NAIROBI: Walk along the aisle of an average supermarket and it soon becomes evident how much of our food is imported: Canadian flour, rice from Pakistan, olive oil from Greece, oranges from Spain, green beans from Kenya, and the list goes on.
In Britain, 40% of the food consumed is imported. In theory, this diverse food supply chain should make the nation less vulnerable – if the banana harvest fails in the West Indies then inhabitants can still rely on bananas coming from Ecuador, Columbia and Costa Rica. But sometimes this complex food network makes people more vulnerable, as new research shows.
In 2008, the world suffered a food crisis as wheat, corn and rice prices rose dramatically. Food riots spread across Africa, with 14 countries experiencing major disturbances. But the strange thing was that there wasn’t really a shortage of food. The 2007 harvest was slightly less (0.7%) than average, but not enough to warrant a food crisis.
“It wasn’t a simple case of a production shortfall leading to a spike in food prices,” Michael Puma from Columbia University, US, told environmentalresearchweb. “Rather it was a consequence of unforeseen interactions in the world’s highly interconnected global food system.”
The complex nature of the system meant that pressures on the wheat and corn market also impacted the rice market, causing panic hoarding and a dramatic spike in prices. Eventually the crisis was resolved when Japan released more than 300,000 tonnes of its surplus rice stock. “The interconnectivity of the global food system allowed the crisis to be resolved rapidly, but the origins of the crisis make it clear that this high interconnectivity is a double-edged sword,” said Puma.
Using annual staple-food production and trade data from 1992 to 2009, Puma and his colleagues analysed the changing properties of the global food system. Their results show that the system has increased in complexity across time, with the number of global wheat and rice trade connections doubling, and trading of wheat and rice increasing by 42% and 90%, respectively.
“We see increasing trade activity across a broader range of countries for major cereals,” said Puma. “In particular, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia and China have substantially increased their agricultural trade activity over this time.” The findings are published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
Next the scientists simulated the impact of continental-scale disruptions such as crop-pest outbreaks or weather extremes on the wheat and rice trade networks. They found that disruptions in European wheat and Asian rice production were considerably worse in a more interconnected network.
They also show that some of the least developed countries, including Senegal, Haiti, Benin and Yemen, suffer the greatest import losses in a highly connected network, because of their increased dependence on imports of staple foods.
