Only one nation is self-sufficient in healthy food

Over a third of all countries cannot meet self-sufficiency for more than two of the seven essential food groups.

Over a third of all countries cannot meet self-sufficiency for more than two of the seven essential food groups. Low self-sufficiency and over-dependence on a few countries for imports threaten their capability to respond to global shocks, particularly for small states. That is the conclusion of a recent article in nature food, Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance highlights lack of national self-sufficiency, by Jonas Stehl from the University of Göttingen and colleagues.

Guyana is the only country that is self-sufficient in all seven food groups, fruit, vegetables, dairy, fish, meat, legumes nuts and seeds and starchy staples. China and Vietnam attain six. Only one in seven countries, most within Europe and South America, achieve self-sufficiency in five or more food groups. Six countries, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, China Macao Special Administrative Region, Qatar and Yemen do not achieve the needs of any food group while more than one-third of all countries, mostly in Africa, achieve self-sufficiency for two or fewer groups.

Notably, the research is based on a comparison between the production of seven food groups in a country and a recommended consumption based on the wwf Livewell diet, and not the actual consumption (see more below). The actual consumption pattern in most countries is different from these recommendations, something I will discuss in my next article. Only 44 countries, out of 186 countries, produce sufficient vegetables. 120 enough meat, 88 fruit, 47 fish, 87 dairy, 84 starchy crops and 85 enough pulses to meet the livewell diet.

Even when countries are grouped in economic regions, there is no single region in the world that produce sufficient with vegetables. The Eurasian Economic Union (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia) is the region scoring the highest for vegetables with a 86% self-sufficiency. For fish the spread is very great, reflecting the fact that fish is one of the most traded food commodities (perhaps also that fishery fleets, while having their home harbour in one country roam the seven sees?).

The researchers also compared the production with the Eat Lancet diet and here the mismatch was, predictably, even much higher, where only 30 countries produced enough pulses and vegetables respectively and only 15 countries were self-sufficient in 5 groups. No countries were self sufficient in 6 or 7 groups according to the Eat Lancet diet.

Note that the research doesn't consider the dependency of animal feed. This means that a country can appear to be self-sufficient in meat or dairy, while they in reality are very trade dependent. Japan, for example, imports most of its livestock feed, even hay. While there certainly is a lot of animal feed traded, there are many exaggerations of how much the livestock sector in Europe is dependent on feed imports. I studied it for Sweden, and the gross import was in the range of seven percent of the total feed, but as Sweden also exports feed (here I only count what is classified as feed at export, but Sweden also export a lot of wheat, which in the end might be used as feed for German pigs or Algerian chicken), the net import is around half.

Ever Ace takes 24 000 containers in one load. Ever Ace 2021 in Hamburg, photo: Wolfgang Fricke, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Local food supply, Sunnansjö Gård, Photo: Gunnar Rundgren

There are quite differing perspectives of how relevant national self-sufficiency is from a food security and resilience perspective (I wrote a longer piece about this some years ago, Food self-sufficiency – does it make sense?). Clearly, the alternatives are not a 100 percent globalized food market or a North Korea style autarchy in food – neither are realistic or desirable.

For a long period of time, many considered self-sufficiency irrelevant as the global market could supply food. The only thing that was important in that context was to afford importing food. The proponents of this globalized food security approach often quoted how trade can move food from surplus areas to shortages caused by a natural disaster, a draught or whatever local or regional disturbance. There is of course some merit in this argument and it has certainly been used both within and between countries.

There are many arguments that can be made against globalized trade in food, however. One main objection is that trade creates a permanent dependency which has little if anything, to do with the possibility to counter natural disasters. Europe has, for instance, let almost 100 million hectares of farm land revert to forest or lying idle, while European farmers buy soy from South America and European food industries buy palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia. Europe could produce those, or equivalent crops, within its own territory, but it is simply cheaper to import it. Thus, trade has diminished the European production and created a trade dependency. The higher proportion of food that is globally traded, the bigger dependencies will be created when regions that could produce their own food cease to do that. This is also noted by the researchers: ”...many countries fall short of their domestic food needs. This does not necessarily indicate an inability to produce sufficiently; cheaper imports and structural constraints (for example, cropping cycles, infrastructure limitations) may suppress production.” More and more people will be structurally dependent on global trade; trade becomes its own justification.

As global trade in food leads to structural dependency of trade, trade becomes its own justification.

Lately, increased self sufficiency of food is considered important from a security perspective. In that context, one also have to consider how dependent the production is in imports of diesel, fertilizers, seeds, pesticides and machinery. In many countries there is little domestic supply of these inputs. Food production would decrease rapidly in case of disrupted imports of those inputs which are essential in industrial agriculture (while organic farming might not be dependent on imported fertilizers and pesticides it is mostly as dependent on diesel, seeds and machinery as conventional agriculture).

There are regions – not to speak about megacities – that are structurally dependent on food in a similar way as they are structurally dependent on oil, water, iron or other resources. But this is also a weakness from all kinds of perspectives and I don't think that the argument that you can't feed a 30 million city from the immediate vicinity is a good argument against increasing regional self-sufficiency, it can as well be an argument against cities of 30 million people. This leads me to the ecological argument for a localized food system.

The ecological perspective of the global metabolism

Humans and human societies are ecologically active and dependent agents and the food-agro-ecosystems need to follow similar principles as other ecosystems in order to be sustainable in the long run.

An ecosystem consists of a certain assemblage of species which interact with each other in many ways. (Almost?) No ecosystem is ”closed”, meaning that it doesn't interact with other ecosystems. Many small ecosystems are part of a larger ecosystem. E.g tide poles are part of coastal ecosystems and an old tree is an ecosystem that is part of a forest ecosystem (Edward O. Wilson called them ”micro wilderness”). And most ecosystems interact with other ecosystems through global processes of wind, rainfall, migratory animals etc. The global circulation of carbon dioxide together with sun light, i.e. the photosynthesis, constitute a major building block for ecosystems and they are both ”external”.

However, in order to even qualify as an ecosystem (as far as I can understand, if any reader wish to correct me, please go ahead) it has to have most of its processes embedded within itself or through a regular exchange with an larger ecosystem such as in the case of a single-tree ecosystem or tide poles. When applying that perspective to the human society, I believe it is apparent that most human societies will have to be rooted in the local ecology for the bulk of their basic metabolic needs. I plan to write more on this train of thought soon.

The metabolism of human societies should be grounded in the local ecology

My next article will be about if global diet recommendations, such as the one used in the quoted research or in the research I discussed in my previous article, really makes sense, or if they reflect a lack of ecological grounding.