**6. Conclusions**

Thus, it can be concluded that this empirical research aimed at the identification of factors affecting countries' food security in short- and long-run perspectives allows us to confirm previous empirical research results and theoretical findings (especially about the influence of CO2 emissions, sufficiency of arable lands, forest areas, and other natural resources, access to electricity, and use of fertilizers). On the other hand, results that were revealed allowed us to obtain empirical evidence and quantitatively clarify the kinds of relationships that were identified mostly on a theoretical level (about influence of access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking).

Therefore, taking into account the results obtained regarding the impact of environmental determinants on countries' food security in short- and long-run perspectives for the 28 former socialist countries, the following can be noted:


Consideration of these proposals might become a basis for the development of state policies in the field of ensuring national food security.

Despite the fact that the obtained empirical results correlate with previous empirical findings, and that, on their basis, some practical recommendations that might be used by governmental authorities while ensuring country food security were developed, there are some limitations of this research, such as: (1) The sample of Countries consists of only 28 post-socialist countries, so expansion of the sample of countries might help to ge<sup>t</sup> more comprehensive, complex, and reliable results; (2) other than the expansion of the country sample, it might be valuable to realize cluster analysis and specify recommendations for certain clusters; (3) as the Global Food Security Index, which is considered as a unified proxy of countries' food security, covers the period starting from 2012, it is too small for reliable empirical results; thus, despite constructing our own index, a better option may be the use of the methodology of the Global Food Security Index in order to ge<sup>t</sup> more reliable assessments.

Moreover, this research was aimed at identification of specific environmental determinants that influence a country's food security in short- or long-run perspectives, but in order to develop e fficient public policy in terms of ensuring country food security, lags of postponed impact of environmental determinants on the FSI might be specified.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.V. and N.S.; methodology, N.S.; software, A.V. and G.M.; formal analysis, investigation, and resources, A.V. and G.M.; writing—original draft preparation, N.S. and T.O.; writing—review and editing, A.V.; visualization, N.S. and T.O.; supervision, A.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
