Spatiotemporal characteristics of agricultural food import shocks

Food supply stability is crucial to ensuring food security for economies, especially those with insufficient domestic food production. To safeguard against potential shortages, food imports are becoming increasingly important. Food import shocks have significant impacts on targeted economies. Using import trade data for 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 across 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, we find that there are regional differences in shock recovery, with the majority of shocks in Asia recovering in the short term. These results contribute to our understanding of the external supply risks of food, placing emphasis on accessibility issues in food security.