Exploring potential food self-sufficiency across alternative dietary futures

Summary

Food self-sufficiency (FSS) and healthy diets are high on policy agendas to ensure food security under increasing global pressures. A global shift towards self-sufficient production of healthy diets would represent a radical departure from today's globalised food system. Representing such scenarios in a biophysically consistent way requires accounting for multiple resource constraints and feedback loops—including feed, fertiliser, and trade flows—while allowing flexible reallocation of crop areas, livestock numbers, and biomass streams. We use the global biophysical optimisation model CiFoS (Circular Food Systems) to evaluate the potential for self-sufficient production of multiple food groups and nutrients in 70 regions by 2050 under a business-as-usual diet (BAU-MinTrade) and a Planetary