The development of industrial agriculture has enabled a sharp increase in food trade at the global scale. Worldwide trade underpins food security by distributing food surpluses to food deficient countries. The study of agricultural product flows can provide insights on the complex interactions between exporting and importing countries and the resulting network structures. Commercial partnerships between countries can be modelled using a complex network approach. Based on the detailed trade matrices from FAO covering the period from 1986 to 2013, we present an analysis of the world cereal trade in terms of weighted and directed networks. The network nodes are the countries and the links are the trades of agricultural products in mass. We reveal the changing topology and degree distribution of the world network during the studied period. We distinguish three entangled subnetwork structures when considering the temporal stability of the trades. The three subnetworks display distinct properties and a differential contribution in total trade. Trades of uninterrupted activity over the 28-year study period compose the backbone network which accounts for two thirds of all traded mass and is scale-free. Inversely, two thirds of the trades only have one or two consecutive years of activity and define the transient subnetwork which displays random growth and accounts for very little traded mass. The trades of intermediate duration display an exponential growth both in numbers and in traded mass and define the intermediate subnetwork. The topology of each subnetwork is a time invariant. The identification of invariant structures is a useful basis for developing prospective agri-food network modelling to assess their resilience to perturbations and shocks.

Driven by population growth and rising incomes, the demand for animal source foods in low and middle-income countries is increasing rapidly. Pork is one of the most commonly consumed animal-based food, with the highest demand being in China due to its largest population and changing dietary habits linked to increasing wealth. Here, we show the changes in pig production systems in terms of farms capacity, productivity and production at the national and provincial levels by analyzing several censuses of China. In addition, we used a downscaling methodology to provide a recent and highly detailed map of the distribution of pigs in China. Between 2007 and 2017, pork production in China increased by 26.6\%, up to 55 million tons and the number of large-scale farms with a yearly production of over 10 000 heads increased by 145\%. Much of the production has changed from extensive backyard subsistence farming to intensive corporate farming. Moreover, the pig distribution has shifted from watercourse-intense southeast to northeast and southwest of China due to environmental policy in 2015. These policy-driven transitions primarily aimed to increase pig production efficiency and reduce environmental impacts and resulted in a profound transformation of geographic production patterns.

Global food production and international trade are rapidly expanding and drive increasing agricultural globalization and specialization. Following production patterns, network properties and added-value chains, exportable surpluses of countries can offset food and feed deficits in other countries. However, production and trade patterns are barely addressed in the scientific literature as two interactive components of global agriculture. Integrated analysis of the temporal dynamics and distribution patterns of production and trade among countries can put current food security challenges in perspective with ongoing trends, and support prospective modeling. Here, we analyze the interdependent patterns of global agricultural production and trade from 1986 to 2016. We class the total mass into six product categories - cereals, oilcrops, meat, fruits and vegetables, coffee, and cocoa. We estimate reexports in global trade by assessing mass balances of production, imports and exports per country. We show that global trade and reexports increase exponentially faster than production and that production and trade are highly centralized among a small number of countries. For most agricultural categories, the centralization of flows has increased in time for production and net exports, and has decreased for net imports and reexports. Accordingly, a growing number of deficient countries are sustained by a decreasing number of top-producing countries. In parallel, reexport routes gather a growing number of countries but are highly dominated by long-industrialized countries. We discuss the interdependencies between global agricultural production and trade patterns. We highlight the drivers and implications of the observed trends for food security challenges.

Like all current industrial systems, agriculture overwhelmingly relies on energy supply from controllable sources, mainly fossil fuels and grid electricity. Power supply from these sources can be adapted to perfectly match the timing of power requirements of demand systems. The energy transition largely consists in substituting renewable power|which is intermittent by nature|to controllable sources, leading to disconnection between instantaneous power production and demand. Energy storage is a potential solution for balancing production and demand and safeguarding the operating conditions of the demand system. In this paper we quantify the effects of renewable power supply (solar and wind) on the operation of a standard poultry farm. We model the balance of power generation and demand considering the growth conditions of poultry and local weather data including temperatures, wind speed and solar radiation. We assess scenarios of renewable power supply in function of the size of the power plant, the wind-to-solar power generation mix and energy storage, and assess the impact of power supply patterns on the operating intensity (productivity) of the demand system. We show that it is possible to achieve non-negligible shares of renewable power supply with a reduced loss of farm productivity regardless of the energy mix by using small storage capacity. However, a full transition to renewable power supply would require a combination of ( i )-large energy storage compared to the annual demand, ( ii )-oversizing the power production plant, and ( iii ) adapting the energy mix to the timing of the power demand. Storage is all the more critical as production and demand are uncorrelated in time. The ratio of useful to unused energy storage by the end of the year varies with the energy mix and operating intensity (productivity) of the farm. We discuss the implications of different energy configurations on the performance of the demand system.