Modeling Sub-Annual Price and Trade Flow Anomalies in Agricultural Markets : The Dynamic Agent-Based Model Agrimate

World food markets are susceptible to systemic shocks due to a concentration of production in a few main breadbasket regions, strong import dependencies of many developing countries, and frequent unilateral and uncoordinated policy interventions such as export restrictions.The well-established agricultural integrated assessment models (IAMs) may assess longer-term food security risks arising from socioeconomic and climatic conditions, but they lack appraising the short-term global food system responses to weather extremes and policy-induced food supply failures. We here present the novel dynamic agent-based network model Agrimate which resolves the short-term trade and price dynamics at global agricultural markets with high temporal resolution. Driven by production anomalies and accounting for unilateral trade policy measures such as export restrictions, the model is designed to describe out-of-equilibrium market dynamics in crisis situations. We employ the model to wheat as a major food grain and hindcast the two world food price crises between 2007 and 2011. By disentangling the role of production failures and export restrictions, we contribute to the ongoing debate on the main short-term drivers of these crises. Next to the elaboration of regional hotspots of food insecurity for the present climate and socioeconomic structure, Agrimate will be also able to assess food security risks for future projected climate and socioeconomic conditions based on existing results of IAMs, which enhances the ability to evaluate environmental policy measures