Global food supply chain resilience assessment: A case in the United Kingdom: Fid-Bau Portal

Global food supply chain resilience assessment: A case in the United Kingdom

Ching-Pong Poo, Mark / Wang, Tianni / Yang, Zaili

Highlights • Assess national Food Supply Chain (FSC) resilience by combining production-to-supply ratios and shipping connectivity. • Analyse the UK's FSC resilience, concerning the impacts from global challenges. • Comarative analysis of four countries to appreciate diverse FSC dynamics. • Uncover strengths and vulnerabilities of FSCs of developed and developing countries. • Offered strategic insights for policymakers in managing food security and disruptions.

Abstract With the development of globalisation, countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) heavily rely on shipping for food imports and supplies. With the unpredictable impacts of black swan events, such as the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and the armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which are traditional food export countries, global freight supply chains could dramatically change, which significantly affects the global food supply chain (FSC) resilience, requiring new solutions to be found. Therefore, it is vital to assess a country’s food importing system by sea to ensure its FSC resilience. However, it is challenging to analyse different food supply resilience levels on a national scale given the high uncertainties in the key relevant elements (e.g. food supplies and transportation) influencing FSC resilience. This paper aims to develop a new method to assess FSC resilience at a country level by pioneering the combination of the two most relevant attributes, its production-to-supply ratio and shipping transport connectivity, used to present food supply security separately in the current literature. Within this context, food production and import distance affecting the connectivity of various food supplies are selected to estimate FSC resilience in this study. The findings, including a new index framework to assess national food resilience, significantly contribute to a country’s food security and the rational development of countermeasures and policies when necessary. To demonstrate the significance of the findings, the resilience of the UK FSC is first evaluated in a real case study, followed by a comparative study with Canada, Australia, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the FSCs of different countries. The findings of the studies can be used to monitor FSC resilience of the countries and provide rational policies for enhancing FSC resilience.