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.
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!
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.
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.
Says a bit about Nature reviewers if the paper misses out a country that would have impact on the key points in the abstract
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.
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.
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.
Not to a level that could feed the entire country, surely.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/australia-pop...
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?
Short-sighted I agree. It would be worth paying a bit more for security - the same applies to a lot of other things.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Yea...
Nature Food is one of those also ran journals that sully the brand. None of my colleagues in related fields bother with it.
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.
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.
Worldwide, dairy & meat are big drivers in climate change, as well as other ecological problems. The NL has a front row seat there. :-( Eg. quality of surface waters is about the worst among EU countries.
Imho the NL would be a better country without its dairy industry: land to re-purpose for growing other crops, increase nature and/or recreational areas, reduce a host of ecological issues, etc. At the cost of a vanishingly small part of our GDP.
But alas - dairy industry, its suppliers & their lobby is a powerful one. So change is slow to come and only if/where absolutely necessary.
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)
There's a continuum between 'extensive' and 'intensive' finishing methods - the former takes longer and uses more forage & grass, and is best suited to native breeds. The latter uses more silage & concentrate, and is used for 'continental' breeds.
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.
Pretty sure these guys have passports or they wouldn't have made it past TSA.
https://stuckattheairport.com/2021/11/18/something-fishy-spo...
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.
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.
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".
Then we will lack whatever was produced on the place where you those new ponds with huge amount of fish.
Most of the richer countries/trade unions have a large meat surplus that could be easily shifted to something else, too.
Obviously nations do have limited surface area and creating new agricultural areas for them would be to the detriment of forests and "nature"
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.
Pollution, pathogens and heavy use of antibiotics and vaccines required to keeping large numbers of fish in confined areas. It's not a solved problem at least in Australia and consumers prefer wild caught.
15% is still a large number. 15% of the Chinese population is 2/3 of the US population and 15x the population of Australia. That's a lot of wild caught fish.
But it's not just China. Fishing boats from Indonesia and other SE Asian countries are more often intercepted within Australia's economic exclusion zone.
>That's a lot of wild caught fish
Note half of 15% wild catch is east sea, i.e. it's mostly in PRC EEZs. Most of other half in SCS, which is dispute shit show. We're really talking ~3% that is legitimately distant fishing, and to be blunt PRC, who due to geography as one of the LEAST EEZ to population / shore ratio (being surrounded by other island neighbours), only capturing 3-7% (if you include SCS) of total consumption via distant water is reasonable. Which is the "real" reason why PRC double down on aquaculture, they're simply large land country with huge population with high aquaculture appetite with limited EEZ resource.
Ultimately this something for UN to sort out, and because PRC reliance much less on high seas fish resource, you're going to hear bitching from other DWF actors way before PRC. In the meantime there's simply no reason for PRC to not DWF at her current per capita rate just because people who can't compare per capita eat up propaganda. The reality is PRC is 20% of global pop and wild catches about 20% of global catch. Has about comparable IUU misbehavior. Useful idiot behavior singling out PRC when many other fishing nations... who happen to be US partners, are not getting same lazy propaganda talking point for extracting much more per capita.
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.