In the event of a global crisis, all these countries will immediately face the threat of hunger, the researchers say.
More than 66% of the regions of the world cannot provide themselves with the required amount of cereals and other key food products without resorting to their export from other parts of the world. The calculations of scientists who came to this conclusion were published in the scientific journal Nature Food.
“Our calculations clearly show that local food sources cannot fully meet the needs of the population in most regions of the planet, which is associated with both the peculiarities of the process of its production and the habits of its consumers. The coronavirus epidemic further highlights the importance of self-sufficiency and the ability to produce food locally,”said one of the study's authors, associate professor at Aalto University Matti Kummu.
According to UN experts, now about 820 million people on Earth are experiencing problems with constant access to food. Most of them live in Black Africa, where one in four suffers from chronic hunger.
These studies showed that the lives of the inhabitants of even the poorest regions of the continent in many cases depended on the availability of cereals and other foods that are imported from other regions of the planet. The discovery of such patterns made Kumma and his colleagues think about how all the peoples of the world are dependent on the import of various cereals and other important crops.
Self-sufficiency problem
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To do this, scientists analyzed how far from cities, villages and other points of concentration of people are the nearest agricultural land and stocks of six key crops - wheat, barley, rice, millet, sorghum and cassava.
Calculations have shown that about 30% of the world's population can provide themselves with food from local sources. In particular, this was typical for only 27% of people from the temperate climatic zone and only 11-16% of the inhabitants of Africa and other tropical and equatorial regions of the world.
In general, these problems were least typical for the countries of Europe, the USA, Canada, Mexico, the states of South and East Asia, as well as Russia. The countries of equatorial Africa, the states of Southeast Asia, as well as the tropical countries of Latin America suffer the most from such problems.
All this, according to Finnish researchers, means that if global trade ties between different regions of the world are destroyed or greatly weakened, then many regions of the planet will face the problem of acute food shortages. Such forecasts, as scientists hope, will induce the authorities of all countries to think about introducing measures to stimulate the development of local agriculture.