Trade and Food Security

The global food system is increasingly connected due to international trade and transnational land acquisitions, creating the potential for perturbations in local agricultural systems to propagate into global food crises. This Venture seeks to understand the factors contributing to the resilience (or lack of resilience) of the global food system to perturbations. This Venture synthesizes existing global datasets in a complex dynamic network framework to evaluate the effects of global trade and transnational land acquisitions on the resilience of the global food system. The specific goals of this project are to:

1. identify commodities and countries that are detrimental to the resilience of food networks and human populations, and
2. link quantitative analyses of food security to human outcomes and ethical trade-offs.

This Venture will improve understanding of factors influencing the vulnerability of the global population relative to perturbations, such as local episodic drops in crop production.