Food self-sufficiency and security in the conditions of trade restrictions: evidence from Russia

Food security concerns are growing as the scale of hunger in the world expands. In the era of globalized agricultural trade, food security is a subject of international regulation, however, it is increasingly influenced by foreign trade policies implemented by national governments. Many of them seek to protect domestic food producers by restricting presence of foreign competitors on the domestic food market, i.e. struggle for making the country self-sufficient in food. In some of the cases, such restrictions lead to improving self-sufficiency, but in most of the cases, they substantially decrease food security in the internationally recognized sense of this term. In this paper, the authors analyze contemporary effects of restrictive trade policies on food security in the case of Russia, where the government launched food import embargo in an effort to develop import substitution and decrease foreign dependence on food. The attempt is made to understand the changes that may have occurred in the food consumption pattern and to observe nutritional implications of these changes due to both trade restrictions and economic decline happening in Russia after 2014.