title: Resilience and reactivity of global food security.
abstract: The escalating food demand by a growing and increasingly affluent global population is placing unprecedented pressure on the limited land and water resources of the planet, underpinning concerns over global food security and its sensitivity to shocks arising from environmental fluctuations, trade policies, and market volatility. Here, we use country-specific demographic records along with food production and trade data for the past 25 y to evaluate the stability and reactivity of the relationship between population dynamics and food availability. We develop a framework for the assessment of the resilience and the reactivity of the coupled population-food system and suggest that over the past two decades both its sensitivity to external perturbations and susceptibility to instability have increased.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padova, National Consortium for the Physical Sciences of Matter and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, 35131 Padova, Italy;
authors.forename: Samir
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1603-8375
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suweis
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4123;
authors.forename: Joel A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Carr
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padova, National Consortium for the Physical Sciences of Matter and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, 35131 Padova, Italy;
authors.forename: Amos
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Maritan
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Ecohydrology, École Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy; and andrea.rinaldo@epfl.ch.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rinaldo
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4123; National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland, Annapolis, MD 21401.
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: D'Odorico
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D003710:Demography; D005523:Food Supply / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D018803:Models, Economic; D011157:Population Dynamics
keywords: Malthusian growth; food crisis; food trade network; stability