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.
The three contributions gathered in this issue of the Newsletter contribute to the debate by examining different dimensions of these concerns and highlighting the importance of multidimensionality in defending food security. The contributions are based on ongoing research presented at the panel organized by the Turin Centre on Emerging Economies within the XXIV AISSEC Scientific Conference, held at Marche Polytechnic University, Ancona, Italy, on 8–9 June 2026.
The work by Saccone, Vallino, and Dell’Angelo opens with the question of who controls the food system. Despite growing policy concern that a shrinking number of firms increasingly set prices, terms, and bargaining power across production, processing, distribution, and retail, evidence on agrifood concentration has remained scattered across individual commodities, countries, or segments of the chain. By systematically reviewing 47 empirical studies and complementing them with original firm-level estimates covering thousands of companies across 99 countries, the research shows that different concentration trends emerge across various items, also considering items that are relevant for food security as an aggregate basket.
Balestri, Crippa, and Pieroni investigate how food insecurity unfolds within households over time under climate stress. Using household-level data from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria and a Hidden Markov Model of dietary diversity, they show that food security is a persistent, path-dependent condition rather than a snapshot indicator: early, sub-critical drought signals already erode food security well before conventional thresholds are triggered, and the burden falls disproportionately on female-headed and rural households. The finding that vulnerability compounds along gender and geographic lines reframes food security as a distributional and dynamic problem.
Knauss and Jollivet-Courtois analyse whether the geopolitical turn of the 2020s is reshaping where inputs are sourced from, and whether this reshaping is bringing environmental objectives with it. Tracing the spatial reconfiguration of global value chains for the European Union and the United States between 2014 and 2023, their provisional results suggest that firms continue to behave more like “hedgers” than “aligners”: sourcing decisions remain associated with low environmental taxation abroad, consistent with continued environmental arbitrage. For a food system whose inputs, and whose vulnerabilities, are globally distributed, this has direct implications for whether the reorganization of trade currently underway will ease or aggravate pressures on food systems.
[1] University of Pollenzo and OEET
[2] University of Turin and OEET
