Abstract
Food flows underpin the complex food supply chains that are prevalent in our increasingly globalized world. Recently, much effort has been devoted to evaluating the resources (e.g. water, carbon, nutrients) embodied in food trade. Now, research is needed to understand the scientific principles of the food commodity flows that underpin these virtual resource transfers. How do food flows vary with spatial scale? To address this question, we present an empirical analysis of food commodity flow networks across the full spectrum of spatial scales: global, national, and village. We discover properties of both scale invariance and scale dependence in food flow networks. The statistical distribution of node connectivity and mass flux are consistent across scales. Node connectivity follows a generalized exponential distribution, while node mass flux follows a Gamma distribution across scales. Similarly, the relationship between node connectivity and mass flux follows a power law across scales. However, the parameters of the distributions change with spatial scale. Mean node connectivity and mass flux increase with increasing scale. A core group of nodes exists at all scales, but node centrality increases as the spatial scale decreases, indicating that some households are more critical to village food exchanges than countries are to global trade. Remarkably, the structural network properties of food flows are consistent across spatial scales, indicating that a universal mechanism may underpin food exchange systems. In future research, this understanding can be used to develop theoretical models of food flow networks and to model food flows at resolutions for which empirical information is not available.
Highlights
We live in an increasingly global society, in which food commodity transfers enable production and consumption activities to be separated in space via complex supply chains [1, 2]
Food flow networks may prove to be an important adaptation measure to cope with future climate and economic shocks
We have examined the empirical network structure of food commodity exchanges across the full spectrum of spatial scales
Summary
We live in an increasingly global society, in which food commodity transfers enable production and consumption activities to be separated in space via complex supply chains [1, 2]. We refer to the movement of food commodities from one location to another as ‘food flows’, reserving the term ‘food trade’ for the international exchange of food commodities between countries. Much research has evaluated food trade [3,4,5,6], the resources embodied in food trade, such as water, carbon, and nutrients [7,8,9]. We know relatively little about food flows at smaller spatial scales, such as within nations or cities. This is largely due to a lack of available data on food flows at smaller spatial scales.
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