Water-in-food, Conflicts and Refugee Movements: A Comprehensive Analysis.

The most relevant global scale phenomena cannot be analyzed in isolation: socio-economic, demographic, ecological, and political aspects are not independent of each other. In particular, the nexus between water and food security, commodities trade, refugee movements and conflicts is central in public debate. However, scholars only recently started to jointly analyze them using quantitative methods through the lens of multiple networks and interaction/gravity models. In particular, the dynamic of human migration and its relationship with international trade has been investigated pointing towards a complementarity between the two phenomena. However, how refugee flows relate to water-in-food trade, and to potential risk of conflicts, has not been intensively extended to empirical studies. Recent studies show that food and water insecurity, sometimes resulting in conflicts, induce movements of refugees and asylum seekers. Importing water through food trade can play as a remedy to compensate water and food scarcity. In this work, we adopt the modern methodological approach of the gravity model along with virtual water trade data to study the effect of bilateral and multilateral virtual water trade (VWT) on the flow of refugees. We find a positive effect of VWT in reducing refugee flows.