plate 352 · 2024 data

Ethiopia's wheat harvest nearly doubled, mostly from higher yields

Ethiopia's added wheat output, million tonnes, 2010 to 2024: more land harvested vs more grain per hectare. FAOSTAT.

Africa's century
  1. 1. By 2100, more than 1 in 3 people will be African
  2. 2. Nearly half the world's under-25s will be African by 2100
  3. 3. DR Congo is projected to outgrow the US by 2100
  4. 4. Kinshasa will soon be bigger than Paris and London combined
  5. 5. Two-thirds of the world's mobile money moves in Africa
  6. 6. Volcanic heat makes nearly 45% of the power Kenya generates
  7. 7. Africa's solar imports more than doubled since early 2024
  8. 8. DR Congo mines three-quarters of the world's cobalt
  9. 9. Most people in Africa are still offline
  10. 10. Africa formally recycles less than 1% of its e-waste
  11. 11. Ethiopia added over a third of Africa's new renewable power
  12. 12. Nigeria's cities now hold more people than Japan's
  13. 13. Sudan now has the world's most people displaced at home
  14. 14. Nigeria now has almost 25 million more people than Brazil
  15. 15. Six of the ten fastest-growing big cities are African
  16. 16. Africa now has more hungry people than Asia
  17. 17. Six in ten child deaths now happen in sub-Saharan Africa
  18. 18. Rwanda spread electricity faster than any country since 2014
  19. 19. Nigeria now eats more rice than Japan
  20. 20. More sub-Saharan Africans now have mobile money than bank accounts
  21. 21. Sub-Saharan Africa's cities now hold more people than Latin America's
  22. 22. DR Congo tripled its copper mining in ten years
  23. 23. Nitrogen dioxide over Khartoum fell 39% after war began
  24. 24. Countries mostly without electricity fell from 33 to 15
  25. 25. Seven in ten West African mobile money accounts sit idle
  26. 26. Nigeria became the third-biggest sender of students abroad
  27. 27. Guinea overtook Australia as the world's biggest bauxite miner
  28. 28. DR Congo passed Chile in refined copper
  29. 29. Burkina Faso now sends half its exports to the UAE
  30. 30. Nouakchott's mobile internet sped from Africa's slowest to top 30
  31. 31. Nigeria now imports more solar panels than generators
  32. 32. Zimbabwe climbed to fourth among the world's lithium miners
  33. 33. Services now employ twice as many Ghanaian women as farms
  34. 34. Sub-Saharan Africa doubled its grain, mostly by farming more land
  35. 35. Sub-Saharan Africa added more rural people than the whole world
  36. 36. France fell from first to third among Côte d'Ivoire's suppliers
  37. 37. China's car sales to Ethiopia are now mostly electric
  38. 38. Guinea rose from 17th to second for investment in Africa
  39. 39. Africa now mines three-quarters of the world's manganese
  40. 40. Tanzania rose from no graphite to world's third-biggest miner
  41. 41. DR Congo has more babies each year than the EU
  42. 42. More Malawians go online than have electricity at home
  43. 43. Nigeria is now Brazil's biggest supplier of urea fertiliser
  44. 44. 19 sub-Saharan countries are now mostly urban, up from 7
  45. 45. Sub-Saharan Africa added 13 million births a year since 2000
  46. 46. Sub-Saharan Africa now holds 88% of people without electricity
  47. 47. Malawi's life expectancy rose 21 years, more than anywhere
  48. 48. Ethiopia's wheat harvest nearly doubled, mostly from higher yields
  49. 49. In purchasing power, Egypt overtook Nigeria as Africa's biggest economy
  50. 50. Kenyans abroad send home more than Kenya receives in aid
75%

of Ethiopia's extra wheat came from higher yields: 1.8 to 2.9 tonnes per hectare, 2010 to 2024 (+59%).

+17%

more wheat land harvested (1.83m to 2.13m hectares), worth 0.71m tonnes. Yields added 2.15m tonnes.

3.3m → 6.2m t

Ethiopia's wheat output. Yields have levelled off near 2.9 t/ha since 2020, and USDA still has Ethiopia importing 1.6m t in 2024/25.

Source: FAO, FAOSTAT Crops and livestock products: wheat, production, area harvested and yield, 2024
the numbers & method

Claim types Estimate · Fact

FAO, FAOSTAT, Crops and livestock products (QCL), wheat (item 15), Ethiopia: production (tonnes), area harvested (hectares) and yield (kg/ha), 2010 and 2024, read from the FAOSTAT API via the progrss vault (QCL release 2025-12-31) (GUIDELINES §4.11, faostat-full passes value_checks). The vault marks Ethiopia's wheat figures as Estimate (FAOSTAT's own flag), so the plate is labelled Estimate. Values: area 1,826,400 ha (2010) and 2,129,952 ha (2024); yield 1,820.9 and 2,904 kg/ha; production 3,325,620 t and 6,185,341 t (+86.0%). Decomposition (progrss calculation, log-mean Divisia, production = area x yield): area +0.709m t, yield +2.151m t, total +2.860m t (24.8% and 75.2%); parts are rounded to 0.01m t (0.71 + 2.15 = 2.86). Yield by year (kg/ha): 2012 2,110; 2015 2,794; 2019 2,822; 2022 2,979; 2023 2,813; 2024 2,904. Cross-check with a different method: USDA FAS PSD wheat production for Ethiopia is 2.86m t (2010/11) and 6.20m t (2024/25), a 2.2-fold rise; USDA imports 1.58m t in 2024/25 (1.5m t in 2025/26 estimate). Ethiopia's yield gain (+59%, 3-year averages 2009–11 to 2022–24) was the largest among the wheat growers with at least 300,000 hectares in 2022–24 that report both periods (Bulgaria +57%, Russia +51%, Iran +51%); no cause (irrigated dry-season wheat schemes, seed, fertiliser) is claimed here. Compare plate 257 (Sub-Saharan Africa's grain growth was mostly more land). Ethiopia rose from 30th to 24th among 122 wheat growers over the same years.

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