Japan tied itself much closer to Western trade networks as it doesn’t trust its Asian neighbours, and food from China won’t be forthcoming anyway. We only get money from China, while China needs food and energy to survive. When dealing with China, Australia needs to remember that technically speaking China needs us more than we need China. The Belt and Road initiative builds out a largely non-Western trade network tasked with feeding and powering China. A thriving China outside of a deeply interconnected global trade network is unthinkable. They can only operate because they are deeply connected to regional and global trade networks. Think about the risks that these nations are exposed to. These nations are highly dependent on international trade. Sources: Chatham House Resource Trade Database, The World Bank, and manual research Double net importers depend on global trade A total of 49 nations fall into this vulnerable category. The top ten list (ranked by GDP) of the Double Importer Club features big names. Let’s start the analysis by looking for nations that are net importers of food and energy. To not clutter the map with minor economic players and microstates, only the top 50 per cent of nations, based on the latest GDP figures, are included. The data refers to energy rather than only electricity as we want to measure oil and gas too. I supplemented the data with manual research for 2022 for the largest 25 economies to make sure no major changes (such as the US becoming energy independent) were missed. Therefore, we use 2019 data to see general trade patterns.Įnergy data comes in a more comfortable format but is relatively old. The latest data is from 2021, when pandemic supply chain issues disrupted global trade. Ideally, we would have this data broken down into calories but since that’s not available, weight appears to be linked closer to calories than value. Now we need to decide whether to measure trade based on value or weight. This isn’t ideal since this might well include non-food items like cotton but it’s close enough. To estimate global food trade, we pick trade in agricultural products. The result will be close enough to the truth to see meaningful global patterns. We will therefore need to work with readily available data. This isn’t a PhD thesis and I only have a day, rather than four years, to work on this. What exactly to measure is tricky to work out. Being self-sufficient is great, as you don’t rely on trade to keep the people fed and the lights on. A nation that exports more energy or food than it imports is a net exporter. Such datasets aren’t readily available, so compromises are required. Understanding whether a nation is a net exporter or net importer of either food or energy is a bit tricky. Sources: Chatham House Resource Trade Database, The World Bank, and manual research. Call for action to keep Coorong flush with fresh water Search All categories

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