About the data

arable.land is a small reference site about one statistic. It exists because the figure is widely quoted and rarely shown with its definition, its year and its source next to it.

Source

Every number comes from World Bank Open Data, which republishes the land-use series compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Three indicators are used:

The data is licensed CC BY 4.0. The same licence applies to the compiled table published here at /data.json.

Method

For each economy the site shows the most recent year that has a value, and prints that year. Regional and income-group aggregates are removed from country tables. The world total in hectares is the sum of the listed economies, because the hectares series has no world aggregate of its own; the world share of land and the per-person figure are the World Bank’s own aggregates.

The figures are checked against the source once a day. Before new numbers replace old ones they must pass sanity checks — enough economies, a plausible world total, an unbroken world series — so that a malformed response cannot put nonsense on the page. Current dataset: last updated by the World Bank 2026-10-08, retrieved 2026-11-03.

What this site is not

It carries no advertising and sells nothing. It does not value land, recommend investments, or offer farm technology. It is not affiliated with the World Bank, FAO or any company.