There are some who argue that a country should be entirely self-sufficient at producing foods for its people and import as little foodstuffs as possible. How much do you agree or disagree?

There are some who argue that a country should be entirely self-sufficient at producing foods for its people and import as little foodstuffs as possible. How much do you agree or disagree?

The idea that countries should pursue full food self-sufficiency — growing all of their domestic nutritional needs at home and reducing imports to a minimum—is a notion that poses serious challenges to national security, economic optimization, environmental impacts—and even geographical reality. I mostly reject this view, arguing that a careful combination of domestic food supply and international trade leads to better outcomes on most of the dimensions food security policy ought to care about than treating self-sufficiency as an end in itself.

The most substantive argument for food self-sufficiency ultimately rests on national security and strategic resilience. Food import-reliant nations are at real risk — the channels of supply can be disrupted by geopolitics, trade row, natural disasters or global economic shocks with implications for food security that can become manifest exceedingly quickly and dramatically. And recent global crisis events have shown with some clarity just how quickly supposedly secure supply chains can lose credibility under stress, providing real estimates for the need to be able to maintain meaningful production capacity within national borders as a core strategic interest that should act as a governing imperative for any responsible state. States with food-import dependencies under hostile conditions — say, due to trade sanctions, naval blockades or supply chain crises — can conceive of this vulnerability in starkly empirical terms that enriches the imagination of food-secure nation-states naïve to both a more systemic understanding of power formation and factual terms while pondering hypotheticals.

In addition, there are significant cultural and heritage reasons for placing more focus on the onshore production of food. Small-scale agricultural communities, the traditional varieties that they cultivate and centuries of experience that they embody are irreplaceable cultural resources easily driven to destruction when market forces are allowed to operate freely. Domestic agriculture is key to the social cohesion of rural communities and the ecological health of their cultivated landscapes; we may dismiss as abstract the loss of agricultural self-sufficiency in countries that have historically defined their identities through agricultural practice, but it comes at a cost, as yet impossible to quantify, but nevertheless palpably real.

But the case for striving toward complete food self-sufficiency as a strategic policy end point ultimately collapses on practical and economic arguments that I find more powerful than those in favour of pressing the security and cultural importance buttons. Ultimately, complete self-sufficiency is physically impossible for a vast majority of the world’s countries. Regardless of ambition to develop their policies, small island states, highly urbanised economies, and countries facing aridity, land or freshwater resources would not be able to produce the full nutritional spectrum that its populations require. Requiring those countries to reduce food imports would inflict immediate nutritional damage on their citizens — an outcome that directly subverts the food security aim that the policy is supposed to deliver.

In the case of nations that do have meaningful agricultural capacity, comparative advantage — easily one of the most verifiable concepts in international economics—shows us through economic logic that specialised production and trade is better for overall welfare than autarky in almost any setting. The fertile soils, the necessary rain and the right climate for some crops make one country able to produce them enormously more efficiently than another country trying to do it in conditions that are just unfit. Both countries fare better in terms of food security and economic welfare when they trade according to their comparative advantages than they would independently if self-sufficient. Although not without its problems, the global system of food has driven down prices for food dramatically and allowed millions more to access adequate nutrition over the last decades — a repeat impossible in an environment of independent, sufficiency-seeking states.

In addition to basic human rights issues, the forced domestication has important environmental ramifications. Cultivating food crops in climates or soil conditions for which they are poorly adapted demands dramatically more inputs of water, fertiliser and energy (per unit output) than producing the same crops in their natural optimal environments. In fact, the ecological costs — aquifer depletion, soil degradation, high GHG emissions on a per unit basis — can greatly outweigh even transport emissions from importing food from more suitable producers.

At the core of our defence (and working in opposition to associated domestic and international pressures) is strategic food security — retaining sufficient domestic production capacity for true emergencies, diversifying imported relationships from single-source dependency catastrophes, adequate investment in agricultural research (to achieve several decades to millennia longevity), international trade from which comparative advantage benefits can be realised. By capturing the real security upsides of domestic production, but steering clear of the economic and environmental costs always associated with complete self-sufficiency, this balanced approachlooks both forward and backward.

In summary, although strategic investment in domestic food production is justified on security, cultural and resilience grounds, the goal of total self-sufficiency from home-produced food with minimal imports is not a realistic target for many countries or economically- nor environmentally-desirable. Rather, (substantial) food production and trade with foreigners should be properly governed: tje absence of vicious extremes in either direction better serves the multifaceted long-term needs of an authentic food geopolitics.