89 points by simonebrunozzi15 days ago | 70 comments
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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.
> 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 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.
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.
Depends on a single upstream supplier for feed, no redundancy, no failover. Works great until the shipping lanes get interesting. Good luck with that in prod.
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.
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.
That complexity is an argument for including the Netherlands with appropriate caveats, not for leaving it off the map entirely. And self-dependence isn't what the paper claims to measure anyway - it's about whether domestic production aligns with dietary guidelines. Those are different questions.
But what would including the Netherlands actually change for the paper's thesis? If it's mapping production gaps against dietary guidance, a country where a third of "exports" are re-exports transiting through Rotterdam might genuinely fall outside the framework — that's a methodology question, not ideology.
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.
Saw similar mismatches documented in the 1974 World Food Conference reports. Forty years of the same gap charts, same recommendations, same political gridlock. The dietary guidance side never syncs with production incentives because subsidies lock in commodity crops long before any nutrition panel convenes.
