Most of the world’s farmland is there to keep us alive. A smaller part, scattered over volcanic slopes and islands the size of a parish, grows things no one needs to survive: a bean to wake us, a grape to ferment, a bud to give away, a resin that smells of heaven when it burns.
Farming is usually asked what the Earth can feed us. Here the question is the other one. Where do our pleasures grow, and who tends the fields they grow in?
Necessity has been mapped with care. Pleasure, mostly, has not.
Wine, hops, agave, cane spirit
The Vine and the Still
Fermentation is the oldest of our chemistries, and the most forgiving: give yeast a sugar and a little time and it will do the rest. What it cannot do is choose the sugar. That choice is a landscape, and every drink carries one.
The grape, the hop cone, the heart of the blue agave, the cane stalk: each drink begins as a field somewhere, and the field is the part we forget.
Now
The world’s vineyards covered 7.1 million hectares in 2024. Of the 24.4 million tonnes of wine FAO counted in 2023, France and Italy made more than a third between them.
Tequila is law before it is a drink: its appellation, declared in 1974, takes in all of Jalisco and named municipalities in four other states. Germany grows nearly three hop cones in ten.
In 1863 a root louse from North America was found in a vineyard in Languedoc. Phylloxera ate its way north for thirty years.
France made 8.65 million kilolitres of wine in 1875. Five years later it made 3.01 million, a fall that historians put down mainly to the insect. The vine survived by being grafted onto American roots, the same continent that had sent the insect.
A belt of bitter plants circles the tropics, and each has been bred into a ritual: the espresso, the bowl of tea, the gourd of maté passed hand to hand, the kola nut broken for a guest. We drink their chemistry to stay awake.
These are the best mapped of all the pleasures, and the maps show how narrow the belt is.
Now
The world grew 11.3 million tonnes of green coffee in 2024, nearly half of it in Brazil and Viet Nam. Arabica holds about six hectares in ten of the coffee land mapped for 2020, robusta the rest.
Côte d’Ivoire alone grew 36 percent of the world’s cocoa. Maté is narrower still: Argentina and Brazil grow nine-tenths of it.
Some 5,300 years ago, at Santa Ana-La Florida in the Ecuadorian Amazon, people of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture left cacao residues in their pots. Chocolate began on the upper Amazon, far south of the Maya who made it famous.
Coffee is younger. The first sure trace of the drink comes from Sufi communities in fifteenth-century Yemen, who took it to stay awake through night prayers.
Tobacco is the one pleasure crop grown to be burnt. When it was first sold across the Atlantic, it built a colony.
Its geography is a paradox. Of the crops FAO models, the one that harms its users finds the most room to grow.
Now
The world harvested 3.4 million hectares of tobacco in 1961 and 3.3 million in 2024. On roughly the same ground, the crop grew from 3.6 to 6.0 million tonnes. China grows more than a third of it.
3.3 Mhatobacco harvested, 2024 (3.4 Mha in 1961)FAOSTAT
For centuries a handful of seeds and barks set the course of fleets. Nutmeg grew on the small Banda Islands, and whoever held the islands held the price.
The spices have since been carried to every tropical coast. Their old habit of crowding into one place has not left them.
Now
Madagascar holds four in five hectares of the world’s vanilla. Indonesia grows three-quarters of its cloves.
Saffron, the stigma of a crocus, crossed borders for 261 million dollars in 2024. Iran sent nearly two-fifths of it.
The spices that once took fleets across the world are now ordinary crops. Since 1961 the land harvested for cloves has grown almost ninefold, to about 700,000 hectares, and for pepper more than fivefold, to about 860,000.
FAO estimated many of the early figures, so read the lines as a shape rather than a count.
A perfume is a field folded into a flask. Behind each drop lies a valley in Bulgaria or Anatolia, a terrace in Tamil Nadu, a hillside in Haiti where vetiver roots are pulled from the ground.
No global statistic follows these crops. Their trade hides inside a customs line called “other essential oils”, and their fields appear on no world map.
Now
In 2024 Türkiye’s rose growers picked 19,318 tonnes of petals and distilled 2,120 kilograms of oil. Do the division: about nine tonnes of flowers for each kilogram.
Indonesia distils about nine-tenths of the world’s patchouli, Haiti more than two-thirds of its vetiver. Agarwood is still taken mostly from wild trees.
French lavender oil fell from 159 tonnes in 2020 to 90 in 2023.
Most of the world’s mint is corn mint, grown for menthol in Uttar Pradesh: 353,000 of India’s 367,000 hectares in 2025-26. India does not report it to FAO, whose world total for mint is 1,710 hectares.
≈9 trose petals per kg of oil, Türkiye 2024ISHS 2025
159 → 90 tFrench lavender oil, 2020 to 2023FranceAgriMer
Then
The first scents were resins. On the coast of Dhofar, the port of Khor Rori shipped frankincense from the fourth century before our era to the fifth after it.
Some fifteen centuries later UNESCO listed a gesture rather than a place: the perfume skills of the Pays de Grasse, from growing the flower to composing the scent, in 2018.
