What you eat depends largely on where you live, despite the year-round cornucopia of food made available by international trade, says a team of biologists and economists. In a study in the journal PLOS ONE, the group, working through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland, says, “A country’s plant production and consumption patterns are still largely determined by local evolutionary legacies of plant diversification.”
The findings are somewhat at variance with the economic theory of competitive advantage, under which farmers would specialize in crops with the highest financial returns and nations would use their profits to import foods that are less profitable to grow.
“Less specialized production patterns will make crop systems more resilient to zonal climatic and social perturbations, but this may come at the expense of global crop production efficiency, an important step in making the transition to a hotter and more crowded world,” says the paper. The authors speculate that agricultural subsidies may skew planting decisions, that cultural preferences for diverse local food production are powerful forces against specialization, and that rural households in developing countries are protected from volatile food prices when they grow a variety of food themselves.
Lead author Erik Nelson, an economics professor at Bowdoin College, said the results of the study were a surprise. “We have not seen a lot of increased specialization in agriculture around the world like we have in other economic sectors areas, such as manufacturing, finance, and technology,” he said.
“We need to become more efficient in agriculture to meet demand, but food may be different than other commodities, as it turns out, so we should think about the implications and whether it’s a good or bad thing in terms of food security.”