A recent interdisciplinary study shows how food poisoning might be
the end of us all.
The collaboration – including the University of Notre Dame and the
Budapest Corvinus University – took a closer look at a darker future, with a
serious methodological background. With Earth’s population exceeding 7 billion
people, sustainable and safe food raise some serious concerns. The high demand
for nutrition turned the food world trade into a very complex system, with
seven countries in central positions, and the ability to reach 77% of the
planet’s population on an everyday basis. But there is a serious price to be
paid for stuffed grocery shelves: the risk. The door is not only open for goods
and services, but infections as well. A massive food poisoning epidemic – like
the Escherichia coli virus in Germany last year – could do serious
damages, and claim human lives.
The United Nations monitors food trade since the sixties, focusing
on networks, qualities, and trends of the goods being transferred. An interesting
development of the past decades was the fact that the amound of food transfer
is now larger than production itself. The main exports shifted from raw
agricultural materials to processed and branded foods. The research itself used
a 2007 UN database as a source. The density of the network increased by 33% in
the last ten years, its most vulnerable parts are dots (countries) in the
centre with the most edges (connections). Through these countries, viruses
could spread vastly within a few days, reaching millions, and making it
virtually impossible to locate the source of an infection (in the case of
Germany, it took 3 weeks). Surprisingly, the most vulnerable dot was not an
agricultural giant like the USA, but the Netherlands (based on per capita trade
activity).Other weak links are the seven giants including the USA, Germany,
France, Italy, China and Spain.
For those of you interested in the numbers, the research was based
on graph theory, that used factors like consumption, population and production
figures in order to make a dynamic model, ranking the danger level of
individual countries. We already mentioned that the Nederlands came out on top.
They also calculated how fast a virus could spread in a country, and how
vulnerably they are.
For more figures and numbers check out the original article.
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