A cut flower is the most perishable of the pleasures. It has a few days of beauty, and it spends some of them crossing an ocean.
Ecuador, Kenya and Colombia grow roses for the world, yet on a world crop map their farms leave no trace.
Now
Fresh roses worth 3.1 billion dollars crossed borders in 2024. The Netherlands declared the largest share, 31 percent. Ecuador, Kenya and Colombia together sent more than half.
Four dollars in five spent abroad on dormant bulbs go to the Netherlands. More than half the carnations come from Colombia.
81%of bulb exports from the Netherlands, 2024CEPII BACI
Then
In February 1637 the price of tulip bulbs in the Dutch Republic collapsed in a matter of days. The mania became a parable about markets. The bulbs stayed, and so did the Dutch.
Cloth keeps people warm, and most of it is cotton: 24.7 million tonnes of lint in 2023. Raw silk weighed less than half a percent of that. Silk, like a dye, is chosen for how it looks and how it feels.
These are the pleasures of the eye and the hand, and they are as hard as any to find on a map. FAO counts silkworm cocoons and raw silk, but not indigo, madder, woad or henna. No global crop map shows a single mulberry tree.
Then
Silk is the one colour crop that FAO counts. The world reeled 212,801 tonnes of silkworm cocoons in 1961 and, by FAO’s estimate, 461,227 in 2023, more than half of them in India. Raw silk grew from 32,503 tonnes to 93,988, and China made more than half of it.
461 ktsilkworm cocoons, 2023 (213 kt in 1961)FAOSTAT
Milk, oil and a fungus are food. A Roquefort, a Kalamata oil or a black Périgord truffle is something more: a staple bound by law to the ground it came from.
Here the pleasure lies less in the crop than in the craft and the soil, what the French call terroir. The border is part of the recipe.
Now
The world made 27.3 million tonnes of cheese in 2023. FAO sorts it by the animal that gave the milk, never by appellation, so the famous names vanish into the total.
Extra-virgin olive oil worth 12.3 billion dollars was exported in 2024, two-fifths of it from Spain. The fresh truffle trade weighed 1,830 tonnes.
On 26 July 1925, French law gave Roquefort the first appellation of origin ever granted to a cheese. A cave and a village became a name the state would defend.
Sugar is the pleasure that became a staple. Cane is now the heaviest harvest on Earth, and every pastry and bar of chocolate still carries the old pleasure inside the new bulk.
Its history is the darkest in this atlas. The ledger must be read before the recipe.
Now
Sugar cane covered 26.7 million hectares in 2024, three times its area in 1961, and gave 1.94 billion tonnes of stalks. Brazil grew 39 percent of them.
From cane and beet together came 188 million tonnes of raw sugar in 2023.
26.7 Mhasugar cane harvested, 2024 (8.9 Mha in 1961)FAOSTAT
The cane plantations of the Americas were worked by enslaved Africans. Between 1501 and 1866, slave ships embarked about 12.5 million people in Africa, and landed 10.7 million. The rest died at sea.
12.5 Mpeople embarked on slave ships, 1501–1866Slave Voyages
These are crops like the others. They want sun and a farmer who knows them, and they have been grown for thousands of years. What sets them apart is a line drawn in law in the twentieth century.
The line changed how they are farmed, priced and counted. It did not change what the plants are.
Now
Colombia counted 261,386 hectares of coca in 2024, the most since its series began in 2001. Peru counted 89,755.
Opium moved. Afghanistan grew a record 328,000 hectares in 2017; after the ban of 2022 it grew 10,200 in 2025. Myanmar grew 53,100 hectares that year and produced more than three times as much opium.
Cannabis has no survey anywhere; the last count in Morocco’s Rif found 134,000 hectares in 2003. Yemen’s 2003 farm census counted 120,885 hectares of qat.
328,000 → 10,200 haopium poppy in Afghanistan, 2017 to 2025UNODC
1,010 topium from Myanmar, 2025 (Afghanistan 296 t)UNODC
Then
In the Ñanchoc Valley of northern Peru, people were chewing coca leaves with lime at least 8,000 years ago.
In 1906–07 the world produced some 41,600 tonnes of opium, 85 percent of it in China. Two years later the Shanghai Opium Commission began the century of control.
Lay the world’s crop maps side by side and a pattern appears. The more a crop serves pleasure alone, the less anyone has bothered to find it.
There is one exception, and it is telling. The crops that are mapped best, field by field and year by year, are the forbidden ones. Agronomy did not draw those maps. Enforcement did.
Now
Coffee, at the other end, is mapped by species on a ten-kilometre grid for 2020. Of the thirteen perfume crops in this atlas, only peppermint has a layer of its own, and it misses India, where most of the world’s mint grows. No cut flower has one. Not blurred; absent.
Colombian coca is counted every year since 2001 on a grid of cells about one kilometre across, 119,154 of them.
