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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Hey irishcoffee, why don't you do that. This 2026, why don't you plug-in your feels numbers with my broadly educated numbers into deep research and see what gets validated - lots of proxy indicators to establish bounds and see whose numbers it comports with and how it deviates from claims.
>it’s widely known
It's widely held cope (aka meaningless) argument by western useful idiots, who don't critically follow PRC subject matters. Some controversial PRC numbers are smoothed, trend/gross approximates are possible via proxy indicators. But domestic fishery #s not controversial, and stuff like aquaculture can be estimated / verified via 3rd party proxy measures i.e. last western geospatial from top of my head mapped PRC aquaculture pond sizes (which is subsect of PRC aquaculture) at ~23000 sqkm, which already gets 2/3 way to official production numbers based on yield/utilization guestimates. See, something's like agri/aquaculture, there are various way to guestimate / measure if one is not innumerate.
And mismeasure, like the propaganda surrounding PRC distant fishing #s that are in fact, without reliable source, and meaningless, i.e if you follow the subject matter claims of PRC DWF fleet size increased from 3000 to 30000 boats since 2020 while claiming PRC DWF catch increased from 12m tons to 15m tons. 1000% increase in fleet size to increase catch by 25%.
So yeah trying to find honest Western source about Chinese anything is not possible outside of mining #s to see if comport with reality, they don't exist. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but unfortunately it's not widely known - despite Trump/(lying)Pompeo publicly acknowledged 100b program to spread anti PRC propaganda (including PRC DWF to push USCG deployments). The US propaganda laundering system doesn't divulge this information accurately. But useful idiots will eat it up regardless despite basic numeracy/analytic skills can extract numbers from variety of sources to find meaning, i.e. figure out which numbers comport with reality, and which doesn't.
The DWF tonnage and derived per capita figures from western claims btw. So even propaganda #s designed to make PRC look bad with some basic decomposition shows per capita PRC better than JP, SKR, TW on DWF. But maybe we all better off being number nihilists and embrace numberwang.
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.
Surprisingly, The Netherlands is missing on this map too.
Very strange indeed.
It's agricultural output is insane for a country with its surface area.
Isn't that, just like in Belgium, mostly so for meat and derived products? Which also happens to be one of the worst situations (of natural food production) ecologically: grow and import a ton of corn and soy, export again, and in the meantime all the pesticides and methane and nitrogen and manure etc are left in your country.
The Netherlands is almost legendary for its agricultural productivity. Its greenhouse operations were the model for NZ capsicum production and other efforts. It also leads food science research in some areas. Wageningen is perhaps the best in that field.
Food groups seem like such a strange way to quantify this, especially given that production of several of the food groups is a net macronutrient destroyer.
The macronutrient story is far more telling. For instance my math says (based on 17B bushel annual production) that the US produces 11,400 calories and 250g protein per person, per day, just in corn. The vast majority of this is used for animal feed and ethanol.
Whether resorting to eating just corn and multivitamins is a good life could be debated, but it's silly to suggest (as the paper figures do) that the US has a food security issue.
> 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".
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.
No, but mostly for economic reasons. You can farm a whole lot of fish in aquaculture - it's just more expensive than importing wild caught fish.
The numbers look pretty insane, you can raise many tons of fish in relatively small volumes of water (several hundred kg of fish per year per cubic meter). You just gotta build the ponds/tanks/cages, and the infrastructure to filter the water, supply the oxygen and deliver the feed.
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".
> 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?
Then we will lack whatever was produced on the place where you those new ponds with huge amount of fish.
This argument does not work, because we are not limited by available space in total agricultural output. Just consider the Netherlands: Second largest food exporter despite the US being >200 times larger.
Most of the richer countries/trade unions have a large meat surplus that could be easily shifted to something else, too.
