In early 2025, the European Union launched a new phase of dialogue on the future of agricultural and food policies, aiming to move beyond the sustainability-centred narratives of the Green Deal and Farm to Fork strategy. The initiative, grounded in the "Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EUAgriculture" and the Commission's communication "A Vision for Agriculture and Food," reframes the role of agriculture within a broader geopolitical and socio-economic context. The Italian Council for Agricultural Research and Analysis of the Agricultural Economy and the Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics convened a study day to examine the relevance and the implications of the EU's Vision for Italy. This paper presents a synthesis of the discussions and reflections, structured along four thematic pillars: economic, environmental, social, and institutional sustainability. The analysis highlights the structural weaknesses of Italian agriculture, the need for circular and diversified agricultural systems, the integration of agroecological and climate resilience strategies with competitiveness, the need for generational and social renewal, and the necessity for political reflection on the adequacy of the Italian agricultural policy governance system. By capturing the perspectives of researchers and academics, the paper contributes to the national debate on reshaping EU agricultural policy beyond 2027.

Social and cultural institutions interact with environmental and individual factors, shaping resilience to external shocks. This study examines the interplay between gender-differentiated land management, kinship norms, and the effects of droughts on agricultural households’ resilience to food insecurity in rural Malawi. Female land-managed households in Matrilineal-Matrilocal villages show higher resilience with respect to other communities. However, in times of drought, these households turn out to be less resilient to food insecurity than their counterparts in other areas. In support of this result, we find evidence that, when faced with drought, female land-managed households in Matrilineal-Matrilocal communities exhibit lesser involvement in more lucrative non-farm activities and a larger decrease in livestock. The study highlights the need to consider socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors interactions when assessing resilience and advocates for intersectional policies enhancing women’s resilience.

It is well documented that COVID-19 increased poverty and food insecurity all over the world, especially in fragile contexts. However, it is still unclear how its effects were transmitted to these two outcomes. This paper aims to identify the mechanisms through which COVID-19 affected poverty and food insecurity in refugee-hosting districts in Uganda. We use path analysis with household fixed effects to identify the main pathways, differentiating between refugee and host households, and considering the heterogeneity among them in terms of income source (agricultural vs. non-agricultural households), and market position (food net-buyers vs. net-sellers vs. self-sufficient households). The analysis shows that COVID-19 significantly affected labour participation and increased food value chain disruption, increasing poverty and food insecurity. Refugees have been affected more than hosts by the COVID-19 direct and indirect effects. Host households could benefit from the increase in food prices, while refugees were mainly affected by the effect on the labour market. As expected, net-buyers are the group most affected by food value chain disruption and, along with non-agricultural households, the ones that were most affected in terms of food security.

This paper analyses poverty dynamics and checks for the existence of poverty traps among refugee and host communities living close to each other in Uganda. Although some non-linearities emerge in asset dynamics, there is convergence towards one stable equilibrium for the whole sample that suggests the existence of a structural poverty trap. However, households are quite heterogeneous: when analysing refugees and hosts separately, refugees converge to a lower own-group equilibrium than hosts. The household size and education are asset growth enablers for both communities. Noticeably, access to land, past history and social cohesion are also significant correlates of refugees’ asset dynamics. From a policy perspective, structural poverty traps are bad news, because standard anti-poverty interventions would not unlock the trap. Our results stress the need of more structural approaches aimed at promoting economic growth in the whole area where refugee and host communities live, targeting both communities.

Uganda is home to 1.5 million refugees from DRC, Burundi, South Sudan and other countries. The Uganda political framework is one of the most progressive and inclusive toward refugees. Only a fraction of the refugees is likely to revert to their home countries. The papers collected in this special issue assess Uganda's progressive refugee policy with reference to how it functioned in the era of COVID-19 using a unique panel data collected between 2017 and 2021. The findings of the special issue stress that the support to refugees and hosts is helping to manage daily challenges but not to ultimately get them out of poverty. Further, this support was insufficient to provide a comprehensive response to COVID-19. For the long-term sustainable integration and development, new policy approaches are needed.

The effects of COVID-19 have been highly heterogeneous, crucially depending on household livelihoods. In the context of households reliant on agri-food systems, the extent of these effects significantly depends on their position within the value chain. An assessment of the COVID-19 effects along the agri-food value chain and the identification of pivotal factors influencing these outcomes are key for designing appropriate responses and targeting the population most in need should a crisis akin to COVID-19 emerge in the future. Using a longitudinal dataset from Ethiopia, composed of a pre-COVID baseline and six follow-up phone-based surveys, this paper estimates the COVID-19-induced change in household income and job participation, tracing its evolution throughout seven months after the pandemic onset. Applying both longitudinal and cross-sectional econometric models, we show that the COVID-19 shock reduced both employment and income, with increasingly negative impacts over time. Despite initial resilience in the face of restrictive measures, farming eventually emerged as the most affected segment within the agri-food value chain over the medium term. Access to formal institutions such as insurance and credit services, formal contractual arrangements, and secured land ownership title played a key role in mitigating the likelihood of income loss.

