World production of mushrooms and truffles passed 50 million tonnes for the first time in 2024

Where the number comes from

The 2024 world figure for FAOSTAT item 449, “Mushrooms and truffles”, is 51,595,327 tonnes, and the row carries flag E, “Estimated value”. That qualifier belongs in the same breath as the total: nobody weighed 51.6 million tonnes of mushrooms, and the FAO Statistics Division does not claim anybody did. The 2023 row stands at 49,821,479 tonnes, so the year added 1,773,849 tonnes, a rise of 3.56 per cent. It is the first year the series has crossed 50 million tonnes. The series begins in 1961 at 495,127 tonnes, itself flagged E, which makes the current value more than a hundred times the first.

The QCL domain’s last update of 31 December 2025 is recorded in the DateUpdate field of FAOSTAT’s own bulk metadata file. That is an update date rather than a publication date, and the distinction matters here: the FAOSTAT interface is a JavaScript application and prints no date at all. The values quoted below were read from the bulk archive of the QCL domain on 17 September 2026. The FAO Statistical Database Terms of Use place the data under CC BY 4.0 and prescribe a citation form, which this entry carries in full: FAO. 2025. FAOSTAT: Production: Crops and livestock products. Accessed on 17 September 2026. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

Sixty-seven rows, added up

“World” in this table means the countries that have a row, not the countries that grow mushrooms. For 2024, item 449 has exactly sixty-seven country-level rows: thirty-six flagged A (“Official figure”), twenty-eight flagged I (“Value imputed by a receiving agency”), two flagged E, and one — the Comoros — flagged M (“Missing value; data cannot exist”), which carries no number at all. The remaining sixty-six values sum to 51,595,327.27 tonnes, which is the world row to within three hundredths of a tonne. The global total is an addition of what is present, not an estimate of what is absent.

Latin America shows what that costs. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile have no row for this item in 2024 at all, official or imputed. The aggregate for the Americas is therefore identical to the aggregate for Northern America: 447,369 tonnes, being the United States at 298,800 and Canada at 148,569. A country that files nothing enters the world total as a zero.

The row that carries the rise

China accounts for 48,614,558 tonnes, or 94.22 per cent of the world figure, on a row flagged E. It is not one of those sixty-seven country rows: FAOSTAT assembles it from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Its dominant component, “China, mainland” at 48,607,249 tonnes, is flagged I — imputed by a receiving agency — and so is every year of that row since 2021: 41,062,405 tonnes in 2021, 45,059,167 in 2022, 46,828,541 in 2023 and 48,607,249 in 2024. The 2020 value on the same row is a flat 40,000,000 tonnes flagged E, a roundness that says something in itself about how it was arrived at.

That one row carries the whole of the latest increase, with a little to spare. Between 2023 and 2024 mainland China gained 1,778,708 tonnes in the database while the world total rose by 1,773,849, so the rest of the world taken together fell by just under five thousand tonnes. The earlier step of nearly four million tonnes between 2021 and 2022 is what lifted the world series from 44.19 million to 48.01 million and brought the fifty-million threshold within a year or two of reach. Crossing it is, first of all, a property of an imputed series rather than an event anyone observed in a growing house. The comparison is uneven in a second way too: Chinese edible-fungus reporting covers a far broader range of cultivated species than a European statistical office records under the same heading, so the 94.22 per cent share is not a like-for-like measurement.

What the total is not

Item 449 measures production, overwhelmingly from cultivation. It is not a record of what was picked in woodland and cannot be read as one. Element 5510 is quantity alone: no price, no value and no turnover appears anywhere in this table. The item name joins mushrooms to truffles, and the QCL domain holds no second mushroom item and no breakdown beneath this one — Agaricus bisporus cannot be separated from Pleurotus eryngii here, and neither a truffle tonnage nor a truffle share can be taken out of the figure.

The Polish row is 255,400 tonnes, flagged A: 0.50 per cent of the world total, and the largest national row anywhere in the European Union. The “European Union (27)” aggregate that contains it — 1,054,130 tonnes, 2.04 per cent of world production, flagged A as well — is nonetheless built from twenty member states rather than twenty-seven. Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia have no row for this item in 2024. Estonia does have one, and it reads as an official zero. Both groups contribute the same amount to the total, but only one of them measured anything.

That Polish figure is also a different number from the 308.3 thousand tonnes MykoRadar records from Eurostat for Polish output in 2025, and it does not contradict it: different year, different collection system, different item scope.

None of this needs special access to check. The flag definitions sit in Production_Crops_Livestock_E_Flags.csv inside the same archive, the rows can be read line by line, and a later FAOSTAT release may revise any of these values. The figure of 51.6 million tonnes is a useful reference point precisely when it is read together with its flag.