Talk:List of countries by agricultural output

Data?
what exactly was this data based on? I dont see agricultural output at the cia site -- Astrokey44 |talk 08:28, 1 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Think that would be a question for User: Anwar saadat, he made the following lists:
 * * List of countries by agricultural output
 * * List of countries by services output
 * * List of countries by industrial output
 * (around 2/3 March) based/calculated on the sector composition ratios and the nominal GDP list. I guess both are coming from the factbook. --Van helsing 09:54, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
 * You already found that out I see now; asked and answered. --Van helsing 09:58, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
 * But they dont seem to be there - theyre not listed at the rankorderguide: and stats for agriculture and the other outputs arent shown on the individual countries pages -- Astrokey44 |talk 11:17, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
 * No, but here: they are (apparently). --Van helsing 13:25, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
 * So this means he multiplied the GDP figure by the percentage listed as agricultural? so say Chile with a GDP (official exchange rate) of $ 97,000,000,000 times 6.2% = $6,014,000,000 - ok that checks out with this list, I guess its in millions of dollars then -- Astrokey44 |talk 22:53, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

"US leads the world in farm productivity"?
Is there a citation for this claim? What is the definition of productivity here? When I was studying economics in high school in Australia, I recall being told that U.S. farm productivity wasn't all that great, partly because the U.S. government has a history of showering the agricultural sector with subsidies. Dmharvey 00:20, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I thought it was pretty obvious. OK I will give the calculations later this evening here on this talk page.
 * It's not at all obvious to me. I can only speak from my experience of Australia and the US. My observations are that both the US and Australia are advanced industrialised economies; Australia is a rarity among such countries in that such a large proportion of its agricultural output is exported; Australia has a far less protectionist stance towards its agricultural sector. Given these factors, my expectation would be that Australia's agricultural productivity would be higher than the US. Also my day-to-day experience is that basic foodstuffs are more expensive in the U.S. than in Australia, by a much larger ratio than is accounted for by differences in income per capita.
 * I also tried to look up some figures, but I'm having trouble getting the numbers straight. The CIA factbook says that 0.7% of the US labour force is engaged in "farming, forestry, and fishing", and gives the US labour force size as 149 million , giving 1,043,000 people working in this category. On the other hand, the department of labour gives a similar figure for wage-and-salary earners, but agriculture has quite a lot of self-employed workers, and when you add these in the dept of labour says there are 2,140,000 . So I'm not sure which one to use; the latter seems more logical. It does seem to make a difference: using the latter figure, I get output/worker = $59672. For australia, using labour force size = 10.42 million and percentage working in agriculture  is 3.6%  which is 375120 workers, giving output of $69,300/worker. But I'm not happy with this, because I don't know what that 3.6% figure includes, and I'm not sure to what extent "agriculture" and "farming, forestry, and fishing" correspond. Dmharvey 13:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
 * US leads the world in farm productivity per labour force attributable to agriculture. Labour force % by occupation for each country is available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2048.html Multiply this by labour force of that country which is available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2095rank.html The result is the portion of labour force attributable to agriculture. Now divide the agricultural output by this number to get the $ value of farm productivity per labour per year. Among the top five nations based on agricultural output, US is way ahead on top...


 * 1) $122,189 - US
 * $83,771 - Netherlands
 * $70,656 - Canada
 * $69,300 - Australia
 * $59,790 - Ireland
 * $55,481 - UK
 * $46,589 - France
 * $32,463 - Spain
 * $29,720 - Italy
 * $25,664 - Germany
 * $23,631 - Greece
 * $21,089 - Japan
 * $18,332 - South Korea
 * $16,306 - Portugal
 * $11,438 - Saudi Arabia
 * $6,253 - Algeria
 * $5,775 - Malaysia
 * $4,844 - Russia
 * $4,549 - Turkey
 * $3,671 - Mexico
 * $3,349 - Brazil
 * $3,293 - Romania
 * $3,031 - Iran
 * $2,707 - Colombia
 * $2,554 - Morocco
 * $2,532 - Poland
 * $2,300 - Ukraine
 * $1,789 - Egypt
 * $1,484 - Cameroon
 * $1,012 - Pakistan
 * $1,012 - Sudan
 * $1,010 - Philippines
 * 1) $970 - Thailand
 * 2) $845 - Indonesia
 * 3) $680 - China
 * 4) $522 - Nigeria
 * 5) $508 - India
 * 6) $379 - Vietnam
 * 7) $316 - Bangladesh


 * I'm not that familiar with all this stuff, but if food prices in the US are kept artificially high by subsidies, doesn't that make this calculation of productivity flawed? And also wouldn't using PPP skew the figures further?  TastyCakes 17:10, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Smaller economies may have higher productivity than US but they are insignificant on a global scale plus in practicality, many small agri projects with unusually high yields have had mixed or no success when scaled up to large commercial markets.


 * International comparison is meaningless unless you stick to the same source. Anwar saadat 14:25, 12 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I accept your argument that Australia is small and therefore not that relevant for this article, although perhaps it would be good to discuss the productivity of smaller economies on the page agricultural productivity.
 * I have amended the statement on this page about US productivity to be more accurate.
 * It would be good to come up with a figure for agricultural productivity for the EU as a whole; this would increase the coverage of my statement from 38% to 54%.
 * By the way I am honoured to work side by side with Anwar Sadat. Dmharvey 15:44, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Anwar, I don't want to get into a lame edit war over this, but you said yourself: of the top five nations, the US is on top. It is not at all clear that this is true over all the other countries too. The text should indicate this proviso. These other countries may be smaller, but certainly they are not insignificantly small. If you can't come up with a better wording, I will revert it back to my version in a few days. Dmharvey 14:12, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I have expanded the productivity list above for ready-reference. Is that sufficient? (Btw, thanks very much for your patience and remarkable civility) Anwar saadat 10:43, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I assume your calculations are correct, based on the CIA factbook data. However, dispute the accuracy and consistency of the CIA factbook data. Everywhere else I look claims at least double the number of agricultural workers in the US. For example: I'm at a loss as to where the CIA gets their 1 million figure from. I think it's incorrect. It's all very well to say that one must use the same data source to make international comparisons, but I'm saying that the CIA factbook appears to be so wrong on this question that I don't think it's a valid source from which to be making international comparisons anyway. I certainly trust the above sources more than the CIA factbook. I mean, the USDA, the BLS and the US census people know their stats better than a bunch of spies, right? Dmharvey 13:21, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
 * The U.S. department of labour claims 2.1 million in 2004
 * The U.S. bureau of labor statistics claims 2.2 million in 2005.
 * The 2000 census gives a figure of 3.3 million.
 * When the data integrity itself is questionable, I have no other option but to submit to qualifying the disputed statement. Let us suppose 3m as the correct figure, then US productivity slashes to about $40,000 which is still better than most large economies but smaller than Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Ireland,... Please see the modified statement in the article. Will that suffice? Anwar saadat 14:00, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's much better. I think your amended statement is now quite fair. Good work, and many thanks for the patience and civility you have shown in return :-) Dmharvey 15:46, 5 May 2006 (UTC)