Spatiotemporal characteristics of agricultural food import shocks

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spatiotemporal patterns of food import shocks for staple crops from 1986 to 2018, highlighting regional differences, recovery patterns, and factors that buffer economies against shocks to inform food security strategies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of import shock characteristics across regions and crops, introducing methods to quantify shock intensity and recovery, and identifying key buffering factors.

Findings

Higher shock frequencies during 2007/2008 food crisis

North America, Africa, and Asia experienced more shocks

High import diversity and low dependency buffer economies

Abstract

Ensuring food supply stability is key to food security for economies, and food imports become increasingly important to safeguard food supplies in economies with inadequate food production. Food import shocks have significant impacts on targeted economies. Using import trade data of four staple crops (maize, rice, soybean, and wheat) from 1986 to 2018, this paper identifies food import trade shocks that occurred to economies during the period of 1995--2018. We compare the temporal evolution and spatial distribution of import shocks occurring to different crops and analyze the shock intensity and shock recovery in various continents based on locally weighted polynomial regression and Cook's distance. The results reveal higher frequencies during the 2007/2008 food crisis and relatively higher shock frequencies in North America, Africa, and Asia. Meanwhile, there are regional differences in shock recovery, with the majority of shocks in Asia recovering in the short term. We also find that high import diversity and a low import dependency ratio buffer economies against import shocks, resulting in a low shock rate and a high recovery rate. These results contribute to our understanding of the external supply risks of food, placing emphasis on accessibility issues in food security.