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An agent based model representation to assess resilience and efficiency of food supply chains

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  • George Van Voorn
  • Geerten Hengeveld
  • Jan Verhagen

Abstract

Trying to meet the Sustainable Development Goals is challenging. Food supply chains may have to become more efficient to meet the increasing food requirement of 10 Billion people by 2050. At the same time, food and nutrition security are at risk from increasingly likely shocks like extreme climate events, market shocks, pandemics, changing consumer preferences, and price volatility. Here we consider some possibilities and limitations regarding the improvement of resilience (the capacity to deal with shocks) and efficiency (here interpreted as the share of produced food delivered to consumers) of food supply chains. We employ an Agent Based Model of a generic food chain network consisting of stylized individuals representing producers, traders, and consumers. We do this: 1/ to describe the dynamically changing disaggregated flows of crop items between these agents, and 2/ to be able to explicitly consider agent behaviour. The agents have implicit personal objectives for trading. We quantify resilience and efficiency by linking these to the fraction of fulfilment of the overall explicit objective to have all consumers meet their food requirement. We consider different types of network structures in combination with different agent interaction types under different types of stylized shocks. We find that generally the network structures with higher efficiency are also more sensitive to shocks, while less efficient network types display more resilience. At first glance these results seem to confirm the existence of a system-level trade-off between resilience and efficiency similar to what is reported in business management and ecology literature. However, the results are modified by the trading interactions and the type of shock. In our simulations resilience and efficiency are affected by ‘soft’ boundaries caused by the preference and trust of agents (i.e., social aspects) in trading. The ability of agents to switch between trading partners represents an important aspect of resilience, namely a capacity to reorganize. These insights may be relevant when considering the reorganization of real-life food chains to increase their resilience to meet future food and nutrition security goals.

Suggested Citation

  • George Van Voorn & Geerten Hengeveld & Jan Verhagen, 2020. "An agent based model representation to assess resilience and efficiency of food supply chains," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-27, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0242323
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242323
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    Cited by:

    1. Liang Lu & Ruby Nguyen & Md Mamunur Rahman & Jason Winfree, 2021. "Demand Shocks and Supply Chain Resilience: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach and Application to the Potato Supply Chain," NBER Chapters, in: Risks in Agricultural Supply Chains, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Saskia Keesstra & Jeroen Veraart & Jan Verhagen & Saskia Visser & Marit Kragt & Vincent Linderhof & Wilfred Appelman & Jolanda van den Berg & Ayodeji Deolu-Ajayi & Annemarie Groot, 2023. "Nature-Based Solutions as Building Blocks for the Transition towards Sustainable Climate-Resilient Food Systems," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(5), pages 1-20, March.
    3. Meyer, Markus A. & Früh-Müller, Andrea & Lehmann, Isabella & Schwarz, Nina, 2023. "Linking food and land system research in Europe," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    4. Davis, Natalie & Jarvis, Andrew & Polhill, J. Gareth, 2022. "Co-evolution of network structure and consumer inequality in a spatially explicit model of energetic resource acquisition," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 608(P1).

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