Impact of Economies on Food Security

Food Security remains one of the global problems for humanity. Even the smallest shortages in food supplies may cause significant consequences (riots and revolutions). Thus, food-exporting countries have considerable potential for influencing global socio-economic and political processes. Knowledge on actors controlling flows in the global food network allows to assess the distribution of power more accurately and make more realistic forecasts. This work focuses on assessing the mutual influence of exporting economies in the global food network. Existing studies of food security do not regard food flows as a network (nodes — exporting economies, edges — volume of exports), use data in absolute terms and do not assess the impact of countries on the entire net. Using the network approach, our research proposes a new method of identifying key food exporters based on the Long-Range (LRIC) and Short-Range Interactions (SRIC) Indices.  In contrast to classical centrality indices, SRIC and LRIC permit to take into account parameters of economies (e.g. volume of food imported); their indirect individual and group influence on each other. LRIC permits to calculate indirect influence on the paths of higher levels (>1 mediating economies).  Our work is based on the data by UN Comtrade on bilateral food trade and bilateral cereals trade of 236 economies during 2011-2014. Having composed matrices of bilateral food flows, we calculated short- and long-range interactions indices as well as the classical centrality indices. Results of LRIC and SRIC differ from that of the classical indices, not taking into account indirect influence. SRIC, in contrast to classical indices, reveals the hidden indirect influence of Russia and India. LRIC shows that on the longer routes the influence of Argentina, Brazil and Canada may surpass the influence of the USA (considered the TOP influential exporter by the classical indices).