Identifying the Achilles’ Heel: Using Complex Network Analysis to Pinpoint Systemic Vulnerabilities in the Global Food Supply Network

Systemic risk in the global staple food trade network has become a critical threat to global food security amid escalating geopolitical frictions and frequent extreme weather events. This study constructs directed weighted trade networks for wheat, rice, maize and soybean covering 196 economies, and applies a cascading failure model to compare cross-crop structural vulnerability. Simulation results reveal stark heterogeneous risk profiles: a shock originating from a top rice exporter in India spreads across two cascading rounds and impacts 25.5% of total network nodes, while a parallel shock from a top soybean exporter in Brazil triggers nine propagation rounds affecting 86.2% of nodes; by comparison, equivalent shocks to wheat and maize networks only affect 22.4% and 24.5% of nodes respectively. Under identical targeted attack conditions, rice and soybean networks suffer sharp connectivity deterioration after removing a small number of core exporter nodes, while wheat and maize networks retain relatively higher residual connectivity under the same attack intensity, reflecting that crop trade systems with higher supply concentration exhibit greater systemic vulnerability. This work adopts a single-year static network framework; future research will extend to multi-year dynamic network tracking and incorporate adaptive supply-chain feedback mechanisms. Despite this boundary, the study fills the research gap in cross-crop systemic risk comparison, providing robust empirical evidence for differentiated global food supply-chain resilience governance.