Current approaches to measuring food and nutrition security (FNS) mainly consider past access to food, while assessing vulnerability and resilience to food insecurity requires a dynamic setting and sound predictive models, conditional to the entire set of food-related multiple-scale shocks and stresses as well as households' characteristics. The aim of this work is twofold: i) to review the state of the relevant literature on the conceptualization and the empirical measurement of vulnerability and resilience to food insecurity; ii) to frame the main coordinates of a possible unifying framework aiming at improving ex-ante targeting of policy interventions and resilience-enhancing programs. Our argument is that clarifying the relationships existing between vulnerability and resilience provides a better understanding and a more comprehensive picture of food insecurity that includes higher-order conditional moments and non-linearities. Furthermore, adopting the proposed unified framework, one can derive FNS measures that are: scalable and aggregable into higher-level dimensions (scale axiom); inherently dynamic (time axiom); conditioned to various factors (access axiom); applicable to various measures of food and nutrition as dependent variables (outcomes axiom). Unfortunately, the proposed unified framework shows some limitations. First, estimating conditional moments is highly data-demanding, requiring high-quality and high-frequency micro-level panel data for all the relevant FNS dimensions, not mentioning the difficulty of measuring risks/shocks and their associated probabilities using short panel data. Hence, there is a general issue of applicability of the proposed approach to typically data-scarce environments such as developing contexts. Second, there is an inherent tradeoff between the proposed approach in-sample precision and out-of-sample predictive performance. This is key to implement effective early warning systems and foster resilience-building programs.

This manual has been written to respond to the need of making available an exhaustive compilation in the Italian language of the main topics and problems of the political economy of development in poor countries. So far, a discussion of such topics in Italian has not been available. The drafting of this manual has benefitted from the teaching and research experience of several academics of the faculty of economics of the university of Florence. Part 1 focuses on key methodological approaches derived from the theory of collective choices. In turn, Part 2 discusses the orthodox and heterodox macroeconomic reforms applied in developing countries, and their problems. Part 3 illustrates the domestic policies that have been or should have been adopted in the field of food security, land reform, environmental sustainability, taxation, social spending, labor markets and population. Part 4 discusses then the domestic policy reforms in the field of international trade, foreign direct investments, capital flows and international migration. Last, Part 5 illustrates the historical experience of five policy regimes (i.e. the import substituting industrialization, redistributive approaches, the Asian Miracle, Washington Consensus, and Sustainable Development) that have been introduced in the non-socialist developing countries between the decolonization of the 1950s and the present time. The methodological approach followed in the manual starts from an evaluation of the real-life impact on growth, income distribution, the wellbeing of the population, and the environment of the policies adopted during each policy regime and in the main economic areas. Whenever the policy measures introduced in the past generated unsatisfactory results, the manual suggests possible alternatives inspired by the structuralist and Keynesian schools.

The overall objective of this paper is to assess the impact of a value chain development project – the AVCPO in the Bale region (Oromia, Ethiopia) – on smallholder households focusing on the relationship between the food security goal (SDG2) and other SDG-related outcomes such as education (SDG4) and collective action and social capital (SDG16).Possible co-benefits and synergies among the SDGs are explored using a variety of approaches ranging from instrument variable techniques to evaluate the project overall impact on the various SDGs, multi-valued treatment effect analysis to assess which project component is more effective in achieving the expected impacts, and causal mediation modelling to evaluate to what extent collective action and social capital can play a role in achieving food security and education.Our study shows that the aggregate impact is positive and significant on most of the considered outcomes, namely food security (SDG2) except diet diversification, education (SDG4) of girls but not of boys, and collective action (SDG16), while social capital (SDG16) is significant only as far as horizontal relationships within the community are created. Disentangling the aggregate impact, we show that combined treatments (e.g. training plus storage facilities and marketing through cooperatives) generally return larger impacts than stand-alone treatments (e.g. training only). Finally, our study finds that collective action (SDG16) is an important channel that favors food security improvement (SDG2) but only to a lesser extent better education (SDG4).

