Food security which refers to the satisfaction of individuals’ dietary
needs and accessibility to food is a vital component of the national security
of any country. There are many ways how to affect food security
thus resulting in the change of living conditions of all individuals. In
our work we study a food power of each country from the perspective
of produce trade. The trade relations between countries are represented
as a network, where vertices are countries or territories and edges are
export/import flows. As flows of products between states are heterogeneous
we cannot consider different types of products in a single network,
this is why we consider 10 networks, where each network refers
to one particular group of substitute goods (cereals, meat, etc.). To
detect key participants affecting food security we calculate both classical
centrality measures and short- and long-range interaction indices
which consider individual attributes of countries (food production and
consumption levels, etc.) and complex interactions between them. The
analysis is based on annual reports of export and import data provided
by the World Bank. The influence of countries through each homogeneous
group of products was aggregated into a single food power
index. We also studied how the influence of countries is changed over
the years.