Food security in an oligopolistic EWF nexus system: a cooperative vs a non-cooperative case

The ever-increasing population growth along with the diverse socio-economic pressures it creates, have led to rising demands for energy, water and food (EWF) resources. This pressure to satisfy the needs for such products has paved the way to competitive behaviors amongst the sectors’ main players which might influence the efficient achievement of their objectives. Food security is one critical target that is heavily affected by the dynamics within the EWF nexus sectors. In fact, food production and supply depend primarily on the performance of water and energy systems, which involve diverse stakeholders characterised with both diverging and converging goals. Therefore, there is a need to understand and capture the competitive and collusive behaviors of each nexus sub-system as means to avoid any shortages and enhance the EWF nexus overall efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to optimise the economic and environmental performance of an EWF nexus system supplying a local food basket considering a set of renewable and non-renewable energy technologies and a range of water systems. The model is formulated as a multi-objective integer linear program that minimizes the economic costs and emissions. The model is run under two different scenarios investigating the impact of competition and cooperation on the optimal solution. Competition is modeled using Cournot game and cooperation is formulated as a Cartel, and results of the games are used as constraints restricting the optimisation framework. Results of the study assert that under competition and cooperation the water mix is mostly supplied by GW and TSE with more than 80%, while the energy production is evenly distributed amongst the three technologies. These results are highly influenced by the affordability and environmental emissions and less impacted by the behavior of the market. Findings of this study can be used to quantify the impact stakeholders’ behaviors on the achievement of food security targets.