Over 250 experts in nutrition, farming, planning and other disciplines from the public, private, academic and civil society sectors gathered online on Sunday for updates on an ambitious plan to create Israel’s first food security program.
Coordinated by the Agriculture and Food Security Ministry, in partnership with the health, economy and environmental protection ministries, the plan will develop into a draft policy document for ensuring food security through to 2050. It is to be submitted to the government by the end of April.
However, with a quarter of the Agriculture Ministry’s staff to be slashed this year and next, along with NIS 360 million ($98.6 million) in funds for research and investment, a large question mark hangs over implementation.
On Monday, ministry officials told a special meeting of the Knesset Economy Committee that the cuts — part of wider government moves to fund the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah — would “paralyze” both the ministry and Israeli agriculture.
Drying up agricultural R&D budgets constituted a “long-term strategic risk,” they went on, and would “irreversibly harm” Israel’s ability to remain a world leader in agricultural innovation and to continue producing sufficient food.
Work to develop a food security policy began almost two years ago, at the initiative of the National Security Council’s climate adviser, Victor Weiss. But it was turbocharged by the war against Hamas in Gaza, which exposed the limits of the state’s growing reliance on food imports over recent years.
In May, Turkey, Israel’s fourth-largest trading partner, halted all exports to Israel, including food staples such as tomatoes. Azerbaijan has been picking up some of the slack, but thanks to timely Agriculture Ministry grants, Israeli farmers stepped up to the plate. In November, they grew around 15,000 tons out of 16,000 tons consumed in Israel.
“Israel has never really developed a food security program,” Yuval Lipkin, appointed three months ago to head the Agriculture Ministry’s Food Security Administration, told The Times of Israel.
The growing dependence on imports without a parallel process to equip Israeli farmers to compete had led to a decline in local production, Lipkin said. He cited the example of garlic imported from China, which has wiped out local garlic production. Cheap at the beginning, imported garlic has since risen in price. Meanwhile, with wars and climate change, countries focused on their own needs first, Lipkin went on. Among other global byproducts, climate change has affected imports and prices, of olive oil, for example.
Israel’s population is expected to double by 2050, yet many crops are no longer grown locally, and agricultural productivity has not increased for years, Lipkin said.
“We need to give our farmers certainty, return their trust, lower the price of water [which according to the Agriculture Ministry is among the costliest in the world for farming], maintain and even expand land for agriculture. We want the Finance Ministry not to decide from one day to the next to cut funds for research. The farmers were the first to return to the Gaza border after October 7. We have to strengthen them,” he said.
Lipkin said it was important to bring all interested parties together to collaboratively examine what food Israelis should be eating, what Israel should grow, what should be imported, and how local farming could be made more efficient and effective through innovation and technology.
Think local
The food security administration’s self-stated goals include ensuring “the ability to produce local food and the regular supply of healthy and affordable food in the medium and long term, in quantity, quality, variety and physical and economic accessibility, to enable a healthy lifestyle for the entire population in Israel, while promoting local agriculture and food industry and sustainable and climate-adapted food systems.”
The starting point has been an update by the Health Ministry to Israel’s recommended national food basket.
Noting worrying trends of overweight and diabetes among Israelis, and poor consumption of fruit and vegetables among disadvantaged populations, Moran Blaychfeld Magnazi, director of the Health Ministry’s Nutrition Division, said her team favored the Mediterranean diet. Israelis should obtain less of their protein from red meat, especially beef, and more from legumes, fish and algae, both for health and environmental reasons, she said.
The food basket will be calculated into the quantities of different food that will be needed. Once the balance between local cultivation and imports has been established, targets will set for local production.
Six working groups with officials from different ministries are meeting at least weekly, inviting representatives from state and professional organizations, research institutes and NGOs. The groups are focusing on local agriculture, international trade and partnerships, the food industry, R&D and innovation, the nation’s food basket and consumption habits, and food waste.
Getting the local farm to Israeli tables
Since September, the groups have been studying the current situation, the risks and challenges. That stage culminated in Sunday’s webinar, during which participants broke into groups for discussion.
The local agriculture group zoomed in on challenges such as water costs, manpower shortages, climate change, pests, environmental health, the profitability of various crops, the ability to compete, and barriers in the wholesale and retail segments of the value chain.
Before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, rapacious onslaught on southern Israel, there were around 30,000 Thai farm laborers in Israel, according to the Agriculture Ministry, and 10,000 to 15,000 Palestinians, depending on the season. Thousands of Thais returned home after Hamas gunmen overran Israel’s Gaza border area, murdering some 1,200 mainly civilians, among them 46 Thai nationals, and kidnapping over 250 to the Gaza Strip, also including Thais. A further five Thais were killed in Hezbollah attacks on Israel’s northern border.
According to Lipkin, there are now 40,000 Thais in Israel, but a ban on the entry of Palestinians remains.
Group co-chairman Uri Zuk-Bar of the Agriculture Ministry called for more data on the possibilities of moving production closer to consumption, also known as farm to table.
Dana Yoskevitz of an organic food NGO The Bounty of the Field (Tov HaSadeh) bemoaned the lack of subsidies for organic farming and said better support could draw many more young people into agriculture. Yael Meltzer, who heads the Israeli Regenerative Agriculture Ecosystem Association, said problems were sometimes related to regulation rather than money. “Take a small piece of unused moshav land, allow young people to farm on it and even live on it, and to sell local produce to locals,” she suggested.
In the group probing consumption habits, the challenges ranged from a lack of uniform messaging about the importance of healthy nutrition in kindergartens, schools and other institutions serving mothers and children, to the high costs of healthy food, the lack of restrictions on the aggressive marketing of unhealthy food to children, and the way food is organized to grab shoppers’ attention in the stores.
Participants suggested using taxes and subsidies to promote healthy eating. A medical doctor cited German research showing that people were most likely to change their eating habits if recommended to do so by their physicians. The Education Ministry’s new nutrition czar, Karin Leibovich, worried that lowering meat content in afterschool education frameworks would anger parents and be seen as stealth cost-cutting. Dorit Adler, President of the Israeli Forum for Sustainable Nutrition, noted that plenty of plant-based food was not healthy.
Those interested in international trade focused on subjects such as the vulnerability of food supply chains, the ongoing decline in the production capacity of exporting countries (both to Israel and in general) because of the impacts of climate change such as drought and flooding, the wisdom of importing seasonal products to encourage competition with the local market, and the readiness of Israel’s infrastructure to import food products as the population grows.
The next stage will see the working groups set goals, targets and metrics. Starting in January, the third stage will look at alternative approaches, and from March, the focus will be on formulating an operational implementation plan.
A second webinar will be held on March 3, with a conference set for April 27 to present the plans to the public in the presence of ministers and ministry directors general.
