Ireland has the highest food security index in the world💪

34 comments
  1. I don’t believe the UK figure as they’re a net food importer. I reckon there’s a fair bit of repackaging imports for exports rather than a surplus of domestic produce. Edit to add, I think they also include alcoholic spirits as food export.

  2. Ireland produces enough food to feed like 45M people.

    Edit: Someone clarified the statistic for me – Ireland produced food is “consumed” by 35M people every year – it does not fully feed 45M.

  3. I’m confused coz the UK imports most of its food and the mass majority of the meat it produces is fed on foreign grain so how is the UK 3rd?

  4. There’s many ways to measure “food security”. I believe this list is based on affordability and availability of food (i.e. we have lots of options in shops and it’s cheap relative to wages) not self-sufficiency.

    Other measures by basic grain production show us as having very low food security.

  5. It depends what you are measuring. If you talk about current imports and maintaining the same diverse range of foods we currently have on the shelves then on paper we are very insecure. It is for that reason that that lad Peter Zeihan listed us as among the most insecure nations in the world in his latest book. He superficially looked purely on imports and in particular wheat and came to the kneejerk reaction that the Irish are among the nation’s that will all starve in his new 2040 world order.

    But if you measure are we likely to actually starve then we are very secure. We produce enough calories to feed our population. Meat potatoes veg. We may not have pasta, rice and avacado toast but we won’t starve. Outside the cities most people have access to ground to grow their own little plot of needed. Hell even in the cities most people have a garden thanks to the build out not up policy. And we have a climate where the it is harder to stop things growing rather then the other way around.

    Of course the problem is the same one we have had for 1000 years. The neighbours. If we have a surplus of food and the Brits, French and Germans have hungry people in cities then they are unlikely to stand by and not send in an army or two to come to a “trade agreement”. You might laugh at the idea but it’s only a couple of years since Pretti Patel was arguing for starving the Irish as a tactic in negotiations with the EU.

  6. Don’t get too comfortable. This score is entirely dependant on import.

    We import 80% of our food, animal feed and beverages.

  7. Bravo, Ireland.

    as a US-ian, I honestly think the US is ranked too high. There are dramatic disparities in access to food/actual nutritional value in both urban and rural areas across the country.

  8. That does not make any sense.

    I come from Uruguay. 3.5M inhabitants.

    [We have about 12 million cattle, or 3.8 heads per inhabitant](https://en.mercopress.com/2007/07/30/uruguay-has-3-8-cattle-per-capita-highest-in-the-world). That’s 600 kgs of meat per person. [1]

    [We are the 10th largest exporters of rice in the world, at 820k tons](https://www.statista.com/statistics/255947/top-rice-exporting-countries-worldwide-2011/). That’s 234 kgs of rice per person per year that we export, without counting domestic consumption.

    Soybeans? [We produced two million metric tons in 2020](https://www.statista.com/statistics/862459/soybean-production-volume-uruguay/). That’s **571** kgs of soybeans per inhabitant.

    Sheep? [We have 2.9 sheep per person in Uruguay, to Ireland’s 1.1](https://getrawmilk.com/content/list-of-countries-with-more-sheep-than-people-numbers-and-ratios-2020)

    We could feed all of our population by *any* of these exports alone.

    Yet we are in position 40+, while the freakin UK, a net food importer, is in 3?

    [1] Ireland, with a much worse climate and land for rearing cattle, has about double the density. That is due to vulnerable inputs (feed/fertilizer/diesel for land labors/manure spreading). Our cattle is typically grassfed with very little external inputs on unimproved/unfertilized lands.

  9. ireland consumes more than it produces, especially grains, and our production is heavily based on importing fuel and fertiliser. Surely a country without its own oil supply can’t really be food secure in the modern age?

  10. I can’t help but notice that three of the top five are Europe’s militarily neutral countries. There’s some sort of correlation there, I’m sure.

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