Agricultural policy monitoring

Total support to agriculture averaged USD 885 billion a year in 2023-25 across 56 countries. It exceeded USD 950 billion in 2025, an increase of USD 121 billion (or nearly 15%) from 2023. Relative to agricultural production value, support rose from 17.6% in 2023 to 19.1% in 2025, reversing a decades-long declining trend.

Support to individual farmers averaged USD 661 billion a year in 2023-25, equivalent to about 13% of gross farm receipts. Consumers bore a net policy-related burden of around USD 204 billion a year, or 4.4% of spending measured at primary product prices.

Global total factor productivity growth, which measures output growth relative to the combined use of production inputs, slowed from 1.8% a year in 1991-2000 to 0.8% in 2014-23.

Public spending on agricultural knowledge and innovation systems averaged around USD 27 billion a year in 2023-25. This was about 0.5% of agricultural production value, roughly half its level in 2000-02. Stronger research, advisory services and technology diffusion can help farmers improve productivity and adapt to changing conditions.

This annual OECD flagship report monitors policies that affect the performance of agriculture and assesses the value of support arising from these policies in ways that ensures consistency and comparability across countries and time. This allows for a well-informed policy dialogue at various levels.

• At the national level: The monitoring report and underlying support data provide countries with a means to understand the overall shape of their agricultural policies, and the support they are providing to the sector. The benchmarking of countries’ policies in comparison to others can help inform a national dialogue on the objectives, impacts, and directions of policy efforts based on a common frame of reference. 
• At the international level: The report facilitates mutual learning and dialogue about trends in support to the sector, highlighting alternative policy tools and practices to achieve diverse objectives for food systems. Countries benefit from seeing other models of expenditure and investment, and of alternative approaches to strengthening productivity, sustainability, and resilience in agriculture.

Since the first edition in the 1980s, the OECD Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation report has provided a consistent and comparable picture on agricultural support across countries and time. This unique source of support estimates covers 56 countries across all continents, representing three-quarters of global agricultural value-added. The detailed classification of different types of support that distinguishes between various characteristics of policy implementation enables overall assessments of levels and composition of support globally.

To help governments track how much support is provided to agriculture and in what form, the OECD has developed a set of standardised indicators that enable consistent measurement across time and countries. These indicators form the backbone of OECD monitoring and help ensure transparency and comparability in agricultural policy analysis.

• The Producer Support Estimate (PSE) captures the annual monetary value of gross transfers from consumers and taxpayers to farmers, measured at the farm-gate level, regardless of the policy’s nature, objective, or impact.
• The Consumer Support Estimate (CSE) reflects gross transfers to consumers of agricultural products, also measured at the farm-gate level, stemming from policy measures that support agriculture, again irrespective of their objectives or impacts.

• The General Services Support Estimate (GSSE) quantifies transfers for sector-wide services like R&D, infrastructure, or biosecurity. These do not include direct payments to producers and do not affect individual farm receipts or costs directly.

• The Total Support Estimate (TSE) aggregates all gross transfers from consumers and taxpayers to the agricultural sector, net of any budgetary receipts, offering a comprehensive picture of total support across policies. 

These indicators are fully detailed in the OECD’s PSE Manual, which guides policymakers in interpreting and applying them.