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Comment by zelos | Hacker News Reader

Is it feasible for many countries - particularly small, densely populated ones - to be self-sufficient in food?

In the UK, at least, I'm not sure there's physically enough space to farm enough food to supply the population. About 50% of food is imported and basically all the agricultural land is already used.

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The Netherlands exports 10 times as much food as the UK with 1/10 of the arable land.

In the event of a crisis I am sure the UK would be able to ramp up their production and become more efficient.

The amount of food that a country exports is orthogonal to its capacity for self-sufficiency. Your example of the Netherlands is a perfect illustration of this. In monetary terms it's a net exporter, but in caloric terms it's a net importer. The latter is a better metric for potential self-sufficiency, and by that measure, the Netherlands is actually the eighth least self-sufficient country in the world[1].

Yes, the UK could undoubtedly reconfigure its agricultural sector to become more self-sufficient. But even on a wartime footing, doing so would take several years. Meanwhile, the slack in food reserves is several weeks. It's that differential between weeks and years where there's the potential for malnutrition and starvation.

1: http://www.fao.org/3/i2493e/i2493e03.pdf

I wonder how much of that caloric deficit is due to economic reasons (low calorie vegetables are a lot more profitable) and how much of that is due to biological reasons (you need a lot of sunshine and land to grow calorie rich crops).

Interesting! As a Dutch person I've never heard of this before. I'm not quite sure what numbers I'm looking at though, is it just because the Netherlands mostly exports cucumbers and watery tomatoes?

Yep, you export a lot of nice flowers and vegetables, and import a lot of meat.

This makes fine economic sense in the context of well-functioning system of global trade. But if that system were to shut down and you had to produce all that meat locally... it wouldn't work so well. And the flowers wouldn't make a good replacement.

Is there more info on how your fao source performed the calculations? The Netherlands is actually a very significant meat exporter (78% of poultry and beef, 95% of calves, and 43% of pork is exported [0]). As a matter of fact, meat is the most valuable export product after flowers.

A lot of the exported animals are first imported, are then held and slaughtered in the Netherlands, and then the meat is exported again for financial gain. So in terms of meat, I'd think they are a caloric exporter but still highly dependent on other countries.

Hence my question: how were the fao numbers calculated?

[0] (Dutch) https://www.trouw.nl/economie/hoe-nederland-uitgroeide-tot-e...

I would imagine that caloric figures would tend to gravitate towards staples, such as wheat, rice and corn, which are high in both calories and in volume consumed.

The Netherlands food industry absolutely depends on imported oil though, so that might not be a good example of self-sufficiency.

well, they're exporting tulips and other flowers, they could grow instead sunflower or colza/canola

> I'm not sure there's physically enough space to farm enough food to supply the population

I'm sure there's an elephant in the room here.

Most of it is just a giant outdoor meat factory, though. Same for Ireland. Meat, fortunately, is unnecessary and very inefficient.

Every time this comes up I have to remind people that not all land that farms meat can be made arable.

There is a lot of arable land in England itself that can be used, (and, currently used for meat production); however this is not true for many parts of wales and most of Scotland. (which combined make up a about 100,000 sqkm vs Englands 130,000 sqkm)

Cows and sheep happily graze on moors and other rocky areas that could not be suddenly used to grow any kind of plants for food.

Harry Metcalfe has a good video[0] about it - he keeps cows on the fields that are just too steep and too rocky to grow anything else - but it doesn't bother animals. Same applies to sheep. I imagine animals like chickens will have different considerations, because farm buildings do take land that can be used for something else.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feSBsLSRkWs

True, though in some cases (The Burren in Ireland for instance) it was sheep that stripped the land of vegetation, then topsoil, and left it rocky, in the first place. Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty, is a good read on this.

That's over grazing. That's lazy, over zealous and/or careless herders who fucked up. You rotate your herds on different land so they don't strip the vegetation. Allowing it to regrow quickly. You're managing the land just as much as your flock. This has been known for thousands of years by people who actually farm and not armchair farm.

