By Iacopo Maria Taddei[1]
The OEET, in collaboration with the Collegio Carlo Alberto (CCA), held its 11th Workshop on December 12–13, 2025, at the University of Turin. Titled Global Trade Shocks and Geopolitical Uncertainty: Implications for Food Security in Emerging Economies, the workshop focused on how international trade, external shocks, and conflict shape food security outcomes, with particular attention to emerging and developing economies.
The event was conceived within the framework of the STAPLES project (Stable Food Access and Prices and Lower Exposure to Shocks), funded by PRIMA, in which OEET and CCA are directly involved. Central to the project is the analysis of how global stressors—such as trade disruptions, price volatility, geopolitical tensions, climate change, and armed conflict—propagate through cereal and agricultural input value chains and affect food availability, access, and stability, especially in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
The workshop was structured into four sessions—three thematic sessions and one round table—covering the main pillars of the STAPLES research agenda.
Food insecurity is a development challenge that has intensified in recent years. Indeed, with trade war between the US and China in 2017, the pandemic in 2020, followed by the war in Ukraine in 2022, different conflicts and wars and the current geopolitical tensions, several countries have been suffering from an acute food insecurity. Indeed, according to FAO (2025), 8.2 percent of the global population may have faced hunger in 2024. In the same vein, the World Food Program (WFP) 2025 Global Outlook estimates that around 319 million people are facing severe levels of food insecurity in the 67 countries with WFP operations. These figures are likely to increase given the increase in the frequency of natural disasters related to climate change that can affect the productivity of the agriculture sector (AATM, 2024). Moreover, trade policy can play a significant role in food security as several low- and middle-income countries are net importers of agri-food products. This note summarizes the main channels through which trade policy can affect food security, with a special focus on the MENA region.
By Sara Balestri, Andrea Crippa, Luca Pieroni[1]
Recent years have witnessed a marked slowdown in global progress in reducing hunger and malnutrition, with food insecurity remaining persistently high, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (FAO, IFAD et al., 2024). In this region, households are frequently exposed to overlapping and reinforcing shocks, including climate-related events, economic instability, and demographic pressures (Barrett, 2021). Among these, droughts are especially relevant for low-income, agriculture-dependent economies, as they affect food security not only by reducing food availability, but also by constraining incomes, disrupting markets, and weakening purchasing power (Myers et al., 2017; IPCC, 2023). Understanding how household food security evolves over time in response to such shocks therefore remains a central empirical challenge.
Much of the existing literature has relied on static measures of food security, often focusing on caloric intake or food availability, while paying less attention to diet quality, dietary diversity, and intra-household dimensions (Costlow et al., 2025). Moreover, empirical analyses are frequently constrained by limited longitudinal data and by econometric approaches that rely exclusively on observed indicators, potentially overlooking the multidimensional and partly unobservable nature of food security (Hangoma et al., 2024; Izraelov and Silber, 2019). These limitations raise concerns about measurement error, omitted variables, and the ability to capture persistence and mobility in food security status over time (Ahmadzai et al., 2025).
By Antoine Castet[1]
My article examines the long-run economic consequences of Egypt’s agricultural expansion into the desert, with a particular focus on its effects on structural transformation. Faced with rapid population growth and mounting pressure on the Nile Delta, successive Egyptian governments have promoted the “conquest of the desert” as a central development strategy. Large public investments in irrigation infrastructure and land allocation policies were intended not only to expand agricultural production, but also to foster settlement, industrialization, and the development of services in newly reclaimed areas. Contrary to these ambitions, the article argues that desert expansion has slowed structural transformation in the districts that benefited from it.
The analysis is grounded in the classical literature on structural transformation, which highlights the shift of labour from agriculture to manufacturing and services as a hallmark of economic development. While agricultural development is often seen as a catalyst for this process, by raising incomes, stimulating demand, accumulating capital, and releasing labour, theoretical and empirical work emphasizes the importance of the nature of productivity gains. In particular, land-augmenting changes such as irrigation can raise output without reducing labour demand, potentially encouraging specialization in agriculture rather than labour reallocation. In open economies, such specialization may hinder structural transformation, as predicted by Matsuyama’s (1992) model.
By Davide Del Prete[1]
This paper studies the distribution and consequences of market power along the global value chain (GVC) of coffee. Motivated by a growing academic and policy debate on market power and concentration, the analysis addresses two central research questions: (i) whether market power differs systematically across stages of a global value chain, and (ii) whether there is a trade-off between local (stage-specific) and global market power when firms operate across countries and stages.
The coffee sector provides an ideal setting for this analysis. It involves more than 12.5 million producers worldwide and approximately one billion consumers, while international prices are highly sensitive to short-run supply and demand conditions. At the same time, the sector has experienced substantial consolidation, particularly among international traders and downstream firms, with more than 70 major mergers and acquisitions (M&A) since 2014. These features make coffee a natural laboratory to study how concentration and firm size shape prices and market outcomes along a GVC.
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11th OEET Workshop Programme
Global Trade Shocks and Geopolitical Uncertainty: Implications for Food Security in Emerging...