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.
The first session focused on the role of international trade in shaping food security, highlighting both its potential benefits and its inherent risks. Chahir Zaki’s article, Who Pays the Price of Protectionism? Food Security in MENA, examined how trade policies affect food security in a region characterized by high import dependence and structural constraints on domestic agricultural production. Drawing on household-level data from Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia during the COVID-19 crisis, the study shows that trade restrictions tend to exacerbate food insecurity, particularly among the most vulnerable households, despite ongoing debates in the literature on the protective role of trade barriers for small producers.
Complementing this perspective, Sara Balestri, Andrea Crippa, and Luca Pieroni, in Unveiling Hidden Drivers: A Latent Variable Approach to Food Security Dynamics in Africa, explored the evolution of household food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using a dynamic framework centred on dietary diversity, the authors show that food security outcomes display strong persistence over time, while climate shocks—especially droughts—significantly hinder transitions toward more secure dietary conditions.
Antoine Castet’s contribution, The Conquest of the Desert: Land Investment in Egypt, offered a longer-term structural perspective. The paper analysed Egypt’s large-scale land reclamation policies in desert-bordering districts, showing that these interventions increased agricultural employment but slowed structural transformation by diverting labour away from more productive manufacturing and service sectors.
The second session addressed how shocks propagate through global food networks. Davide Del Prete’s paper, Market Power along the Coffee Global Value Chain, documented the presence of market power across different stages of the coffee value chain, highlighting systematic differences in concentration and pricing dynamics between upstream and downstream actors.
Stefano Schiavo’s Food Connections: Global Trade, Shock Propagation and Food Security adopted a network-based simulation approach to assess how production shocks in major cereals—wheat, rice, and maize—spread through international trade linkages. The results indicate that trade can amplify shocks in highly import-dependent countries, leading to sharp increases in the number of people exposed to malnutrition.
Related evidence was provided by Dela-Dem Doe Fiankor and co-authors, who examined how Italian pasta exporters adjust prices in response to global wheat price shocks. Their findings show that international price shocks are systematically transmitted to export prices, though with heterogeneous effects depending on the nature of the shock.
The third session, organized as a round table, presented preliminary results from Work Package 1 of the STAPLES project (Understanding External Stressors and Shocks). CCA researchers Alessia Amighini, Giorgia Giovannetti, and Iacopo Maria Taddei illustrated descriptive results from a static network analysis of global trade in unprocessed cereals and fertilizers, highlighting patterns of import dependence and evolving trade clusters.
Together with representatives from partner institutions—POLIMI (Marta Marson) and UNISG (Donatella Saccone) —the discussion also addressed how these analytical results feed into the development of a Dashboard and Decision Support System (DSS). This tool aims to provide policymakers and value-chain actors in the MENA region with timely information on trade dependencies, exposure to external shocks, and alternative sourcing strategies during periods of crisis.
The final session focused explicitly on the relationship between conflict and food insecurity, emphasizing its bidirectional nature. Armed conflict disrupts food production, trade routes, and livelihoods, thereby worsening food insecurity; at the same time, high food insecurity and malnutrition can increase social tensions and the risk of conflict.
Julia Fisher’s article, Growth in the Aftermath of War: Aid Effectiveness in Post-Conflict Locations, analysed African regions between 1995 and 2020 to assess how exposure to conflict affects economic growth and food security. Using nighttime lights as a proxy for local economic activity, the study shows that post-conflict recovery depends crucially on the intensity and geography of past violence. Locations indirectly exposed to war experience stronger post-conflict growth than areas directly affected by fatalities, underscoring the importance of targeted post-conflict policies and aid allocation.
Acknowledgements
This research was carried out within the framework of the STAPLES project. The STAPLES project is part of the PRIMA programme, supported by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 2333.
Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the PRIMA Foundation or the European Union, and neither of them can be held responsible for the information contained.
[1] OEET - Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy (email:
