Quantifying the dynamic structural resilience of international staple food trade networks: An entropy-based approach

Establishing a resilient food trade system is an international consensus on safeguarding food security amid growing disruptions. However, a unified resilience framework has yet to be established, leading to the proliferation of diverse measures. Here, we conceptualize resilience as a trade-off between efficiency and redundancy and employ an entropy-based approach to quantify the dynamic structural resilience of international trade networks for maize, rice, soybean, and wheat from 1986 to 2022. Using index decomposition analysis, we also investigate the relative contributions of internal components to resilience dynamics. Within this framework, despite heterogeneity across different food commodities, we find that current trade networks are relatively redundant, with improvements in efficiency being the dominant driver of changes in resilience. In addition, we reveal a historically pronounced impact of flow concentrations on resilience, while trade interactions have become increasingly important in recent years. Following the leave-one-out approach, we furthermore identify critical economies and trade relationships that disproportionately affect the overall resilience, some of which are less well-focused in previous studies. Moreover, we highlight that overconcentration of flows along core trade relationships may undermine both efficiency and resilience, whereas peripheral trade networks may play strategic alternative roles in sustaining resilience, underscoring the importance of concentrating on developing economies and promoting broader trade links. These findings not only provide new insights for assessing the resilience of international food trade systems but also propose directions for strengthening resilience through both regional cooperation and more inclusive trade relations.