Abstract
The Russia–Ukraine conflict reduced global wheat supplies, yet the food security implications vary across countries. We identify a 39% decrease in Ukrainian wheat exports in 2022 resulting in >70% import losses in some of the countries most vulnerable to these disruptions, with substantial impacts felt in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Mauritania, Yemen and Lebanon. Differential impacts are a function of access to capital and international trade, suggesting the need for policy measures to defuse the impending food crisis.
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Data availability
All data generated in this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7826603. Raw data can be obtained from the Statistics Division of the United Nations (https://comtradeplus.un.org/), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FBS), the United States Department of Agriculture (https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/app/index.html#/app/downloads).
Code availability
Data analysis was carried out using R v.4.1.0. and the following packages: tidyverse (v. 1.3.2), ggplot2 (v. 3.4.0) and circlize (v. 0.4.15), all of which are publicly available at no cost at https://www.r-project.org. The code developed to generate the figures is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7826603.
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Acknowledgements
Funding from the National Science Foundation award EAR 2142967 (to M.F.M.) and from the Environmental Change Initiative at the University of Notre Dame (to L.B.) is gratefully acknowledged.
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M.F.M. and L.B. designed the research; L.B. and M.F.M performed the analysis; M.F.M., L.B. and P.W. wrote the paper.
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Nature Food thanks Tanaka Tetsuji and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2.
Supplementary Table 1
Correction for unreported exports in 2022.
Supplementary Table 2
Countries included (‘x’) in each dataset: 119 countries were included in all three datasets and included in the analysis.
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Bertassello, L., Winters, P. & Müller, M.F. Access to global wheat reserves determines country-level vulnerability to conflict-induced Ukrainian wheat supply disruption. Nat Food 4, 673–676 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00806-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00806-w
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