Trade, value chains and food security. Background paper prepared for The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2015–16

The aim of this paper is to present possible directions of research for investigating the relationship between trade and food security by taking into account the role of production fragmentation and the degree of participation of farmers in the different stages of the GVCs. To this end, the paper first introduces the topic, with a specific focus on the agri-food industry and provides a synthetic picture of the state of the art of the empirical analysis. Then, it focuses on two lines of research: the first one, at the macro level, deals with the emerging literature on tracing the value added of countries’ trade flows; the second one, at the micro level, makes use of the new household panel data with a strong focus on agriculture and rural development. Finally the conclusions present some policy implications related to the rising of GVCs.