Shocks to agri-food flows between counties in the United States from 2018 to 2022

Abstract The United States food supply chain is a complex and critical network that links production to consumption, contributing to food access and security for people across the country and the world. In recent years, this network has faced significant shocks, including a trade war with China, the COVID-19 pandemic, and severe flooding and drought. While some studies have examined these impacts at the national or state level, there remains a very limited understanding of how the agri-food supply chain responded to these shocks at a finer spatial resolution. In this research, we aim to fill this gap by estimating the annual domestic agri-food flows in the US at the county spatial scale from 2018 to 2022. We analyze the spatiotemporal shifts in the food flow network and assess whether diversity in domestic trade mitigates the reductions in inflows during shocks. Our results show that significant spatial heterogeneity exists in commodity-specific responses to a shock. We also find that specific periods, which were beneficial to certain regions, could be simultaneously adverse to others. Moreover, we show that diversity in domestic trade plays a key role in minimizing inflows losses during a disruption. Our findings suggest that commodity-specific policies can be strengthened by accounting for regional socioeconomic and environmental conditions that shape network behavior during shocks. Furthermore, enhancing local diversification of inflows can make the food flows network more robust against disruptions.