.3 million tones, down 4.74 million tones (4.7%), the lowest production in the past three years. The agro-meteorological conditions of early growing stags in Argentina's main soybean production areas were normal while since April, the continued reduction in precipitation on late sowybean growing season lead to a 980,000 tones fall (1.9%) at 51.61 million tones. As the world's largest soybean producer, the United States soybean production areas are not affected by high temperature and dry weather, soybean yields increased slightly, total soybean production increased by 0.7% to 105.24 million tones. The increase in soybean growing area in India led to an increase in total soybean production of about 6.7%, an increase of 780,000 tones. The decline in soybean growing area in northeast China, influenced by market factors such as the continued rise in corn prices, led to a decrease in soybean production in China of about 1.4%.