Articlegold2015

Assessing the evolving fragility of the global food system

Michael J. Puma · Satyajit Bose · So Young Chon · Benjamin I. Cook

452 citations0/0 files storedEnvironmental Research Letters

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Economics of Agriculture and Food Markets Agricultural and Food Production Studies Supply Chain Resilience and Risk Management

Abstract

The world food crisis in 2008 highlighted the susceptibility of the global food system to price shocks. Here we use annual staple food production and trade data from 1992–2009 to analyse the changing properties of the global food system. Over the 18 year study period, we show that the global food system is relatively homogeneous (85% of countries have low or marginal food self-sufficiency) and increases in complexity, with the number of global wheat and rice trade connections doubling and trade flows increasing by 42 and 90%, respectively. The increased connectivity and flows within these global trade networks suggest that the global food system is vulnerable to systemic disruptions, especially considering the tendency for exporting countries to switch to non-exporting states during times of food scarcity in the global markets. To test this hypothesis, we superimpose continental-scale disruptions on the wheat and rice trade networks. We find greater absolute reductions in global wheat and rice exports along with larger losses in network connectivity as the networks evolve due to disruptions in European wheat and Asian rice production. Importantly, our findings indicate that least developed countries suffer greater import losses in more connected networks through their increased dependence on imports for staple foods (due to these large-scale disturbances): mean (median) wheat losses as percentages of staple food supply are 8.9% (3.8%) for 1992–1996, increasing to 11% (5.7%) for 2005–2009. Over the same intervals, rice losses increase from 8.2% (2.2%) to 14% (5.2%). Our work indicates that policy efforts should focus on balancing the efficiency of international trade (and its associated specialization) with increased resilience of domestic production and global demand diversity.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 452 citations exist upstream.

References

1992On the Behaviour of Commodity Prices 2003Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. By Mike Davis. London: Verso, 2001. x + 464 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $27.00, paper $20.00 2010Rethinking the global food crisis: The role of trade shocks 2011The World Trade Network

Cited by

2020Impacts of COVID-19 on Trade and Economic Aspects of Food Security: Evidence from 45 Developing Countries 2015The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk 2022Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk 2020Interplay of trade and food system resilience: Gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency 2023Poverty, Livelihoods and Sustainable Development 2021Grain export restrictions during COVID-19 risk food insecurity in many low- and middle-income countries 2018Trade and the equitability of global food nutrient distribution 2020A regional nuclear conflict would compromise global food security

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.