The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has shed new light on the contribution of agriculture to global warming. In its Statistical Yearbook , released on Wednesday, FAO said greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture have increased year on year.

Ghg emissions from agriculture grew 1.6 percent per year during the decade after the year 2000, FAO said. By 2010, agricultural emissions had reached 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂ eq, a measure used to compare and aggregate different greenhouse gases), or ten percent of all emissions related to human actions.

In line with earlier reports, the data shows that livestock farming and synthetic fertiliser use release by far the greatest amount of polluting gasses. Over the year so far, FAO has called on policy makers to roll out support for agroforestry, cut food waste and champion small scale farmers as a means of reducing the carbon footprint of farming and improving agricultural biodiversity.

Other key facts and figures from the Yearbook include:

Food production and supply

• Global crop production has expanded threefold over the past 50 years, largely through higher yields per unit of land and crop intensification.
• Cereals occupy more than half of the world's harvested area and are the most important food source for human consumption. Of the 2.3 billion tonnes of cereals produced each year, 1 billion are destined for human consumption, 750 million tonnes are used as animal feed and 500 million tonnes are either processed by industry, used as seed, or wasted.

Economic trends

• Following a decade of slower growth in the 1990s, global public spending on agricultural R&D increased steadily from $26.1 billion in 2000 to $31.7 billion in 2008. Most of this increase was driven by developing countries. China and India accounted for close to half of this growth, but other countries - particularly Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Nigeria and the Russian Federation - also significantly increased their spending on public agricultural R&D. Still, these trends mask the negative developments that have taken place in numerous smaller, poorer and less technologically advanced countries.
• Buoyed by high commodity prices, agriculture has demonstrated astonishing resilience during global economic turmoil. In 2010, agricultural value-added at the world level rose by 4 percent, in contrast to a 1 percent increase in overall GDP.

Hunger and malnutrition

• Almost 870 million people, or 12.5 percent of the world's population, were undernourished in 2010-2012; the vast majority of them (852 million) live in developing countries.