GroundLevel - Space Apps Challenge

GroundLevel| Food for Thought

Food for Thought

Your challenge is to consider the journey of food to your plate, determine how disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting the food supply locally and globally, and propose solutions to address these issues.

GroundLevel- Provider of Agrobased Strategy and Trading Solutions

Summary

With the COVID-19 pandemic, certain countries have placed barriers to open trade, disrupting supply chains and threatening food security. Each country has relied on their long-term trading partners for agricultural goods, but with this disruption, countries and organizations have had to look for alternative solutions like finding new trading partners. Our solution utilizes trading history and several determinants to provide faster, efficient trading strategies to optimize international trade.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our solution aims at providing a strategy and consultancy services for countries and people to perform multilateral trading of agricultural products especially with the issues COVID-19 has created.
Faced with unforeseen shortages of food, the platform is a supplement for rapid responses to give foresight on the trade for the crop being sought. It gives oversight on the stock of the crop in different countries, the existing trade relations, past data on the production capacity of countries.
The platform provides data on the present situation of the crop in the region to help in the first step of decision making.
In view of optimizing the trade between countries in each sub region of the world, we have developed a matrix which overlaps several factors of interest, including geographical position, deficit, currency parity and prices of crops, to output the most preferred country to trade with for any country within the region.

How We Developed This Project

Inspiration:

In a world linked by international trade more than ever before, the unprecedented measures that were undertaken with the COVID-19 pandemic have left the world unprepared to face the possible food shortage that will result.
Many of us are personally touched by the ripples of a food shortage which will most likely be felt for some time to come.
Everyday countries are countries are changing their trade policy without following the right notification procedure stated by WTO.
Some of these policies do not comply with WTO and GATT rules and are hence detrimental to the food security of developing economies who rely on import and export.

Approach:

Based on our analysis of WTO reports dated 23 April, 2020 dealing with issues trade is face due to the pandemic we have decided to cater our solution to providing trading strategies and trade consulting advice on agricultural goods to countries and organizations who are adversely affected due to the disruption in multilateral trade.
Each country has relied on their long-term trading partners for agricultural goods, but with this unprecedented disruption where each country is looking out for themselves by applying trading barriers and disrupting free trade, countries and their residents have had to look for alternative solutions. One of them being consider trading with new countries/partners based on several factors.
Our solution employs several determinants like distance between the trading partners, cost of goods, currency parity and deficit to determine which country/partner can be the next best alternative. Our solution is based on statistics of prior trading data and history between the partners.
In order to optimize our solution for this challenge we have focused our solution to South-East Asia (comprising of 11 countries) where we took into consideration two major agricultural crops: rice and wheat. We have used the past trading data of the partner countries in South-East Asia for rice and wheat to formulate a working model and approach to our solution.
According to WTO, with the disruption in agricultural trade developing economies have had the most trouble addressing the food security issue within their countries and South-East Asia was the perfect region to focus our solution. While rice is a common agricultural crop grown in South-East Asia, wheat on the other hand is heavily imported from larger economies showcasing the validity of our approach.

Space agency data: The main database used was NASA Earth Data Resource at the UN Food and Agricultural Organization [http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data]. Some other references used for understanding the trade relations and policies are listed in Section 7 ‘References’.
Country-wise databases on the amount of crop produced, their import and export quantities and annual consumption were used in this project. This allowed us to gain an overview of the stock of crop in the various countries and their trade relations with neighboring countries. The data was also analyzed to determine the factors involved in establishing the best trade routes for a given country.

Tools/coding language: The MATLAB platform supports advanced computations including several machine learning tools, probability distribution tools and importing of excel sheets to access real-time data. This enabled us to use the official trade data to make predictions on potential exporters of a crop for a country. Furthermore, MATLAB also has Mapping and Image Processing tools, both of which were used to map out the produce imported by a country, and possible deficits/surplus for a given crop in a country based on past data.

Problems and Achievements: In order to provide a solution on the various regions from where food can be imported- determining the various factors on which trade depend upon was challenging. While each country has their own political relation with each other we were forced to focus on major tangible determinants like crop price, deficit, global position with respect to each other and currency parity. All our determinants are based on past trading data which necessarily may not be the same today and incorporating real-time data is difficult. To overcome the complexity of international trade and to ensure our solution can showcase our approach clearly, we focused on 11 countries in South-East Asia and trade in two agricultural crops: rice and wheat. A few countries like Lao and Timor-Leste had not published their data and hence were not shown on our maps indicating historic trade or deficit. Thus, transparency of data from countries is important for our solution.

Our solution has achieved the following:

The application visually represents the past data of the trade within the region for crops of interest.
Provides a visual representation of the exporting power of each country with respect to the crops in question. This MATLAB simulated plot results from computations of data on production power, trade and consumption to indicate the trade deficit or surplus of rice in countries in our region of interest. This allows for a rapid inspection of the availability of the crop in the area for imports. At the bottom of the scale are countries with surplus, and the top of the scale represents countries with a deficit.
Based on factors of interest, our preferability matrix gives results, in terms of an index, to indicate the country with which it is most preferable to engage in trade with for each crop.

Future Work: Aim at developing our solution to incorporate real time data rather than data based on past trading history. With the current situation there has been a number of changes in the trading policy of every country on a daily basis and many of these policies are not compliant with WTO and GATT rules and regulations. So, we hope to introduce a feature where we showcase all the trade policies implemented by governments and evaluate it.