Reserves and trade jointly determine exposure to food supply shocks

By P. Marchand, J. Carr, J. Dell’Angelo, Marianela Fader, Jessica A. Gephart, Matti Kummu, N. Magliocca, M. Porkka, M. Puma, Z. Ratajczak and 5 more. 2016

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While a growing proportion of global food consumption is obtained through international trade, there is an ongoing debate on whether this increased reliance on trade benefits or hinders food security, and specifically, the ability of global food systems to absorb shocks due to local or regional losses of production. This paper introduces a model that simulates the short-term response to a food supply shock originating in a single country, which is partly absorbed through decreases in domestic reserves and consumption, and partly transmitted through the adjustment of trade flows. By applying the model to publicly-available data for the cereals commodity group over a 17 year period, we find that differential outcomes of supply shocks simulated through this time period are driven not only by the intensification of trade, but as importantly by changes in the distribution of reserves. Our analysis also identifies countries where trade dependency may accentuate the risk of food shortages from foreign production shocks; such risk could be reduced by increasing domestic reserves or importing food from a diversity of suppliers that possess their own reserves. This simulation-based model provides a framework to study the short-term, nonlinear and out-of-equilibrium response of trade networks to supply shocks, and could be applied to specific scenarios of environmental or economic perturbations.

Subfields: Ecology, Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4968e50325c0eaab8a506a9373b4b02738fd6ba

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. L. Rosa
2. Paolo D'Odorico
3. E. Röös

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Paolo D'Odorico
2. E. Röös

In Environmental Engineering

1. L. Rosa
2. Paolo D'Odorico
3. Matti Kummu
4. E. Röös
5. M. Porkka

Citations in the corpus

• Global food self-sufficiency in the 21st century under sustainable intensification of agriculture (2020, result): “The results of this study could be used to determine future hotspots of crop production deficits or surpluses, the reliance of countries on food imports (Macdonald 2013, Porkka et al 2013), and their vulnerability to food supply shocks (Puma et al 2015, Marchand et al 2016).”
• Interplay of trade and food system resilience: Gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency (2020, background): “When considering the connectivity indicators, independency from imports (RP2a) would enhance the resilience to any disruptions in the trade network, such as production shocks in exporting countries, price spikes and export bans (Marchand et al., 2016; Cottrell et al., 2019).”