In recent years, a dramatic increase in Alternative Agri-Food Networks (AAFNs) has been interpreted by experts of the sector as triggered by innovative food supply chains capable to reconnect producers with consumers. Simultaneously, the worldwide growth of consumers’ initiatives towards AAFNs is reducing the distance with producers shortening the supply chain and enhancing its value added. Examples of these consumers’ experiences have been reported in Japan, Europe, the USA, and Canada, and differ according to the degree of participants’ commitment to the logistics and the management of the initiatives. In general terms, these experiences could represent instances of co-production practices involving thousands of citizens who are seeking quality, sustainable, healthy, and ethical products and services reducing the uncertainty of food credence attributes. In this framework, the overall objective of this paper is to contribute to the scanty literature on food associations and cooperatives co-producing private goods with citizens contributing to marketing services such as procurement, storage, pricing, and quality assurance. Specifically, the focus is on the experience of Camilla, a food consumption cooperative that recently established an outlet to stock and sell food and non-food quality goods in Bologna (Italy). Camilla is the first Italian experience of a shop self-managed by its customers - who are also the owners - who practice critical consumption by supplying organic products at fair and sustainable prices while promoting small local productions as well as Fair Trade productions. A deep, participatory, and immersive ethnographic project was carried out between January and October 2019 to understand the functioning, the motivations and the drivers underpinning the process of citizens’ self-organisation in the domain of the food sector. Results provide useful insights on the way in which these innovative AAFNs are organised and on the reasons pushing people to join these initiatives. Key questions emerging from outcomes of the Camilla case study are discussed from an empirical and theoretical point of view.

The objective of this paper is twofold: firstly, it analyzes the evolution of frauds in the Italian wine value chain over the period 2007–2015, and then, using a properly disaggregated social accounting matrix (SAM) of the Italian economy, it simulates the impact of wine frauds on the national economy in terms of growth, employment, value added and income. The wine industry is the sector most exposed to frauds within the Italian agro-food system accounting for 88% of total value of seized agro-food outputs. Most irregularities (95%) are made by only three agents, specifically individual wineries, bottlers-wholesalers and retailers. We estimated industry-specific SAM multipliers to assess the share of the Italian economy depending on irregular wine production. These activities account for 11.5% of specialized permanent crop farms output and over 25% of wine industry output. This is a sign of vulnerability of the wine industry: should a food scandal/scare determine a drop in consumers’ demand, the negative effect on production activities of these sectors may be large. The SAM was also used to perform an impact analysis adopting a counterfactual approach. Results show a slightly positive increase of value added (6 million euro) along with an overall decrease in the activity level (an output loss of 406 million euro and more than six thousand full time jobs lost). This contractionary effect can be explained with fraud rents. Indeed, the extra-profits from frauds do not activate the economy circular flow as most of them leak out to exogenous accounts such as the public administration and the rest of the world.

Urban population growth has raised concerns about food security. Agricultural systems are asked to satisfy a growing demand of food while addressing sustainability issues and facing resources constraints. Ecological footprints are widespread instruments for the study of human impact and dependence on natural resources. Amongst these tools, Land Food Footprint (LFF) is used to measure the land actually used to produce the food needed to satisfy the demand of a given region or country. Understanding the differences between alternative production methods and the gaps between available and needed land is a crucial issue in order to integrate food security and sustainability issues into the food system. The objective of this study is to analyse the Land Food Footprint of Tuscany (Italy) for both organic and conventional agriculture, taking into account the nexus of diet. In this aim, Land Food Footprint for the considered production processes is assessed under four different diet scenarios with different levels of animal protein consumption. The study suggests that the gap between land needed by organic and conventional agriculture varies considerably between vegetable and animal products. It confirms that organic agriculture needs more land than conventional one but the gap between land footprints shrinks because of dietary changes. In this study, the most important finding is that organic agriculture might feed the case study population if the diet shifts towards a reduced intake of animal protein. In fact, with a diet reduction of 50% in animal proteins, the organic land food footprint value is equal to the conventional land food footprint under the status quo diet scenario indicating that organic agriculture would be able to address food security issues if food consumption was properly adapted to agriculture carrying capacity.

This paper proposes a social accounting matrix (SAM)-based, counterfactual approach to assess the economy-wide impact of food fraud in a given country and applies it to the Italian economy. The empirical application uses primary data collected by the authority in charge of the monitoring and repression of fraud in food value chains between the years 2007 and 2015. This is a unique dataset to analyze the issue, although it includes only data on food fraud within the country. The results of the SAM simulations show that the share of economy directly and indirectly linked to the supply of irregular food products accounts for 0.5% of the total value of output and is able to activate up to 156 thousand labor units. The net impact of food fraud on output and employment in the whole economy is negative, with losses averaging up to 1.8 billion euros of output and of 20,000 jobs per year, with a relative impact significantly larger in agriculture than in the food industry. These figures reveal an intrinsic fragility of the agri-food system, especially in those subsectors featuring relatively large price elasticities such as quality products (e.g., wine, olive oil, cheese). The overall conclusion is that food fraud is not only a source of unfair competition to regular production activities but also has an overall contractionary impact on the whole economy due to its directly unproductive rent-seeking nature. [EconLit classifications: C67, L66, Q13].

