Gaps in national food production, worldwide
nature.com46 points by simonebrunozzi 18 hours ago
46 points by simonebrunozzi 18 hours ago
> Fish and seafood self-sufficiency is particularly low across most regions
This seems like an impossible requirement to meet for landlocked countries.
I didn't see how deep they go here: for example, Ireland ranked higher than I expected, because of a lot of dairy and meat production. But how much of the cattle feed is imported?
According to this article, "Ireland imports around 80 percent of its animal feed, food, beverages, and other agri-food products".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Ireland
I haven't examined the source link to see if that's fully accurate, but if it's even mostly true, and that import collapsed, it would be a catastrophe.
It's not enough just to label a country as producer/not producer for a category but rather whether that production is fully stable and internalized in case of disasters/war.
My guess is that the results in the study should look worse for many of the countries listed.
> This seems like an impossible requirement to meet for landlocked countries.
Why? There's plenty of freshwater fish that are farmed around the world. Trout, tilapia, etc.
> It's not enough just to label a country as producer/not producer for a category but rather whether that production is fully stable and internalized in case of disasters/war.
Conversely, many industrialized and wealthy countries can probably shift their production pretty easily. For example, looks like Hungary is doing well on fruit but not on vegetables. This is probably not because it's hard for them to grow vegetables, just that there's no economic incentive to.
Similarly, the two-way legumes / veggies difference between the US and Mexico probably boils down to free-market economics or government subsidies more than to any real agricultural bottlenecks on either side.
> There's plenty of freshwater fish that are farmed around the world
Farmed fish are often fed on fish meal from the ocean - e.g. fish meal made from species that are not eaten by people. Between 5% and 10% of ocean fishing is used for such aquaculture.
Same same as the cattle example in Ireland being fed on imported animal feed.
> There's plenty of freshwater fish that are farmed around the world. Trout, tilapia, etc.
Not to a level that could feed the entire country, surely.
Why? If you have the money, the equipment, and the climate, what's stopping you from shifting agricultural production from one good to another on any scale you like? It's often as simple as the government saying "you know what, from now on, we're subsidizing beans instead of corn".
Barring some planetary-scale cataclysm, most of Europe and the US are at no real risk of starving. There are other countries that are at a real risk, but the map doesn't make a clear distinction between "red as a matter of convenience" and "red because they physically can't do it".
I had a look at the reference and the Wikipedia creates a misleading picture. The source states
> Ireland has very limited horticultural and grain production on account of its topography and climate, and it imports around 80 percent of its animal feed, food, and beverage needs.
Cattle are predominantly grass-fed in Ireland which is largely self-sufficient in grass/silage. Not to minimize the fragility of its economy wrt to food production - but the 80% I imagine is due to the reliance on other EU for fruits, vegetables and grain but these imports are almost exclusively for human consumption.
I am very surprised to see Japan in the 40%-60% self-sufficiency category for fish. Is simply cheaper to buy from elsewhere?
New Zealand appears to be missing from the map. Hard to know in this case if we're missing for the usual reason or because we have no food production gap.
Haha
I would think New Zealand would be in a similar situation to Australia.
Australia would be fine - we export 2/3 of our produce so have no problem. This study doesn't seem to account for trade, consumer choice and price differentials world-wide.
We don't grow some produce because it's easier/cheaper to import and any local producer may struggle on price, unless they can differentiate on something else like organic.
As for fish, we prefer to maintain sustainable local fish stocks, and choose import.
We're screwed on coffee and chocolate.
> As for fish, we prefer to maintain sustainable local fish stocks, and choose import.
There's hard evidence for this in the form of a map [1]. The light pixels close to the Australian coastline are Australian vessels fishing close in. The solid light areas further from the coast are other countries' vessels stripping the ocean bare. It's particularly obvious to the north east of Australia, where the solid line is the edge of Australia's exclusive economic zone. Minimal activity (dark) inside the zone, being stripped bare (light) outside the zone.
China may be listed as self-sufficient in fish, but its fish are not coming from near China [2]. Mind you, Australia's not helping if it's just buying from countries that are stripping stocks.
[1] https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index?longitude=126.00884...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-19/how-china-is-plunderi...
> We're screwed on coffee and chocolate.
If things get desperate, AU does have small coffee and cacao goring industries!
>China may be listed as self-sufficient in fish, but its fish are not coming from near China
PRC fishing is ~85% domestic aquaculture. THE HIGHEST RATIO OF SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE IN THE WROLD.
Of 15% remaining wild catch, ~50% is from east sea, i.e. PRC coast. So ~95% self sufficiency. ~98% including SCS, i.e. PRC definition of sovereign waters. Functionally, self sufficiency is at 100%, since PRC large aquaculture exporter.
All the distant fishing drama/propaganda is just 2-5% of PRC fishing, which per capita they underfish relative other major fishing distant water fishing actors like JP, SKR, TW, Spain etc. For reference PRC distant water catches like 1.5kg per capita, the others 3-30kg+, i.e. 2-20x PRC. TLDR is PRC is the largest aquaculture producer (absolute&relative) that also grossly under extracts from global commons relative to other DWF, unless one thinks PRC citizens entitled to less fish.
NZ is (famously) often cut off from maps.
Surprisingly, The Netherlands is missing on this map too. It's not just missing data: Germany and Belgium gained a lot of North Sea shore.
I was actually interested in the Netherlands, because my country has for the last 80 years followed policies with the express focus of never having a food shortage again, even during world wars. It's agricultural output is insane for a country with its surface area.
Given that many of the depicted countries list as having "sufficient production", I guess it's for the usual reason.
For those wondering what the usual reason is - https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/
That is just a subreddit, I don't really see where it describes the problem.
Anyway: It's because on the Mercator projection, it is a small point in the bottom right that easily gets overlooked or accidently cropped out.
Nationalist food security, at least here in Finland, seems really paradoxical as the main focus seems to be animal production, with imported feed.
This makes me sad to see this. The economic implications of this is catastrophic and unfortunately people who are in the middle of warzones get squeezed and suffer from famines.
I had a look at the maps in the article and noticed they somehow managed to forget the Netherlands, the #2 exporter of agricultural products in the world. This makes me wonder about the quality of the rest of the article given that Nature, once a journal of note has rapidly gone down the ideologically biased slide like many other publications and as such lost a lot of credibility.
I was wondering about that because it doesn't make sense given how small a country it is. It's a bit of creative bookkeeping, ultimately: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2026/03/value-of-agricultural-...
The biggest export product is dairy and eggs; I get that, most of our country feels like it's pastures lmao. And eggs / chicken farms are relatively compact, not sure what they feed them though.
But second is "cocoa and cocoa preparations"... the Netherlands cannot grow cocoa itself, wrong climate, so this is all processed imported raw materials as well as re-exported cocoa beans. Third is "horticultural products", so that's all the flowers and tulip bulbs coming from the greenhouses and tulip fields, but also keep in mind a lot of that is grown in e.g. Africa and just passes through.
We're in a strategic location, sea access, rivers going deep into Europe, and we have a lot of trade connections, is the gist of it. Oh and good cows / pastures.
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