Physicists and food science experts have
recently published a rigorous analysis of the international food-trade network
that shows the network's vulnerability to the fast spread of contaminants as
well as the correlation between known food poisoning outbreaks and the
centrality of countries on the network.
As the world’s population climbs past 7 billion, the sustainable production and distribution of food is balanced against the need to ensure its chemical and microbiological safety. The new paper maps the international agro-food trade network (IFTN), a highly complex and heterogeneous system formed around a core group of seven countries, each trading with more than 77 percent of the world’s nations. Since any two countries in the IFTN have only two degrees of separation on the network, the IFTN is capable of spreading a foodborne contaminant very efficiently. It also tends to mask the contaminant’s origins once the system is compromised, since so many network paths run through the central nodes. Story Source:
The above story is republished from materials provided by university of Notre Dame
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