Fish don't care about soil quality or level ground. If anything fish ponds can benefit from height differences because that allows you to flow water through multiple ponds before pumping it back up
Obviously nations do have limited surface area and creating new agricultural areas for them would be to the detriment of forests and "nature"
There is a difference between 'can produce the food with the climate' and 'should produce the food with the climate'. Comparative advantage crops up yet. Iceland can grow bananas by magma but they are grown slower and have more expensive labor than tropical banana growing countries.
> 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.
That's only because that bycatch is almost free of charge in areas with significant ocean fishing fleets.
You can provide the right mix of proteins and fats from algal and insect sources, so this shouldn't be a barrier to increased adoption of fish farming.
(Scaling wastewater and disease management are perhaps greater challenges, but ought not to be intractable either)
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 was wondering about that. Cattle in Britain are also predominately grass fed and Ireland has a similar climate and environment and a much lower population density and a lot more land for cattle.
Ireland also exports a lot of that grass fed beef, so could presumably export less, and consume more of it to replace whatever it could not import.
A lot of other countries are also be both importers and exporters of food. The problem might be that in some places the quality and range of diet might decline.
In Ireland (and I believe it's similar in GB), beef cattle are usually finished on a mix of silage and concentrated feed with a significant maize component to promote better fat distribution.
Dairy cows will also have pelleted additives over the winter, making up to about a quarter of their intake (largely depending on silage quality). But those tend to be mixes of yeast, fats, and digestible fibre so shouldn't necessarily require imports.
It seems like both of these are true: "Cattle are predominantly grass-fed" - yes, but this is seasonal; when they're eating something other than grass, it's an import.
Apparently impossible for Australia as well, entirely girt by sea, and only 23million population. We also have significant knowledge and efforts in on-shore fish farming as well.
I am unsure how deep this study goes to understand capacity and capability, especially with regards to how each country could adapt.
We also fail at vegetables. But given we are highly leveraged in dairy for export, if we were isolated by trade we could switch up our land use. I am not saying it would be fool proof, but we can grow veggies here. We have an insane amount of arable land contrasted to our population.
The idea we can simply change land use here seems simple too, but much of the agricultural industry has boxed themselves in, applying nasty BS to the ground which used to be not safe to grow veggies for 6 - 7 years bare minimum, though there has been of late, pressure to let the limit slide downwards for the idiots who could not be told that choosing a problem chemicals over some others which took a bit more effort, was going to bite them in the bum.
I have farmed veggies, but in a dry farming situation (no irrigation) so the whole show is at the mercy of the weather. Last few years have been a no go. Many other areas find themselves in a similar situation, water either costs and arm and leg or there's not enough access to it when required.
Ironically the best areas that grew a lot of veggies were (up until 60s, 70s) along the coast up my way Queensland ... much of it gave was to roads and houses that need wet weather insurance during very wet periods ... they are are subject to flooding.
The other factor that governs growing vegetables is the price being offered (knife edge to low) and silly antics like from Queensland sending truck loads of veggies 2000 km to a central depo and then back up along the coast for distribution.
BTW, for farmers, their fuel since the beginning of 2026 has doubled in prices after fuel excise rebate, so in a few months it's going to be very interesting as to what's in the shops that's still affordable by the average worker. The supermarkets here don't miss any upward costs either, applying the real cost by some factor the public might believe is realistic.
Dear god, let's not bring up fishing again, it was exhausting enough for Brexit.
Fish do not obey national boundaries. They don't carry passports. The entire North Atlantic ecosystem needs to be considered as one, along with quotas for sustainability. I'm not sure if it's mathematically possible for all of Europe to hit this "recommended" consumption level from pelagic fish without quickly making them extinct, has anyone checked that?
Very interesting. I would not have expected my home, Spain, to fail at fish and starch. Living in northern Spain where fishing and potato farming are big business gives one a warped perspective apparently.
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.
At https://infinite-food.com/ we've spent ten years targeting food distribution efficiency with robotics. Now raising for GTM with multiple simultaneous order of magnitude improvements over legacy operations. To put it bluntly, we will print money: scaling initially at the same rate as the fastest QSR historically attested, and accelerating from there. Raising $100M, $30M spoken for, looking for a $50M lead.
