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Access to global wheat reserves determines country-level vulnerability to conflict-induced Ukrainian wheat supply disruption

Nature Food volume 4, pages 673–676 (2023)Cite this article

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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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Fig. 1: Dependence on, and losses of, Ukrainian wheat imports.
Fig. 2: Response to Ukrainian wheat import losses in vulnerable countries.

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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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Leonardo Bertassello & Marc F. Müller

  2. Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Paul Winters

  3. Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Marc F. Müller

Authors
  1. Leonardo Bertassello
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  2. Paul Winters
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  3. Marc F. Müller
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Contributions

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.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc F. Müller.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

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.

Reporting Summary

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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