Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance (2025)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4

by simonebrunozzi • 3 months ago

89 63 3 months ago

shrubby2• 3 months ago

Nationalist food security, at least here in Finland, seems really paradoxical as the main focus seems to be animal production, with imported feed.

kyykky• 3 months ago

Maybe that’s the only category that can make a profit here?

shrubby2• 3 months ago

I don't think it is making profits?

Heavily subsidized and farmers are hurting.

jemmyw• 3 months ago

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.

DavidSJ• 3 months ago

Given that many of the depicted countries list as having "sufficient production", I guess it's for the usual reason.

anitil2• 3 months ago

For those wondering what the usual reason is - https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/

dwd2• 3 months ago

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.

femto• 3 months ago

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

lucumo• 3 months ago

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.

stinos• 3 months ago

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.

magicbuzz• 3 months ago

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

pelcg• 3 months ago

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.

esperent• 3 months 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.

chromacity2• 3 months ago

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.

rf152• 3 months ago

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.

robocat• 3 months ago

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.

derriz• 3 months ago

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.

graemep2• 3 months ago

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.

pjc502• 3 months ago

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.

lkm0• 3 months ago

I am very surprised to see Japan in the 40%-60% self-sufficiency category for fish. Is simply cheaper to buy from elsewhere?

RobotToaster2• 3 months ago

On the other hand it seems almost inexcusable that the UK isn't self sufficient for fish, we're surrounded by ducking water FFS.

graemep2• 3 months ago

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.

pjc502• 3 months ago

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?

ehnto• 3 months ago

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.

anenefan• 3 months ago

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

hagbard_c• 3 months ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 3 months ago

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.

fransje26• 3 months ago

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.

myrmidon2• 3 months ago

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.

317070• 3 months ago

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...

croisillon• 3 months ago

gotta love how an alert about increasing food insecurity still turns into a recrimination against blue haired vegans

dbcooper2• 3 months ago

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.

karmakurtisaani• 3 months ago

Don't like what an article is saying? Just declare them ideologically biased and call it a day. Works every time!

contingencies2• 3 months ago

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.

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

Are you really likely to find big vending machine investors in a global food security thread?

contingencies2• 3 months ago

You'd be surprised! Thesis-driven investors exclusively monitor specific areas looking for edge. I've already met with groups like Cargill who approached me while still in Shenzhen. They really are ear to the ground.

jongjong• 3 months ago

As an engineer I'm too busy processing spreadsheets with AI to concern myself with the menial task of food production.

jcarrano• 3 months ago

How much of the fish self-sufficiency of China is due to them plundering the seas across the globe?

alpineman• 3 months ago

That's what massive subsidisation of the meat and dairy industry gets you over the long run

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

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.

ericpauley• 3 months ago

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.

Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance (2025)

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