While I generally agree with you, there is the tragedy of the commons effect. :-)

Yea, but that's not a "farming" or "meat" problem. That's a human problem. A well known one for a long time at that. If everyone owns it, no one takes care of it. Someone has to be responsible and thus, manage it. There are people who will always abuse a system because they simply don't care. The same as people litter. Pretending to be surprised and blaming anything else is fruitless. "Well, it's the bag's fault for existing, that's why there's trash." or "It's the consumption of meat's fault that the land was stripped bare". No, an asshole did it. An asshole is responsible. Hold particular humans responsible for their personal actions. Don't blame someone or something else.

That doesn't mean you could grow good on it though if there was no sheep

In Norway, sheep herds are typically sent off into the mountains during summer and left to fend largely for themselves, so not even fenced in land. I'd expect that is the same many other places too.

UK food production minus exports is 55% of the food consumed in the UK. [1]

Turn off the exports, and you're going to get close to self-sufficient. If the EU disappeared tomorrow, I doubt the UK would starve.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/food-statistics-poc...

If people ate money, that would be true. But the important thing for self-sufficiency is not the monetary balance of trade, but the caloric value of trade. It is typical for smaller countries to export high-value refined agricultural products (wine, cheese, etc.) while importing lower-value bulk commodities (grains, oilcrops, etc.) This can cause a vast disparity between the economic and caloric balance of trade. In the case of the UK, it imports about twice as many calories as it exports, so the disappearance of trade would have a major impact. If food waste were eliminated, starvation could probably be avoided. But a few years of malnutrition, while the domestic agricultural sector reconfigured itself for self-sufficiency, would probably be unavoidable.

I was trying to figure that out too.

Part of the problem is that the figures are apparently percentage of value, which might give misleading figures if a country produces a lot of its high-value requirements: producing all your own asparagus isn't much use in a famine if you still rely on 90% imported wheat.

Unfortunately I don't have a good answer, but I suspect it doesn't need to be a 0 or 1 situation -- having a decent percentage of the needs covered is better than having very little.

Unfortunately a trend I'm seeing in my country is that some people are calling for crippling the in-country farming industry because it is "inefficient" due to subsidization and would be cheaper to import food from elsewhere. The trend should be upwards, reducing dependence on importing and focus on local produce. Gut feeling is also that it would be more ecologically efficient although I don't have any concrete numbers on it.

The strive for efficiency brought to us by lean management made us terribly vulnerable to supply chain breaches.

I think it is overdue to recognize a degree of slack as a necessity rather than a nuisance.

One of the problems is that people normally do not want to pay for that slack. Getting them on board with spending more probably needs some convincing.

It can be done, see fairtrade coffee/cocoa. (I know that it has some problems, too, but it shows in principle that people can be persuaded to pay more for stuff, if the reason is good enough.)

Supposing that it was an isolated 'the skies go dark' scenario, then being self-sufficient in food is quite a complex question to try to answer, as most food chains require the skies to not be dark, at least not all the time.

An interesting (and today, happily, academic) question is what happens to the UK in the event of, say, AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- aka the gulf stream that sends warm air up from the equator) shutting down. Noting that London's only 4 degrees latitude away from, say, Moscow.

And then it becomes a much more fascinating question.

Oddly, as an exception, the Netherlands would probably go a long way even if the skies went dark, due to the large surface area of artificially lighted and heated greenhouses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westland_(region),_Netherlands

Hmm, this could use translating

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westland_(Nederlandse_streek)

> An interesting (and today, happily, academic) question is what happens to the UK in the event of, say, AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- aka the gulf stream that sends warm air up from the equator) shutting down. Noting that London's only 4 degrees latitude away from, say, Moscow.

Probably not that much because the notion that the gulf stream shutting down would send Northern Europe into an ice age is mostly a fiction:

http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/

Simply being next to an ocean with prevailing winds off that ocean is what gives the UK an oceanic climate, if the gulf stream vanishes there might be some slight cooling but it isn't going to make Glasgow have the same climate as Moscow because Glasgow won't be far inside a continental landmass.

