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I'm not certain this is the right place to ask this, so if not please let me know.

I'm grading research papers for an international competition, many of which are written by students for whom English is not their first language, although all submissions must be written in English. I've come across the following sentence:

"The impact of the U.S. interruption of food exports is small for countries where food is highly self-seocissive."

I can't tell if "self-seocissive" is a typo or mistranslation or actually means something I can't find, and I would be interested to know if anyone has an idea what it means. Google returns at most two results, neither of which is particularly helpful.

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    From the context it seems like what is meant might be "for countries which are self-sufficient regarding food", and I am wondering if the writer is using a form of this verb along the lines "food is self-sufficing" meaning the same sort of thing. But it would be an unusual construction and I confess I have not seen it before -- hence not offering this up as an answer as such. Mar 13, 2021 at 13:23
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    Further to this I have found this link: topic.echemi.com/a/… where there are a number of similarly unusual constructs starting "self-" which I wonder have been incorrectly parsed by an optical character recognition system. Mar 13, 2021 at 13:25
  • it's a typo - other words, from the two google results you mentioned, including "self-serfity" and "self-seghing" similarly make no sense to me... Mar 13, 2021 at 13:25
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    I’m voting to close this question because there's no point in us trying to guess what word hasn't been correctly recognised by OCR scanning software, which is almost certainly the cause of the "problem" here. Besides which OP's background information strongly implies it was written by a non-native Anglophone in the first place, so even the "right" word (whatever the student actually wrote) is probably the "wrong" word for the context anyway. Mar 13, 2021 at 13:35

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