A Multiperiod, Multicommodity, Capacitated International Agricultural Trade Network Equilibrium Model with Applications to Ukraine in Wartime

Abstract

The world is facing immense challenges because of increasing strife and the impacts of climate change with accompanying disasters, both sudden-onset as well as slow-onset ones, which have affected the trade of agricultural commodities needed for food security. In this paper, a multiperiod, multicommodity, international, agricultural trade network equilibrium model is constructed with capacity constraints on the production, transportation, and storage of agricultural commodities. The model allows for multiple routes between supply and demand country markets, different modes of transport, and storage in the producing and consuming countries as well as in the intermediate countries. The generality of the underlying functions, coupled with the capacity constraints, allow for the modeling of competition among agricultural commodities for production, transportation, and storage. The capacity constraints also enable the quantification of various disaster-related disruptions to production, transportation, and storage on the volumes of commodity flows as well as on the prices. A series of numerical examples inspired by the effects of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on agricultural trade is presented, and the results are analyzed to provide insights into food insecurity issues caused by the war.