Assessing the evolving fragility of the global food system

By M. Puma, S. Bose, S. Y. Chon, B. Cook. 2015

420 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/871423f26c8c214570f3889fdb16962a322397ef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. K. Erb
2. H. Haberl
3. Paolo D'Odorico
4. J. Dell’Angelo
5. J. Carr
6. Samir Suweis
7. E. Röös
8. Maria Cristina Rulli

In Environmental Engineering

1. K. Erb
2. H. Haberl
3. Felix Creutzig
4. Paolo D'Odorico
5. J. Dell’Angelo
6. J. Carr
7. Samir Suweis
8. G. Baiocchi

In Plant Science

1. Paolo D'Odorico
2. K. Erb
3. H. Haberl

Citations in the corpus

• The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk (2015, neutral): “Consider global food production (Puma et al. 2015).”
• The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency (2019, neutral): “Third, the growth in food trade and manufacturing has led to long and complex supply chains that create challenges of transparency, traceability and food safety (Ercsey-Ravasz et al., 2012; Puma et al., 2015).”
• Impacts of COVID-19 on Trade and Economic Aspects of Food Security: Evidence from 45 Developing Countries (2020, background): “[21], who found that LDCs suffer greater import losses due to disruption of food supply chains through their increased dependence on imports of staple foods.”
• Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands (2016, background): “Most of the future urban population and urban area expansion are forecast to take place in Asia and Africa (4), often in places with high poverty rates and potentially prone to systemic disruptions in the food system (11, 12).”
• Reserves and trade jointly determine exposure to food supply shocks (2016, methodology): “We share this approach with other ‘cascading shock’ models applied to specific food commodities (Puma et al 2015, Gephart et al 2016), virtual water (Tamea et al 2016), industrial sectors linked by input–output relationships (Contreras and Fagiolo 2014) and aggregate economic production (Lee et al…”
• Food First: COVID-19 Outbreak and Cities Lockdown a Booster for a Wider Vision on Urban Agriculture (2020, background): “Notwithstanding these aspects, the pandemic will likely prompt governments and city authorities to consider redundancies and diversity of the global food system, regional self-sufficiency, and food security in cities more seriously [11].”
• Interplay of trade and food system resilience: Gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency (2020, background): “As a consequence, diversity in local food production landscapes has substantially decreased and diverse and nutritious landscapes have been progressively replaced by monocultures with low resilience to respond to unanticipated shocks (D'Odorico et al., 2010; Thow et al., 2011; Puma et al., 2015; Suw”
• Food self-sufficiency: Making sense of it, and when it makes sense (2017, neutral): “8 Puma et al., 2015, p. 9–10.”
• Severity of drought and heatwave crop losses tripled over the last five decades in Europe (2021, background): “The size and trend of extreme event impacts on both cereal and non-cereal production is of concern as it can cause ripple effects in the global food trade system and affect food prices and availability worldwide (e.g. Puma et al (2015), Jägermeyr et al (2020)).”