INFEWS: U.S.-China: Coupled FEWS Modeling for Sustainability of the Global Crop Supply Chain with a Focus on China - US Interactions

The greatest challenges for global food systems are the spatial and temporal mismatches of their supply and demand. The crop supply chain helps to relieve these mismatches through transportation, trade, and storage. However, long-distance shipping consumes a great deal of energy. Water, as a critical resource for crop production, is unevenly distributed across regions and throughout the seasons. The interaction, as a Food, Energy, and Water System (FEWS), and spatial and temporal heterogeneity require a systematic and coupled method to study the global crop supply chain, which includes production, storage, transportation, distribution, and consumption. Teaming with the crop research group at Nanjing Agriculture University, this project will develop a scalable framework that models decision-making in the global crop supply chain as embedded in the water resources and energy, socioeconomic, and policy environments and as affected by prices and climate factors. The integrated systems modeling framework for the global crop supply chain will enable the connection of global challenges and the local concerns of individual stakeholders along the supply chain through multi-scale resolutions and dynamic interactions. The research results will make local shareholders more aware of the FEWS sustainability challenges faced by the global food system, which should help them make better decisions and encourage their engagement in collective efforts to achieve fairer and more sustainable global crop systems. <br/><br/>The twofold objective of this proposal is 1) to advance FEWS systems modeling methodologies and improve understanding of the interactions of the global crop supply chains by developing a framework to integrate climatic, economic, governmental, societal, and technological changes, and 2) use the supply chain formed by China and the US to identify technical, societal, and policy solutions to improve the sustainability and resilience of the global crop supply chain. This research deliberately chooses the US-China wheat and soybean supply chain as a testbed for the framework, with emphasis on its interaction with the rest of the world, because their large trade volume has a critical impact on the global sustainability of food, energy, and water. The rest of the world will be represented by the modified Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). The lessons learned from this particular US-China supply chain can be applied to other global crop supply chains. This study will address multiple limitations of the current agricultural systems and integrated assessment models (e.g., GCAM) by 1) coupling climatic, policy, socioeconomic, and technological changes with global crop supply, demand, and prices in a dynamic way; 2) measuring the global crop supply chain sustainability from both global and local viewpoints, considering spatio-temporal distribution for all supply chain players and including energy consumption, water stress, profit, fairness, and resiliency; 3) developing decision making tools for spatially distributed individual crop players with consideration of global issues such as pricing and international trade; 4) integrating models that come from different disciplines and operate with heterogonous data requirements and spatio-temporal resolutions; and 5) studying the resilience of global crop SCs under extreme scenarios.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.