Dec 21, 2024 02:22 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1068751
INTRO: The war in Ukraine is causing hunger thousands of miles from the battlefields, according to a study released today.
Nearly three years of war in the “breadbasket of the world” has left croplands destroyed and forced laborers who grow, harvest and process a bounty of wheat, barley and oats to flee. Combined with export bans from other countries, ripple effects resonated through global trade and upended food supply systems.
But understanding how far those disruptions reached, who suffered and who gained has been difficult. Researchers at Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) lead a unique effort, relying on satellite images to quantify loss of cropland and employing a holistic method called the metacoupling framework and network analysis to analyze connections within a region, between neighboring areas, and across distant ones.
The work was published in Nature’s Communication Earth & Environment. “The most striking aspect of our research is its ability to connect a regional conflict to its far-reaching impacts on global food accessibility,” said Nan Jia, a PhD student and lead author.
The stakes are high. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization models suggest that 13 million more people would be undernourished in 2022 due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine's lost production of three winter cereals in 2021 could have met the caloric needs of 76 million adults for a year.
The study revealed that regarding wheat, barley, and oats, the war has had a much greater impact on distant countries than on countries next to the Ukraine and disproportionately harms poor countries. “It’s remarkable how interconnected our world is..." (MORE -details, no ads)
INTRO: The war in Ukraine is causing hunger thousands of miles from the battlefields, according to a study released today.
Nearly three years of war in the “breadbasket of the world” has left croplands destroyed and forced laborers who grow, harvest and process a bounty of wheat, barley and oats to flee. Combined with export bans from other countries, ripple effects resonated through global trade and upended food supply systems.
But understanding how far those disruptions reached, who suffered and who gained has been difficult. Researchers at Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) lead a unique effort, relying on satellite images to quantify loss of cropland and employing a holistic method called the metacoupling framework and network analysis to analyze connections within a region, between neighboring areas, and across distant ones.
The work was published in Nature’s Communication Earth & Environment. “The most striking aspect of our research is its ability to connect a regional conflict to its far-reaching impacts on global food accessibility,” said Nan Jia, a PhD student and lead author.
The stakes are high. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization models suggest that 13 million more people would be undernourished in 2022 due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine's lost production of three winter cereals in 2021 could have met the caloric needs of 76 million adults for a year.
The study revealed that regarding wheat, barley, and oats, the war has had a much greater impact on distant countries than on countries next to the Ukraine and disproportionately harms poor countries. “It’s remarkable how interconnected our world is..." (MORE -details, no ads)