The globalisation of poultry supply chains: implications for food security and foodborne disease

Global poultry trade plays a critical role in contemporary food systems, underpinning food security by supplying affordable animal protein to a growing global population. At the same time, the increasing scale and connectivity of poultry supply chains create pathways for the transboundary dissemination of foodborne pathogens. Understanding how the structure of international poultry trade shapes both resilience and vulnerability is therefore essential for effective food safety governance. In this study, we characterise the global trade networks for fresh and chilled poultry meat over a 10 year period (2014–2022). Weighted, directed trade networks were constructed using data from the UN Comtrade database and analysed to assess community structure, connectivity, centralisation, and temporal stability. We further examined the relationship between network structure and food safety outcomes within the European trade community using notifications from the EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF). Detected trade communities were broadly aligned with regional economic trade blocs, particularly in the European Union, the Americas, and the Asia–Pacific regions, which all maintained extensive, primarily monodirectional, intercontinental linkages. Commodity networks exhibited diffuse ‘hub-and-spoke’ structure, indicating highly plastic regional networks which are dependent upon a small number of highly-connected nucleating countries. Detailed analysis of the European community identified a positive association between export volumes and food safety notifications, with several high-volume exporters emerging as disproportionate sources of reported foodborne disease risk. These findings suggest that while highly integrated poultry trade networks enhance food availability and market resilience they may also amplify systemic vulnerability to foodborne disease transmission centred around large exporting countries. Network analysis offers a valuable framework for identifying critical nodes, informing risk-based surveillance, and strengthening international food safety governance. Integrating trade network intelligence into global food safety initiatives, including regional and WHO-led surveillance frameworks, could support earlier detection of emerging risks while safeguarding food security in increasingly interconnected food systems.