Trade globalisation and path-dependent severe food insecurity: Dynamic evidence from agro-environmental pressures and structural absorption capacity

Globalised food systems can expand access to food through trade, but they can also transmit unequal exposure to market, ecological, and institutional shocks. Drawing on vulnerability-resilience theory, this study examines severe food insecurity as a path-dependent outcome, operationalised through lagged food insecurity, shaped by structural absorption capacity — the buffering role of economic and institutional conditions within globalised food systems. Unlike prior studies that treat trade, agro-environmental, and institutional factors as separate correlates of food security, this study integrates them within a single dynamic cross-country framework. Using an unbalanced panel for 2010–2024, the analysis estimates how trade openness, tariff rate, agricultural production, water stress, energy intensity, GDP per capita, institutional quality, and development status relate to severe food insecurity, applying a dynamic System-GMM (Generalised Method of Moments) estimator to address persistence, endogeneity, and unobserved heterogeneity across three agro-environmental specifications. The results show that severe food insecurity is strongly shaped by past deprivation. After addressing persistence and endogeneity, trade openness emerges as the most stable policy-relevant channel associated with lower severe food insecurity, although its statistical strength varies across specifications; tariff rate, GDP per capita, institutional quality, development status, and agro-environmental pressure indicators show weak independent short-run effects. These findings suggest that globalisation affects food insecurity conditionally rather than uniformly. The results most directly support a managed-globalisation perspective centred on market access, while the complementary roles of domestic production systems and institutional capacity remain theoretically motivated rather than statistically robust in this dynamic specification.