By Kelly deVos
The United States will remain on top. Brazil will gain ground. China will expand its share. And some longtime European agricultural powers may fall behind.
That is the picture of the global food trade in 2035 emerging from a new analysis led by Arizona State University researcher Deniz Berfin Karakoc, an assistant professor of industrial engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU.
In “Underlying export characteristics and projected country positions in the agri-food trade: A global system analysis,” a new peer-reviewed study published in npj Science of Food, a Nature Portfolio journal, she and her collaborators used artificial intelligence to analyze approximately three decades of agricultural trade data from 25 countries that together account for more than 75% of the global agri-food export market.
That scale is where machine learning, a form of AI, became particularly useful.
Instead of examining one country, commodity or influence on trade at a time, the researchers could look across the global system, searching through huge volumes of data for relationships among economic, social and infrastructure factors. They then used those patterns to project how countries’ shares of the global market could change by 2035 if long-term trends continue.
The results suggest that the world’s food-export map won’t be completely redrawn over the next decade. But some of its borders are shifting.
Source : asu.edu