How does food get traded around the world?

My local supermarket here in Scotland is full of foods that were grown and produced elsewhere: bananas from South America, cocoa beans from West Africa, and citrus fruits from my southern neighbors in Europe. This is the case in many parts of the world. Our food systems have become incredibly globalized.

Which countries do we depend on for this wide range of foods?

To see how and where food is traded across the world, my colleague Sophia Mersmann built this interactive visualization that shows the flow of different types of food from producer to consumer.

A note on methodology

Our tool is built from country-to-country trade data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

What we found when digging into this data is that what exporting countries say they’ve exported to a given country doesn’t always match what the receiving country says they’ve imported. This is a common issue for all trade data, not just food.

To keep things balanced, we prioritize data reported by the importing country. Pablo Rosado explains in more detail in our technical documentation.

The first view of this visualization shows how maize (or corn) was traded across the world. On the left-hand side, we have the exporting countries, and on the right, we see where they sent it. Brazil and the United States were the largest exporters, followed by Ukraine and Argentina. China was the largest importer.

From here, you can use the tool to explore in two ways: changing the product in the dropdown to see the same global picture but for bananas, palm oil, coffee beans, or any other food item; or by changing the country to see maize flow into and out of your chosen country.

A walkthrough of how to explore the tool

Sankey diagrams are an unusual visualization type, and one we haven’t used often on Our World in Data. So if the tool above doesn’t quite make sense to you, let me walk you through it so you can see the different views of the data that are available.

We’ll take one specific example: soybeans.

Below you can see both exports and imports of soybeans into the United States. On the left, you can see that it imports hardly anything. On the right, you can see that it exports a lot.

If we want to focus only on what the United States is exporting, we can narrow it down to the export view. That’s shown below.

As you can see, China is the US’s largest soybean export market. More than half of its exports go there.

That raises the question: how dependent is China on soybean imports to meet its domestic demand? And which countries does it rely on; does the US play a big or small role in its import market?

By looking at soybean imports in China, we get the answers. Imported soybeans make up most of its domestic supply. And while the US is a significant exporter, it’s far smaller than Brazil. Almost 70% of its imported soybeans came from there, compared to just one-quarter from the United States.

What starts as curiosity about where the food in our supermarket comes from unfolds into many important questions about the dependencies countries have on others: who is vulnerable when food crises hit, who is exposed to export tariffs, and what other countries might be there to fill the gaps. We built this tool to help answer some of them.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Marcel Gerber for his help in building this interactive visualization. Pablo Arriagada for feedback on the data and visualization. And thanks to Max Roser and Edouard Mathieu for their comments and suggestions on this article.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “How does food get traded around the world?” by Hannah Ritchie, Sophia Mersmann, Pablo Rosado, Marwa Boukarim, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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