Fruit Production by Country 2024

Botanically, a fruit is a flowering plant's seed-bearing structure that's formed from the ovary after flowering. Making fruits edible is a way to disseminate seeds, as it motivates humans and other animals to eat the fruit and disperse the seeds through their droppings. This evolutionary adaptation has resulted in a symbiotic relationship between animals and fruiting plants. Consequently, fruits comprise a major portion of the world's agricultural output.

Definitions

Substantial differences exist between the botanical and culinary definitions of a fruit. The culinary definition generally refers to a fleshy structure with a sweet or sour flavor that contains seeds. However, botanical fruits also include other types of food like nuts, vegetables and cereal grains.

For example, many culinary nuts are a type of botanical fruit, even though they're hard, non-sweet and grow inside a shell. Culinary vegetables that are botanical fruits include broccoli, lettuce, tomato and zucchini, which are non-sweet. However, culinary vegetables like sweet potatoes and yams are sweet. On the other hand, some culinary fruits aren't botanical fruits. For example, rhubarb is used as a fruit when it's used to make pies, even though it isn't sweet. In addition, the part of the plant that's edible is the leaf stalk, known botanically as the petiole.

Cereal grains are another type of botanical fruit that isn't a culinary fruit. The grain of plants like wheat, corn, rice, oats and sorghum is a botanical fruit known more specifically as a caryopsis. However, the fruit portion is quite thin, compared to the seed, meaning the seed comprises almost the entire edible portion of the grain.

Cultivation

Fruits come from different species of plants with a range of environmental requirements, making a country's fruit production dependent on many factors. The most important of these include the country's size, especially the amount of arable land in a warm climate. The available agricultural technology is also a major factor in determining a country's fruit production.

Production

The FAO CSD reports a total world fruit production of 887,027,376 metric tons in 2020. The following list shows the fruit production of the top ten countries for that year in metric tons: