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I feel food production shouldn't really be an issue, of course depending on the food type. But the tiny country of The Netherlands is a huge food exporter [0].

• mschuster91 8y ago
  The Dutch mainly produce plant stuff - which is indeed easy to scale up. The problem is that veggies are not the part that causes problems... it's meat, both land animals (cattle, pigs, poultry) and water animals. The rising meat demand especially in the exploding middle class in formerly poor countries such as China and India has to be produced somewhere, and animals have the problem that they create massive amounts of feces which: - for land animals are carted across half of Europe as both Germany and the Netherlands produce more feces than can be brought out to fields - for fish, contaminate the farms and the freshwater in which the farms are set. In addition the fish food that does not get eaten by the fish causes algae and other pest blooms in the waters, plus the attraction that fish farms pose to predators.
• usrusr 8y ago
  They are also a huge importer of input materials for their farming machine. Fertilizer, livestock fodder (that will result in even more fertilizer), fossil energy to fuel greenhouses. Thinking of modern Dutch agriculture as food production is misleading, it's more meaningful to think of it as a refining process. Cheap nutrients go in, expensive nutrients go out.