Global trade may not guarantee food security for all

As the world population continues to grow, the global food supply may not meet escalating demand - particularly for agriculturally poor countries that depend on imports for much of their food supply, scientists say.
Using production and trade data for agricultural food commodities collected by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation, a new study reconstructed the global food trade network in terms of food calories traded among countries.
"We found that, in the period between 1986 and 2009, the amount of food that is traded has more than doubled and the global food network has become 50 per cent more interconnected," said Paolo D'Odorico, a University of Virginia (UVa) professor of environmental sciences and the study's lead author.

"International food trade now accounts for 23 per cent of global food production, much of that production moving from agriculturally rich countries to poorer ones," said D'Odorico.
D'Odorico noted that food production during more than two-decade period increased by 50 per cent, "providing an amount of food that would be sufficient to feed the global population with an increasing reliance on redistribution through trade."
D'Odorico and his co-authors demonstrate that most of Africa and the Middle East are not self-sufficient, but trade has improved access to food in the Middle East and in the Sahel region, a vast, populous, semi-arid region stretching across the central portion of the African continent.

The investigators found, however, that trade has not eradicated food insufficiency in sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia.

"Overall, in the last two decades there has been an increase in the number of trade-dependent countries that reach sufficiency through their reliance on trade," D'Odorico said.
"Those countries may become more vulnerable in periods of food shortage, such as happened during a food crises in 2008 and 2011, when the governments of some producing countries banned or limited food experts, causing anxiety in many trade-dependent countries," D'Odorico said.
The food crises to which D'Odorico refers were caused by extreme climate events that brought drought conditions to several food-exporting nations, including Russia, Ukraine and the US.

He found that 13 agricultural products - wheat, soybean, palm oil, maize, sugars and others - make up 80 per cent of the world's diet and food trade.
The study was published in the journal Earth's Future.