Fig. 3: Food production distributions under the stationary development scenario and trade-off between food security and cultivation cost.

a With symmetric crop yield distributions, the risk-neutral strategy results in a 50% reliability for food production in regions that have sufficient arable land to meet the food demand, indicated in purple for region B in this case. Under the risk-neutral strategy, seven of the nine regions show a food supply distribution with 50% risk of food insecurity (Supplementary Fig. 7 in SI). The introduction of reliability targets for food production produces a shift of the food production distribution according to the imposed reliability level. b If the arable land is insufficient to meet the food demand, introducing reliability targets has no effect on the food production distribution, which is the case for instance for region I, located in Nigeria, featuring the highest population density in West Africa. Two of the nine regions have insufficient arable land and food production never meets food demand, corresponding to an actual reliability level of 0%. c In all development scenarios (high-pressure, stationary, and low-pressure), there is a strong trade-off between reliability targets for food production and the corresponding cultivation cost aggregated over all 9 considered regions and time.