Evolving Community Structure in the International Pesticide Trade Networks

The statistical properties of the international trade networks of all commodities as a whole have been extensively studied. However, the international trade networks of individual commodities often behave differently. Due to the importance of pesticides in agricultural production and food security, we investigated the evolving community structure in the international pesticide trade networks (iPTNs) of five categories from 2007 to 2018. We reveal that the community structures in the undirected and directed iPTNs exhibit regional patterns. However, the regional patterns are very different for undirected and directed networks and for different categories of pesticides. Moreover, the community structure is more stable in the directed iPTNs than in the undirected iPTNs. We also extract the intrinsic community blocks for the directed international trade networks of each pesticide category. It is found that the largest intrinsic community block is the most stable, appears in every pesticide category, and contains important economies (Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal) in Europe. Other important and stable intrinsic community blocks are Canada and the United States in North America, Argentina and Brazil in South America, and Australia and New Zealand in Oceania. These results suggest that, in the international trade of pesticides, geographic distance and the complementarity of important and adjacent economies are significant factors.