Interesting article, thanks.

Author doesn't mention rainfall impact at all - but my understanding is if AMOC shuts down completely (highly unlikely) UK's arable land drops significantly, because of the reduction in predicted rainfall.

Author also sounds a bit hand-wavey with the claim that '50% of heat comes from east-ward wind patterns, the other 50% comes from stationary waves of atmospheric flow'.

I guess it's feasible that the gulfstream provides zero warmth to the air above it as it flows north and around the UK, but this is a challenging claim.

It's odd the author didn't put in any estimates on temperature change from AMOC shutdown -- elsewhere I'm seeing an expected average delta in the south of perhaps 1 or 2 C, and in the north of Scotland, up to 4C.

I found author's actual paper [1] but that doesn't mention rainfall either, and I can't find any estimated ranges on temperature impacts for the UK.

[1] http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/pubs/Seager_etal...

That all depends how you want to look at it. It's a fun thought experiment but extremely problematic since we're talking about the interaction of global supply chains and how other countries fair/react, which then requires countries to react, and then other countries react to that and so forth.

Could small countries grow the current plethora of fresh fruits/veg that would be technically out of season? Not at all.

Calorically adequate, yet boring, repetitive foods along with preserved? Probably.

Very, very, very few countries are at agricultural limits. Prepped and ready to go? Maybe you can argue that. A month or two of razing? They got it.

If it was a decade long issue, and be foreseeable as a decade long, I'd imagine you'd see more farming gluts of grains and easy to preserve fruits and veg. A lot of fun, exotic foods would go bye-bye. Then lots of canning. Short term, man... that's a hard call. I don't know if most countries are prepped for such shocks to the system. Some will fair better than others, but just like how Covid proved some things did better than others, don't really know until it happens. Problem would be, with huge spikes of global starvation, war is a real threat. That's going to throw some extra problems into the mix.

Meat will go up in price, but won't disappear. People like to think that animal husbandry is meaningless. Literally their poop will be black gold. Thousands upon thousands of years we relied on animal husbandry for good reason. People need to get off their vegan high horse. Meat production levels will probably maintain, maybe lower a little, but not by much. To maintain those crop production needs, because there would be a panic and lower crop rotation rates, you'll need to fertilize like hell. Depending on worldwide logistics and that country's natural resources, artificial fertilizers may not be as readily available as today. At that, the price would skyrocket due to the crazy demand and strategic stockpiling (toilet paper crazy times 100). Locally sourced fertilizers, cow/chicken/sheep/goat shit, will be more valuable and available. It's still an active industry in the USA, but small. I know there are some startups in Africa using rabbits for both meat and fertilizer production. So I assume there are plenty of places worldwide doing it. So that ramp up would not be too far off. Maybe though, the price of meat won't increase by much. If a majority of value from the animal will come from their poop, instead of meat, the meat prices might be slightly stable (still go up in a famine of course). Breed reliance would probably change. Less broilers (chickens) since you need a slightly active chicken if you're going to have them produce compost. That'll increase harvest time though as modern commercial broilers are like 8 week birds while a normal breed is like 20 weeks (depends on breed of course). Eggs would probably become a bigger staple since chickens are good at making lots of compost rather passively.

I'd bet this, pork will be the first to go up in price and by a lot. Unlike most other common livestock, a good amount of feed for pigs comes from taking food waste. They're straight up trashcans and can eat anything without worry. Chickens and ducks too depending on the farm. But you see it more in pig farmers. Famine like conditions, there would presumably be less food waste in general. Then more would be spent on pig feed, thus pork prices go up.

That and Victory Gardens will be a thing again. That'll be nice. Any home owners association or city ordinance that reframes from farming on a lawn/city limits would be told to stfu. That'll be nice too. In truth, you'll see a decent CO2 drop just because the logistics of moving food would diminish drastically. Homesteading will be a big thing again.

Generally, there are ways for people to adapt to this.

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