31 | SEPTEMBER 2026

by Donatella Saccone^[1], Elena Vallino^[2]

Global food systems are under simultaneous pressure from various sources, including the concentration of market power along agrifood supply chains, the mounting exposure of vulnerable households to climate shocks, and the reordering of global value chains under geopolitical and environmental strains. Recent events have made this pressure even more acute through the sharp reduction in shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the escalation of Houthi activity around the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, and growing concerns over the impact of El Niño on agricultural production.

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by Donatella Saccone^[1], Elena Vallino^[2] and Jampel Dell'Angelo^[3]

The high degree of concentration observed in agrifood supply chains has become a growing source of concern among policymakers, civil society organizations and researchers. A substantial body of work has documented how a small number of firms increasingly dominate the production, processing, distribution and retail of food, raising the prospect that such concentration distorts prices, deepens inequality, and shifts bargaining power away from producers and consumers. Ultimately, there is the concern that these dynamics may undermine food security on a global scale. Despite this increasing policy attention and a growing volume of empirical research, the evidence base remains fragmented and, until now, has not been systematically mapped. This study contributes to closing that gap in two complementary ways. First, it conducts a systematic review of the existing literature on market concentration in agrifood supply chains, with the specific aim of identifying the empirical gaps that remain in current research. Second, building directly on the gaps that emerge from the review, it provides new preliminary estimates of agrifood market concentration based on firm-level market shares, adopting a global and multi-commodity perspective that is largely absent from prior work.

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by Sara Balestri, Andrea Crippa, Luca Pieroni^[1]

Food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa is a persistent and multidimensional condition. It encompasses not only insufficient access to food, but also limited dietary quality, high vulnerability to shocks, and constrained capacity to recover from them — dimensions that interact with one another and evolve over time in ways that snapshot indicators rarely capture. Despite this complexity, most empirical work in the field relies on observable proxies — such as dietary diversity scores, caloric intake, food expenditures — that each illuminate one facet of the underlying condition while leaving the rest in shadow. The result is a measurement gap with real consequences: two households may look identical on any given indicator yet differ profoundly in their exposure to risk, their coping capacity, and their trajectory over time.

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by Steven Knauss and Pascal Jollivet-Courtois^[1]

After decades of frustratingly slow progress in tackling the environmental crisis at the planetary level, the 2010s finally witnessed some significant advances in the fight against climate change, both technologically -- with accelerations in the deployment of key renewable technologies such as batteries, solar and wind power -- and socially, with the fight against climate change catapulting to a place of prominence on the societal and political agenda, as symbolized by key moments such as the 2015 Paris Accords and the 2019 adoption of the European Green Deal.

Just a few years on, however, and the situation looks quite different. Despite the warnings of the scientific community becoming, if anything, more alarming than ever, the ecological transition must now compete for its place at the top of the political agenda with politically pressing items ranging from affordability and competitiveness to the AI race and renewed geopolitical competition.

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