Country Typologies According to the Impact of Geopolitical and Health Crises on the Energy-Food Nexus

Geopolitical and health crises slow down global economic activities. This triggers atypical price increases in food and energy, aggravating inflation, exacerbating pressures in the supply chain, pushing millions of people into hunger and poverty, and increasing political uncertainty, financial market vulnerability, and environmental impacts—because of energy and food systems being intrinsically interconnected along the supply chain. To find groups of countries with similarities in the impacts of the energy-food nexus during these crises, and thus be able to establish more appropriate routes of action, it is proposed to typify several countries belonging to the European Union by applying the k-means clustering technique based on 26 characteristics from 2019 to 2022. When characterizing the groups, one was found to be in a critical situation in energy due to its dependence on foreign energy specifically on natural gas from Russia, while it shows a better situation in the food sector. Therefore, it is crucial to first establish methodologies that find the vulnerabilities of the countries and then reduce and mitigate them through policies that increase the resilience of the systems.