Global Food Trade May Not Meet All Future Demand, Study Indicates

As the world population continues to grow, by about 1 billion people every 12 to 14 years since the 1960s, the global food supply may not meet escalating demand -- particularly for agriculturally poor countries in arid to semi-arid regions, such as Africa's Sahel, that already depend on imports for much of their food supply.

A new University of Virginia study, published online in the American Geophysical Union journal, Earth's Future, examines global food security and the patterns of food trade that -- until this analysis -- have been minimally studied.

"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 percent more interconnected," said Paolo D'Odorico, a U.Va. professor of environmental sciences and the study's lead author.  "International food trade now accounts for 23 percent of global food production, much of that production moving from agriculturally rich countries to poorer ones."

"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."

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 United States.
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"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."

D'Odorico notes that some countries, such as the U.S. and Brazil, are "blessed" with climates and soils that are conducive to high agricultural yields, and also the technologies -- industrial fertilizers, sophisticated large-scale irrigation, new resilient cultivars -- and financial resources to sustain high yields, and therefore are major exporters of food to agriculturally poor nations. 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."

Global Food Trade May Not Meet All Future Demand, Study Indicates