Food Trade Dependency under Climatic & Socio-Political Shocks: Managing Risk (F-TRADEMARK)

ongoing

Policies in developing countries that seek to fight hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture (a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal), face considerable obstacles when confronted with disruptions of their staple food production and trade. Disruptions such as climate change along with inter-state conflicts, e.g., the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, have weakened developing countries’ staple food yields, supply, and trade flows. For trade in particular, challenges include physical trade disruptions of agricultural outputs, as well as inputs, particularly in more vulnerable regions. These disruptions are often followed by government trade interventions. A critical dimension of food risk and security is staple food trade dependencies between countries. Such dependencies occur both directly, in terms of regional food security, and indirectly increase migration as well as gender vulnerabilities. Indirect dependencies emerge from the complex web of trade relationships in which a country's access to staple foods relies not only on direct imports from producing nations but also on re-exports facilitated by intermediary countries. In the case of disruption shocks, such a trade system may expose importing countries to vulnerabilities at various intermediary points. For example, the Russian-Ukraine war has exposed the vulnerability of countries directly importing staple foods and fertilizers from the two countries, but also heavily affected countries that rely on the re-export of staple foods. The project F-TRADEMARK aims to measure the vulnerability of nations’ food systems resilience based on global trade data from 1986 – 2020 using network-based assessment tools. Moreover, the future of staple food and fertilizer trade dependence will be predicted under different short-term and long-term shocks up to the year 2100.