How 'Food Secure' Is The Netherlands?

“Our essential task is to protect food security in harmony with nature,” said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in her State of the Union address last September. We hear the word 'food security' more and more often. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shortages threatened, resulting in empty supermarket shelves. But how food (in)secure are we here in the Netherlands? WUR board chairman Sjoukje Heimovaara wrote a contribution about this at the request of Financieel Dagblad on December 18, 2023.

10 years ago, research was done into what could happen if the import and export of food was suddenly closed. What turned out was that the Netherlands can continue to offer its own population healthy food, but it will have to adapt. Both in what we eat and in what we produce. Seen from what our own population needs, for example, we now produce little grain, fruit and oil crops and a lot of potatoes and animal products. We can adjust that, but that takes time. I limit myself to essential foods and leave out coffee, tea, avocados and the like.

Are we completely 'food secure' as the Netherlands? No, because we are dependent on imports for fertilizers such as phosphate and potassium. We mainly get this from Morocco and (Belarus) Russia. And the recent increases in the price of our food, largely due to higher energy costs, show how dependent we are on affordable energy.

European scale
But for a realistic and attractive view of food security, we should not retreat behind the dikes. It is better to look at the Netherlands as part of a robust European Union. Food security is already on the agenda there. From a European perspective, we do not need to intervene as drastically in our diet in order to continue to eat healthily as Dutch people. We are missing some oils, fats and tropical products, but there is already enough grain and fruit. On a European scale, we can also make better use of production in places where the soil and/or climate are best suited for this. This way we can make optimal use of our polders and the fertile chernozem soil in Central and Eastern Europe for arable farming. And poorer soils for more extensive (livestock) farming.

Can we then rest assured that our food security is guaranteed? Unfortunately not. The major food crises of the last decades are actually almost entirely due to conflicts. Hunger, or the threat thereof, is often used as a means of pressure. We see this now in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. Political stability is therefore the best instrument against food insecurity worldwide.

Above all, there are developments such as climate change and biodiversity loss. These may seem less acute, but they pose the real threat to food availability. Von der Leyen rightly mentions the need for 'harmony with nature' for food security.

Last year, grain and olive harvests in Spain and Portugal partly failed due to extreme drought, and harvests in Northern Italy failed due to floods. The British fear they will have to import potatoes from Egypt for their Christmas dinner this year. Too much or too little rain is always common, but the frequency and intensity are not. And the biggest losers around the world, as always, are the vulnerable groups.

The changing climate also causes the loss of species: biodiversity loss. We quickly think of the polar bear, but the loss of the broad diversity within food crops is a bigger problem for our food security. Now half of the calories we consume worldwide come from just 3 crops (wheat, rice and corn). Last summer, India, the world's largest exporter of rice, restricted some exports due to disappointing harvests due to extreme weather. We will see this more often in the future.

Climate-robust crops
So we need crops that are resistant to drought, heat, salinization, but also to new pests and diseases. For this we need all possible diversity. Because rice is so climate sensitive, India, for example, is now fully committed to the more climate-robust crop millet as an alternative.

Back to the Netherlands. We often hear 'no feed without a farmer', a truism. But for long-term food security, agriculture must change. We must quickly get to work on future-proof food production that does not burden the climate and biodiversity. New techniques, new crops, and especially new thinking about sustainable agriculture and food policy are needed.

The larger the region in which we achieve this new thinking and action, the more robust our food supply will become. With European cooperation we get more affordable, healthier and more varied food. And if we think globally, we can design a truly fair system, with greater stability as a result.

'Food is the gold of the 21st century', they sometimes say. But if we aim for sustainable, healthy and affordable food, we do not have to ask for a gold price, only a fair price.