Involving Resilience in Synthesizing Food Networks in Low-Income Communities

Abstract

Global warming has produced negative effects in all life aspects around the world. Particularly, in terms of agriculture, the rainfall variability causes lower water availability, having unfavorable yield effects in all the crops. Temperature increases and rainfall reduction have resulting decreases in agricultural production and infertility. These issues, combined with the constant population growth, predict a severe food security problem for the next decades. In recent years, natural disasters are more frequent and dangerous as the result of global warming. Droughts, freezing, and flooding are the problems with the highest impact on the food supply chain, particularly in low-income communities, increasing the lack of access to food and undernourished problems, resulting in human casualties. This paper presents a response analysis of the food supply chain network in 14 municipalities of the state of Michoacan in Mexico; these municipalities are the ones with the lowest human development index values, joined to malnutrition problems. Natural disasters such as freezing, flood, and drought were considered and used to measure their impact on the food network through a mathematic optimization model, obtaining food system behavior to these difficulties. In the addressed case study, as a consequence of natural disasters, the total cost of the food network increases fifteen times to obtain a resilient system. The proposed approach is general, and this can be applied to other cases.