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.
The Netherlands is also the #4 importer of food in the world. I reckon with these transport heavy countries it is very hard to estimate how self-dependent they actually are, versus how much is settlement lag on the transport portion.
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.
Dismissing the dutch agricultural output as "creative bookkeeping" goes waaaayy too far IMO. Your own article distinguishes local production and re-exports and those make up less than half.
The country of plofkip disappearing into water and steam as you cook it, of south-american chicken re-labeled as a dutch product, and the country of absolutely tasteless, hard-as-rock tomatoes as a great export product.
A quick cycling tour through any of the greenhouse areas will quickly remind you why such an agricultural model is maybe not the greatest of ideas.. The lingering chemical smell is all telling.
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!
https://www.agca.au/
https://www.thechocolateprofessor.com/blog/australian-cacao
>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.
Hey maxglute, I could post verbatim what you did, changing only numbers.
Without a reliable source, your numbers are meaningless.
Trying to find an honest source about chinese economics is not possible, they don’t exist. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s widely known.
The prc doesn’t divulge this information accurately.
Hey irishcoffee, why don't you do that. This 2026, why don't you plug-in your feels numbers with my broadly educated numbers into deep research and see what gets validated - lots of proxy indicators to establish bounds and see whose numbers it comports with and how it deviates from claims.
>it’s widely known
It's widely held cope (aka meaningless) argument by western useful idiots, who don't critically follow PRC subject matters. Some controversial PRC numbers are smoothed, trend/gross approximates are possible via proxy indicators. But domestic fishery #s not controversial, and stuff like aquaculture can be estimated / verified via 3rd party proxy measures i.e. last western geospatial from top of my head mapped PRC aquaculture pond sizes (which is subsect of PRC aquaculture) at ~23000 sqkm, which already gets 2/3 way to official production numbers based on yield/utilization guestimates. See, something's like agri/aquaculture, there are various way to guestimate / measure if one is not innumerate.
And mismeasure, like the propaganda surrounding PRC distant fishing #s that are in fact, without reliable source, and meaningless, i.e if you follow the subject matter claims of PRC DWF fleet size increased from 3000 to 30000 boats since 2020 while claiming PRC DWF catch increased from 12m tons to 15m tons. 1000% increase in fleet size to increase catch by 25%.
So yeah trying to find honest Western source about Chinese anything is not possible outside of mining #s to see if comport with reality, they don't exist. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but unfortunately it's not widely known - despite Trump/(lying)Pompeo publicly acknowledged 100b program to spread anti PRC propaganda (including PRC DWF to push USCG deployments). The US propaganda laundering system doesn't divulge this information accurately. But useful idiots will eat it up regardless despite basic numeracy/analytic skills can extract numbers from variety of sources to find meaning, i.e. figure out which numbers comport with reality, and which doesn't.
The DWF tonnage and derived per capita figures from western claims btw. So even propaganda #s designed to make PRC look bad with some basic decomposition shows per capita PRC better than JP, SKR, TW on DWF. But maybe we all better off being number nihilists and embrace numberwang.
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.
Surprisingly, The Netherlands is missing on this map too.
Very strange indeed.
It's agricultural output is insane for a country with its surface area.
Isn't that, just like in Belgium, mostly so for meat and derived products? Which also happens to be one of the worst situations (of natural food production) ecologically: grow and import a ton of corn and soy, export again, and in the meantime all the pesticides and methane and nitrogen and manure etc are left in your country.
The Netherlands is almost legendary for its agricultural productivity. Its greenhouse operations were the model for NZ capsicum production and other efforts. It also leads food science research in some areas. Wageningen is perhaps the best in that field.
NZ does well though: fruits, dairy, meat, vegetables and legumes
Says a bit about Nature reviewers if the paper misses out a country that would have impact on the key points in the abstract
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_m...