Share of each crop's mapped area still drawn on its year-2000 pattern (CROPGRIDS, 2020)
Black pepper100%
Vanilla100%
Cinnamon100%
Cloves100%
Nutmeg, mace, cardamom100%
Ginger100%
Yerba mate100%
Kola nut100%
Areca nut100%
Mushrooms and truffles100%
Coriander, cumin, fennel, anise100%
Pimento (Monfreda class)100%
Chillies, dried94%
Grapes67%
Hops32%
Peppermint, spearmint9%
Olives0%
Then
The best global grid we have is dated 2020. For vanilla, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, ginger, maté, kola and areca, the pattern inside each country is still the one drawn for the year 2000, rescaled to new national totals. For wine grapes, two-thirds of the area sits on that same old pattern.
This page redraws the spices from each country’s own statistics, by province or state where they are published: Indonesia’s cloves and nutmeg, India’s pepper and cardamom, Iran’s saffron. Inside each province the fields are still the ones drawn for 2000.
2000year of the field pattern for nine spice and stimulant crops in the 2020 gridCROPGRIDS v1.08
For six of these crops we can ask how much ground is suitable. FAO’s agro-ecological model asks of every ten-kilometre cell on Earth whether rain-fed coffee, cocoa, tea, tobacco, olive or sugar cane could grow there, and how well.
We count a cell suitable when FAO rates it moderate or better, and quote the stricter share of land within it that FAO rates suitable. Suitability is not a harvest: the model knows nothing of rust, of missing pollinators, of prices.
Now
Today tobacco has the widest room, 15.0 million km² of suitable land. Coffee has 10.3 million, sugar cane 7.7, cocoa 4.8, tea 4.1. The olive, at 2.9, is the most confined of the six.
15.0 M km²suitable for tobacco, 2001–2020FAO GAEZ v5
The shift has begun. Run on the climate actually observed, the model finds 5.73 million km² suitable for tea in 1981–2000 and 4.09 million in 2001–2020. Nearly three-tenths gone in twenty years, before any scenario.
−29%land suitable for tea, 1981–2000 to 2001–2020FAO GAEZ v5
Take every square metre of dry ground on Earth, Antarctica included, 146.7 million square kilometres,
and lay it out in one line. Forest holds the largest stretch. Fields come to a tenth.
The pleasure crops, 88.1 million hectares harvested
26.7Sugarcane
12.5Coffee
11.1Olives
11.0Cocoa
9.0Spices
6.7Grapes
5.5Tea
3.3Tobacco
1.3Areca
0.5Kola
0.4Yerba mate
0.1Hops
Million hectares harvested, FAOSTAT 2024. Every width above is its number.
Pleasure fits in 0.3% of the land.
Coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, the vine, hops, the spices, mate, kola and areca together take
50.3 million hectares, 3.2% of the world's cropland. Add olives and the share
becomes 3.9%. Add sugarcane, whose sugar is also food, and it reaches
5.6% of cropland and 0.6% of all land. Animal feed,
by the count of Mottet and colleagues for 2010, claims 560 million
hectares, about 35% of today's cropland.
These are harvested areas. For trees and bushes FAO counts the bearing area, so young plantings fall outside it.
Our own maps of physical area, pattern year 2020, give 41.1 million hectares for the same
core set and 77.6 with olives and sugarcane.
The Map in Circulation
A world map shared widely online recolours each landmass to stand for one use of land: the Americas for
livestock, Greenland and Antarctica for ice, Libya for towns and roads. Its numbers come from the 2019 edition of
Our World in Data's breakdown. Measured on the globe, the regions are well chosen. The Americas are
27.1% of all land against a label of 27%, Libya 1.1% against 1%.
Its Robinson projection then undoes some of that: Greenland and Antarctica fill
17% of the drawn land for a label of 10%, while Africa, the Middle East and South Asia
shrink to 23% for 26%.
Several labels have since moved, or never quite held.
Livestock 27%. The same method on 2024 data gives 25%, because pasture has shrunk. The method also counts every hectare FAO files as pasture as grazed, and Mottet and colleagues find about 1.5 billion hectares of it carry no animals. Counting only the land livestock uses, the share is 17%.
Cropland 7%. Correct for crops minus animal feed. All cropland is 10.8%.
Barren land 19%. Bare ground measured from orbit is 14%. Nineteen is reached only by adding sparse vegetation, much of it grazed, so the same ground also sits inside livestock.
Forests 26%. FAO's latest assessment gives 28%.
Freshwater 1%. Lakes and rivers cover 2 to 3% of land (3.3% by FAO), so Mongolia, at 1.1%, is drawn a third of the size it should be.
Shrub 8%. A remainder, not a measurement. With current data the remainder is 13%.
Glaciers at 10% and built-up land at 1% still hold, the first only because Antarctica is counted.
All land = FAO land area 13015.9 + FAO inland waters 443.05 + Antarctica (MODIS, all classes) 1215.78 = 14674.73 Mha. The shrub, grass and sparse share is what is left once the seven measured classes are taken away, so any overlap between pasture and bare ground lowers it.
Atlas
Pick up to four crops. Drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom. Each step of colour is a band of crop share, from a trace to the densest growing areas; paler areas still follow a map from around 2000.
You found the way through.
An immersive, soothing voyage to abstract infinity awaits. Best with long,
slow space-ambient music — whatever lets you drift — your screen full, and
nothing asked of you for a while.