HN

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  jemmyw
  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.
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  esperent
  > Fish and seafood self-sufficiency is particularly low across most regionsThis 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_IrelandI 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.
• ericpauley
  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.
• swiftcoder
  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.
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  shrubby
  Nationalist food security, at least here in Finland, seems really paradoxical as the main focus seems to be animal production, with imported feed.
• pelcg
  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.
• alpineman
  That's what massive subsidisation of the meat and dairy industry gets you over the long run
• jcarrano
  How much of the fish self-sufficiency of China is due to them plundering the seas across the globe?
• jongjong
  As an engineer I'm too busy processing spreadsheets with AI to concern myself with the menial task of food production.
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  contingencies
  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.
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  hagbard_c
  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.