Food groups seem like such a strange way to quantify this, especially given that production of several of the food groups is a net macronutrient destroyer.
The macronutrient story is far more telling. For instance my math says (based on 17B bushel annual production) that the US produces 11,400 calories and 250g protein per person, per day, just in corn. The vast majority of this is used for animal feed and ethanol.
Whether resorting to eating just corn and multivitamins is a good life could be debated, but it's silly to suggest (as the paper figures do) that the US has a food security issue.
> 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. Trout, tilapia, etc.
Not to a level that could feed the entire country, surely.
No, but mostly for economic reasons. You can farm a whole lot of fish in aquaculture - it's just more expensive than importing wild caught fish.
The numbers look pretty insane, you can raise many tons of fish in relatively small volumes of water (several hundred kg of fish per year per cubic meter). You just gotta build the ponds/tanks/cages, and the infrastructure to filter the water, supply the oxygen and deliver the feed.
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".
> 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?
Then we will lack whatever was produced on the place where you those new ponds with huge amount of fish.
This argument does not work, because we are not limited by available space in total agricultural output. Just consider the Netherlands: Second largest food exporter despite the US being >200 times larger.
Most of the richer countries/trade unions have a large meat surplus that could be easily shifted to something else, too.
Fish don't care about soil quality or level ground. If anything fish ponds can benefit from height differences because that allows you to flow water through multiple ponds before pumping it back up
Obviously nations do have limited surface area and creating new agricultural areas for them would be to the detriment of forests and "nature"
There is a difference between 'can produce the food with the climate' and 'should produce the food with the climate'. Comparative advantage crops up yet. Iceland can grow bananas by magma but they are grown slower and have more expensive labor than tropical banana growing countries.
What's stopping us from shifting agricultural production, is probably the same that's stopping us from fixing climate change.
If I read the study correctly the bar isn't to feed the entire population exclusively on fish, only to cover the expected ratio of fish in the diet.
> 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.
That's only because that bycatch is almost free of charge in areas with significant ocean fishing fleets.
You can provide the right mix of proteins and fats from algal and insect sources, so this shouldn't be a barrier to increased adoption of fish farming.
(Scaling wastewater and disease management are perhaps greater challenges, but ought not to be intractable either)
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 was wondering about that. Cattle in Britain are also predominately grass fed and Ireland has a similar climate and environment and a much lower population density and a lot more land for cattle.
Ireland also exports a lot of that grass fed beef, so could presumably export less, and consume more of it to replace whatever it could not import.
A lot of other countries are also be both importers and exporters of food. The problem might be that in some places the quality and range of diet might decline.
In Ireland (and I believe it's similar in GB), beef cattle are usually finished on a mix of silage and concentrated feed with a significant maize component to promote better fat distribution.
Dairy cows will also have pelleted additives over the winter, making up to about a quarter of their intake (largely depending on silage quality). But those tend to be mixes of yeast, fats, and digestible fibre so shouldn't necessarily require imports.
https://www.farmersjournal.ie/tillage/news/feed-imports-into...
It seems like both of these are true: "Cattle are predominantly grass-fed" - yes, but this is seasonal; when they're eating something other than grass, it's an import.
Silage is grass stored to use out of season, it can still have been produced in Ireland.
Apparently impossible for Australia as well, entirely girt by sea, and only 23million population. We also have significant knowledge and efforts in on-shore fish farming as well.
I am unsure how deep this study goes to understand capacity and capability, especially with regards to how each country could adapt.
We also fail at vegetables. But given we are highly leveraged in dairy for export, if we were isolated by trade we could switch up our land use. I am not saying it would be fool proof, but we can grow veggies here. We have an insane amount of arable land contrasted to our population.
Population here is over 27 million atm. [1] [2]
The idea we can simply change land use here seems simple too, but much of the agricultural industry has boxed themselves in, applying nasty BS to the ground which used to be not safe to grow veggies for 6 - 7 years bare minimum, though there has been of late, pressure to let the limit slide downwards for the idiots who could not be told that choosing a problem chemicals over some others which took a bit more effort, was going to bite them in the bum.
