The challenging international landscape and exacerbated extreme weather conditions contribute to the instability of global grain trade, complicating its impact on food security. This complexity is particularly pronounced for varieties like rice, which are heavily affected by policy-driven trade restrictions. There is insufficient research on how a country’s rice trade characteristics affect food security. A network analysis approach is adopted to intricately dissect the structural characteristics of rice trade. To explore causality with food insecurity, this paper chooses structural holes and centrality as representatives of trade network characteristics and regresses them on the food insecurity indicator. With cross-national data spanning over 30 years, the network analysis provides a clear portrayal of the dynamic changes in international rice trade. The overall resilience of the trade network has increased, but specific countries’ vulnerability has also risen. Unlike the changing trends in features observed in grain and food trade networks, there is a notable intensification in the imbalance of power distribution in the rice trade network compared to over 30 years ago. The panel data regression results show that constraint, indicating the scarcity of structural holes or connections to stronger trading partners, significantly and positively influences a country’s level of food insecurity. Based on these findings, the policy proposal for importing countries emphasizes creating strategic trade connections. By choosing appropriate trade partners that reduce constraint, food security can be enhanced, even without improvements in other conditions.

The interlinked insurance and credit contract is an emerging model of agricultural insurance in China. However, the development of interlinked insurance and credit contract and farmers’ demands for it are poorly understood. Based on the wheat farmers on the Loess Plateau in China, a field experiment is employed to obtain dynamic choice data from 415 farmers. We empirically analyzed the inhibitory effect of credit constraint on farmers’ adoption behavior of innovative seeds and also explored the heterogeneity of farmers’ innovative seeds adoption due to the availability of interlinked insurance and credit contract. The results illustrate that credit constraint can hinder farmers’ innovative seeds adoption significantly, and interlinked insurance and credit contracts can encourage farmers to adopt innovative seeds effectively by dispersing natural risks and alleviating credit rationing. Further, constrained by low education levels in China’s rural areas, providing interlinked insurance and credit contract to farmers is not beneficial to enhance farmers’ innovative seeds adoption. In addition, farmers who are relatively poor may underestimate the benefits of innovative seeds at the beginning of planting, making their adoption behavior have some delayed effect. This research provides a new perspective for promoting the spread of innovative technology in rural areas.

Encouraging the use of conservation tillage technology is a highly effective approach to safeguarding soil health, improving the environment, and promoting sustainable agricultural development. With the mounting concerns surrounding climate change, developing conservation tillage methods that facilitate sustainable agricultural growth has become an imperative both in China and around the world. While it is widely recognized that adapting to climate change is crucial in agriculture, there is limited research on evaluating the risks, discovering resilience, measuring farmers’ perceptions on climate change, and exploring how tillage technology can be adjusted in the context of small-scale farming in China to foster sustainable development. Using research data from smallholder farmers in the Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces of China, this paper aims to explore the impact of climate change perceptions on farmers’ adoption of conservation tillage technologies based on an ordered Probit model. We found that farmers tend to refrain from embracing conservation tillage technology due to the presence of unclear and conflicting perceptions regarding climate change. Focus on short-term profitability and inadequate preparation hinder them from prioritizing adaptation. We recognized several measures that could help farmers adapt and thrive within the agricultural sector. Furthermore, we have validated the need for self-system moderation in promoting farmers’ adoption of conservation tillage technology. By utilizing such tools and resources, farmers can comprehend the gravity of climate change’s impact on agricultural productivity and, more importantly, channel their efforts towards fortifying resilience to extreme weather conditions and long-term climate risks, thus fortifying agricultural sustainability.