> 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.
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".
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 would 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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 would 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.
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.
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.