Food trade may not meet demand

IMAGINING a future where food supply is scarce is not exactly what we want for our children’s children. But as the population increases at 1 billion every 12 to 14 years, it may be the harsh truth. We’ve been hearing it from other sources, and new studies continue to substantiate possible food shortages in the future.

University of Virginia researchers conclude the same after they did an analysis of global food security and food trade patterns. Using production and trade data for agricultural food commodities collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization, they reconstructed the global food trade network in terms of food calories traded among countries. The report, which is published online in the American Geophysical Union journal, Earth’s Future, analyses the role of food trade in all regions of the world. Maps of food self-sufficiency and trade dependency are also illustrated.

“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% more interconnected,” said Paolo D’Odorico, a professor of environmental sciences and the study’s lead author. “International food trade now accounts for 23% of global food production, much of that production moving from agriculturally rich countries to poorer ones.” In the same period, food production also grew by 50% which is adequate to meet the demand of world population “with an increasing reliance on redistribution through trade,” Mr D’Odorico said.

Outlook for Africa and the Middle East

These regions are not yet self-sufficient, although trade has improved access to food, even to Sahel, the semi-arid region of western and north-central Africa extending from Senegal eastward to The Sudan. However in Sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia, trade has not eliminated food insufficiency.

“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,” Mr D’Odorico said. “Those countries may become more vulnerable in periods of food shortage, such as [what] happened during the 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.”

According to Mr D’Odorico, extreme climatic conditions led to these food shortages. Drought affected production in Russia, the Ukraine and the United States, which are exporters.

Other findings based on available data show that 13 agricultural products – wheat, soybean, palm oil, maize, sugars and others – make up 80% of the world’s diet and food trade. Furthermore, Mr D’Odorico confirmed the significant increase of meat consumption in China, which is changing land-use patterns in that country since meat production requires more land area then crops.

“Fats and proteins tend to increase with the economic development of emerging countries,” he said. “An increase in consumption of animal products is further enhancing the human pressure on croplands and rangelands.”

Mr D’Odorico also noted that countries, such as the U.S. and Brazil, are major exporters of food to agriculturally poor nations because they are “blessed” with climates and soils that are conducive to high agricultural yields. In these countries, technologies such as industrial fertilizers, sophisticated large-scale irrigation, new resilient cultivars are widely available, as are financial resources to sustain high yields. However, as populations grow and climate change brings currently unforeseeable changes to growing conditions, it is possible that exports to other nations could be reduced.

“The world is more interconnected than ever, and the world food supply increasingly depends on this connection,” D’Odorico said. “The food security for rapidly growing populations in the world increasingly is dependent on trade. In the future, that trade may not always be reliable due to uncertainties in crop yields and food price volatility resulting from climate change. Trade can redistribute food, but it cannot necessarily increase its availability.”