I have farmed veggies, but in a dry farming situation (no irrigation) so the whole show is at the mercy of the weather. Last few years have been a no go. Many other areas find themselves in a similar situation, water either costs and arm and leg or there's not enough access to it when required.
Ironically the best areas that grew a lot of veggies were (up until 60s, 70s) along the coast up my way Queensland ... much of it gave was to roads and houses that need wet weather insurance during very wet periods ... they are are subject to flooding.
The other factor that governs growing vegetables is the price being offered (knife edge to low) and silly antics like from Queensland sending truck loads of veggies 2000 km to a central depo and then back up along the coast for distribution.
BTW, for farmers, their fuel since the beginning of 2026 has doubled in prices after fuel excise rebate, so in a few months it's going to be very interesting as to what's in the shops that's still affordable by the average worker. The supermarkets here don't miss any upward costs either, applying the real cost by some factor the public might believe is realistic.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/australia-pop...
[2] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population
I am very surprised to see Japan in the 40%-60% self-sufficiency category for fish. Is simply cheaper to buy from elsewhere?
On the other hand it seems almost inexcusable that the UK isn't self sufficient for fish, we're surrounded by ducking water FFS.
Dear god, let's not bring up fishing again, it was exhausting enough for Brexit.
Fish do not obey national boundaries. They don't carry passports. The entire North Atlantic ecosystem needs to be considered as one, along with quotas for sustainability. I'm not sure if it's mathematically possible for all of Europe to hit this "recommended" consumption level from pelagic fish without quickly making them extinct, has anyone checked that?
Agreements about which waters who can fish, and it being cheaper to import from elsewhere.
Short-sighted I agree. It would be worth paying a bit more for security - the same applies to a lot of other things.
Very interesting. I would not have expected my home, Spain, to fail at fish and starch. Living in northern Spain where fishing and potato farming are big business gives one a warped perspective apparently.
Nationalist food security, at least here in Finland, seems really paradoxical as the main focus seems to be animal production, with imported feed.
Maybe that’s the only category that can make a profit here?
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.
That's what massive subsidisation of the meat and dairy industry gets you over the long run
How much of the fish self-sufficiency of China is due to them plundering the seas across the globe?
As an engineer I'm too busy processing spreadsheets with AI to concern myself with the menial task of food production.
At https://infinite-food.com/ we've spent ten years targeting food distribution efficiency with robotics. Now raising for GTM with multiple simultaneous order of magnitude improvements over legacy operations. To put it bluntly, we will print money: scaling initially at the same rate as the fastest QSR historically attested, and accelerating from there. Raising $100M, $30M spoken for, looking for a $50M lead.
Are you really likely to find big vending machine investors in a global food security thread?
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.
Yes, very questionable. They also missed New Zealand which is the largest exporter of dairy products (~ 21%).
Nature Food is one of those also ran journals that sully the brand. None of my colleagues in related fields bother with it.
The Netherlands is also the #4 importer of food in the world. I reckon with these transport heavy countries it is very hard to estimate how self-dependent they actually are, versus how much is settlement lag on the transport portion.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Yea...
Don't like what an article is saying? Just declare them ideologically biased and call it a day. Works every time!
gotta love how an alert about increasing food insecurity still turns into a recrimination against blue haired vegans
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.
Dismissing the dutch agricultural output as "creative bookkeeping" goes waaaayy too far IMO. Your own article distinguishes local production and re-exports and those make up less than half.
Ah yes..
The country of plofkip disappearing into water and steam as you cook it, of south-american chicken re-labeled as a dutch product, and the country of absolutely tasteless, hard-as-rock tomatoes as a great export product.
A quick cycling tour through any of the greenhouse areas will quickly remind you why such an agricultural model is maybe not the greatest of ideas.. The lingering chemical smell is all telling.