Despite the mounting threats that tropical ecosystems face, conservation in the tropics remains severely under‐researched relative to temperate systems. Efforts to address this knowledge gap have so far largely failed to analyze the relationship between an author's choice of study site and that author's country of origin. We examined factors that motivate both foreign and domestic scientists to conduct research in tropical countries, based on a sample of nearly 3000 tropical conservation research articles. Many barriers that have historically deterred foreign research effort appear to have been overcome, although US scientists still respond negatively to safety concerns and distance. The productivity of local scientists is affected by corruption and lack of institutional support. Both foreign and in‐country scientists are increasingly working in places with more listed threatened species, but many regions still lack adequate conservation research. Although foreign scientists could be attracted to less‐studied areas through targeted grants, the long‐term solution must be to train and employ more local scientists.

This paper explores the linkages between international migration and household food and nutrition security (FNS). First, building on existing literature, we discuss the main microeconomic channels through which international migration may affect household FNS. Second, taking Bangladesh as a case study, we estimate the overall impact of international migration on the FNS of left-behind households. Third, by disentangling the overall effect, we assess the importance of the various microeconomic channels that link international migration to household FNS. The empirical results suggest that international migration has a positive impact on the quantity, quality and variety of food consumed by left-behind households. Our findings also suggest that international migration might be considered among the possible drivers of the so-called Bangladesh paradox, i.e. the exceptional progress in health and nutrition achieved by the country during a period of relatively poor economic performance.

Resilience—the capacity that ensures adverse stressors and shocks do not have long-lasting adverse consequences—has become a key topic in both scholarly and policy debates. More recently some international organizations have proposed the use of resilience to analyze food and nutrition security. The objective of the paper is twofold: (i) analyze what the determinants of household resilience to food insecurity are and (ii) assess the role played by household resilience capacity on food security outcomes. The dataset employed in the analysis is a panel of three waves of household surveys recently collected in Tanzania and Uganda. First, we estimated the FAO’s Resilience Capacity Index (RCI), combining factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Then probit models were estimated to test whether the resilience is positively related to future food security outcomes and recovery capacity after a shock occurs. In both countries, the most important dimension contributing to household resilience was adaptive capacity, which in turn depended on the level of education and on the proportion of income earners to total household members. Furthermore, household resilience was significantly and positively related to future household food security status. Finally, households featuring a higher resilience capacity index were better equipped to absorb and adapt to shocks.

The literature on environmental policy shows that institutional arrangements are key in designing effective environmental policies. Besides regulation and market (Coasian) solutions, grass root collective action has been advocated as a possible solution for the provision of agro-environmental public goods. We gauge that the same institutional arrangement can be found in many territorially integrated food chains that aims at re-embedding food production in the local society. Building on this literature, we present a case study - a short supply chain for bread production from ancient local wheat landraces in Tuscany – emphasizing the role played by collective action in maintaining high quality production in a context of severe information asymmetries.

The literature on environmental policy shows that institutional arrangements are key factors in designing effective environmental policies. Grass root collective action has been advocated as a possible solution for the provision of agro-environmental public goods. Building on this literature, we present a case study using a well-established theoretical framework emphasizing the role played by collective action in maintaining high quality production in a context of severe information asymmetries. We observed that several already known collective action features can be found in this successful experience. Maintaining such form of co-operation would help the chain to face the future challenges of the agricultural sector.

This paper assesses the impact of assistance on the wellbeing of Palestinian households. The impact evaluation analysis uses a difference-in-difference approach for the treatment of sample selection bias. The paper uses data from the 2013 and 2014 rounds of the Palestinian Socio-Economic and Food Security survey to estimate the impact of assistance to West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) households on their poverty and food security status. Results suggest that both poverty and food insecurity would have been much higher for WBGS as a whole without assistance, further increasing in areas with lower levels of assistance. However, the average positive impact of assistance hides a lot of heterogeneity. In fact, while there is a clear positive impact of the intensity of assistance on poverty reduction, food consumption and diet diversity in the West Bank, Gaza Strip analysis shows mixed results. Results highlight how the international community cannot disengage from supporting Palestinian households without severely impacting their wellbeing.

The main goal of this paper is to develop a methodology to quantitatively assess resilience to food insecurity. The developed methodology is applied to Nicaraguan rural households hit by Mitch Hurricane in 1999. The results show that the proposed resilience index is a good predictor of households’ food security. The proposed resilience index highlights small landowners and agricultural wage workers as less resilient vis-a-vis other livelihood groups. Moreover this paper shows how a resilience index can be used in policy impact evaluation.