The current CropWatch bulletin describes world-wide crop condition and food production as appraised by data up to the end of October 2022. It is prepared by an international team coordinated by the Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

The assessment is based mainly on remotely sensed data. It covers prevailing agri-climatic conditions, including extreme factors, at different spatial scales, starting with global patterns in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 focuses on agroclimatic and agronomic conditions in major production zones in all continents. Chapter 3 covers the major agricultural countries that, together, make up at least 80% of production and exports (the "core countries") while chapter 4 zooms into China. Special attention is paid to the production outlook of main crop producing and exporting countries where major cereal and oil crops (maize, rice, wheat and soybean) are harvested this year or currently still in the field. Subsequent sections of Chapter 5 describe the global disasters that occurred from July to October 2022.

Agroclimatic conditions and global warming

Temperatures keep setting new records. During this monitoring period, Europe experienced the hottest summer and autumn on record, accompanied by a prolonged drought. The Yangtze river basin in China also experienced an extremely hot and dry summer and autumn. Extreme rainfall anomalies were recorded as well in other parts of the world: Pakistan suffered from devastating floods, while the South of the USA, Argentina, southern Africa and the Horn of Africa were affected by severe droughts. These conditions are partly due to La Niña,  which is entering a rare 3rd consecutive northern winter. Thus, the outlook for the upcoming months is rather dire for some regions.

In many regions of the world, rainfall is the main limiting factor for crop production. The largest rainfall deficits, exceeding more than -30%, as compared to the 15-year average, were observed for Central-Eastern Brazil, the Central-Northern Andes, California, the northern Plains of the United States, the coast of North African and Middle Asia region, the Caucasus region, Africa south of the equator, Tibet and South-East China. Rainfall deficits in the range of -10 to -30% were observed for the Pampas of Argentina, southern and north-eastern Brazil, the Amazon basin, the Mexican Highlands, most of Canada’s crop production regions, most of Europe and Turkey, Central Africa and Gulf of Guinea, northwest India, the North China Plain and Southern China. Only few summer crop production regions in the northern hemisphere received above average rainfall. In Pakistan,  torrential rainfalls caused prolonged floods in Sindh and Baluchistan provinces. In the southern hemisphere, the Malay Archipelago, as well as Australia and New Zealand experienced above average rainfall conditions.

Global crop production situation

During the monitoring period from July to October, the global crop production index (CPI) was at the lowest level (CPI=1.15) in the same period of nearly 10 years, which was equivalent to that in 2018. Although the crop production situation in this monitoring period is worse than that in previous years, a CPI greater than 1 indicates that global crop production is stable on the whole, and there will be no significant reduction in production.

Estimates of global crop production 

The global production of majors crops for 2022 is expected to be 2859.86 million tonnes with a decrease by 44.10 million tonnes (-1.5%) from 2021. Maize production is expected to be 1045.17 million tonnes with a decrease of 32.01 million tonnes (-3.0%), which is the largest reduction in the past five years. Rice production is expected to be 754.57 million tonnes with a decrease of 9.45 million tonnes (-1.2%) from 2021. Wheat production is expected to be 740.07 million tonnes, a reduction of 2.32 million tonnes, a drop by 0.3% from 2021. Soybean production is expected to be 320.05 million tonnes with a decrease of 0.32 million tonnes (-0.1%) from the previous year.

Outlook

In October, the prolonged drought negatively impacted the sowing of winter wheat in the High Plains of the USA and the planting of maize and soybeans in Argentina. In Brazil, conditions for sowing of maize and soybean were close to normal. Planting of winter wheat in Europe and China benefitted from generally favorable moisture conditions, although dry conditions persisted in the Caucasus region of Russia.