**1. Introduction**

Global economic development at the end of the XX century led to the boosting of industrial and technological development. However, these processes also triggered numerous destructive trends, especially for the environment. In turn, the scale of the environmental problems needed cooperation of the global community to solve them, so the Agenda 21 and, recently, the Millennium Development Goals were developed in order to coordinate the efforts of different countries on the way to elimination of global damages and implementation of sustainable development. At the Millennium Summit in 2000, eight Millennium Development Goals were developed, aimed at poverty, hunger and child mortality reduction, decrease of different diseases, expansion of education, banning of gender inequality, triggering of cooperation of local community, and promotion of sustainable environment development. All of these goals have quantitative measures that needed to be achieved in order to fulfill the goals. Global community cooperation during the last decades allowed the partial fulfilment of these goals. Nevertheless, considering such achievements and newly appeared damages in 2015 at the United Nations General Assembly, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 were introduced [1]. It is worth noting that most of the Sustainable Development Goals focus on food security or environmental issues that clarify their urgency and importance both at national (local) and supranational levels.

Elimination of hunger and di fferent forms of malnutrition in order to overcome food insecurity continues to be an urgen<sup>t</sup> global task because of the insu fficient economic growth dynamics in di fferent countries, climate change, existence of war conflicts and political instability zones, etc. Namely, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) report [2] in 2000, there were 792 million people in 98 countries who met food insecurity problems, while, in 2018 [3], more than 820 million people were still su ffering from hunger. Such a situation proves the extreme urgency of the need for the global community's cooperation in order to fulfill the Zero Hunger goal by 2030. Moreover, it is also essential to continue scientific research aiming at clarification of factors strengthening or worsening country food security. That might help to develop a more well thought out and scientifically grounded economic policy at both national and supranational levels.

Particularly, according to the FAO [4], nowadays, "food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to su fficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life". Moreover, in terms of the FAO approach, food security has four dimensions, namely food availability, food access, food stability, and food utilization. Food availability is about physical existence of foodstu ffs of appropriate quality that might be supplied to the population. Food access characterizes the possibility of getting food considering legal, political, economic, and social conditions. Food utilization illustrates rationality and e ffectiveness of consumption, sanitation, and water access conditions. Food stability is about ensuring foodstu ff provision at any time range, even in cases of insu fficient economic situations or realization of some other risks [4]. As it becomes evident from the essence of the food security perspectives, some of them mostly dependent on economic conditions, but the majority of pillars are reliant on environmental preconditions. Consequently, environmental determinants play a crucial role in foodstu ff production, distribution, and the quality of its consumption. However, the functioning of food-producing enterprises is quite often (especially in developing countries) accompanied by numerous adverse environmental e ffects (air pollution, soil degradation, elimination of certain species of flora and fauna, reduction of forest area, greenhouse gas emissions increase, etc.). On the contrary, spurring environmental problems would likely lead to an increase in food insecurity and disruption of sustainability of the national economy.

It should be noted that there is plenty of research that specifies the influence of social, economic, and environmental factors on a country's food security as a whole and on its perspectives separately, but they sometimes contradict each other. In addition, di fferent groups of scientists focused on various environmental aspects and food security pillars, so it might be hard to see the situation comprehensively. Therefore, from both theoretical and empirical points of view, it is crucial to identify the impact of environmental (ecological) factors on a country's food security in the short-run and long-run perspectives using up-to-date data and scientific approaches. Specifically, this research aimed at clarifying several important issues:


consideration that environmental factors likely have no immediate influence on a country's food security; thus, it is by far more valuable to clarify this impact in different time perspectives).

Moreover, the food security concept originated in 1974 during the World Food Conference, but gained its modern features in 1996 at the World Food Summit [4]. Despite the conceptual clarification from the mid-1990s of the XX century, the possibility of tracking countries' progress in terms of food security appeared only in 2012 with the launching of the Global Food Security Index. Thus, there is no considerable amount of similar research results aimed at testing the influence of the environmental factors on a proxy of countries' food security, especially in different time perspectives.

Consequently, this research might have significant theoretical and empirical value both in terms of development of countries' environmental and food security policies and tracking of changes the environmental determinants of countries' food security.
