One of the main concerns worldwide is food security, considering the challenges created by climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine crisis, among others. In these scenarios, some of the main discussions by international organisations and governments are related to the design of the most adjusted policies to deal with food security and food sovereignty. The objective of this chapter is to assess the consequences of the most recent events on agricultural output worldwide. Data from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) databases were considered for the period 2012-2022 and the following variables: crop production (thousand hectares; tonnes/ha; thousand tonnes); and meat consumption (Kg/capita; thousand tonnes). The statistical information seems to highlight no relevant impacts from the events since 2019/2020, for example, in crop production and meat consumption worldwide.
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In globalised supply chains (Hamilton et al., 2020), the current international shocks create challenges for several stakeholders (Biadgilign & Yigzaw, 2020), including farmers (Burrone et al., 2022). They promote serious threats to the different economic sectors (Haque et al., 2021), workers (Lusk & Chandra, 2021), including migrants (Molinero-Gerbeau, 2021), rice cultivators (Niaz et al., 2022), human health (Madzorera et al., 2021), wildlife (van Vliet et al., 2022), commercialisation channels (Vargas et al., 2021) and environment (Liu et al., 2022). There is still a field to be explored regarding the environmental repercussions (Mahmud et al., 2021). The smaller farmers are generally the most affected by these events (Haqiqi & Bahalou Horeh, 2021). But, these events bring also opportunities (Usman et al., 2021) to deal, for example, with greenhouse gas emissions (Andrieu et al., 2021), carry out alternative assessments (Dentener et al., 2020) and promote eco-friendly productions (Arshad et al., 2022).
The impacts of these recent events have been unequal across countries, sectors, groups (Gatto & Islam, 2021) and farming systems (Tripathi et al., 2021), namely in terms of severity (Asegie et al., 2021), and, in some cases, the recovery will be long (Boughton et al., 2021). The consequences on cereals production and trade are particularly worrying in the most vulnerable countries (Selim & Eltarabily, 2022) and populations (Jha et al., 2021), specifically in rural areas (Sun et al., 2022). These events impacted the agricultural production and the decisions about the use of some resources (Johnson et al., 2022), as well as the farmers’ perceptions (Yuan et al., 2022).
Some countries are crucial for the cereal supply (Araujo-Enciso & Fellmann, 2020) and food security (Lioubimtseva & Henebry, 2012) worldwide (Meyfroidt et al., 2016), as well as specific regions and lands (Arsene & Nkulu Mwine Fyama, 2021). Food security is a current problem (Muthamilarasan & Prasad, 2021), namely in specific frameworks (Okoli, 2021), and it will continue to be among the most relevant research topics (Bartol, 2023). Wheat is one of the most important cereals for the diet of the world population (Gutiérrez-Moya et al., 2021). Rice has also its importance for world food security (Zhao et al., 2022).
Agricultural policies have a fundamental role in these frameworks (Pan et al., 2020), particularly the fiscal and monetary ones (Temesgen et al., 2022), however not always with the most adjusted instruments (Belasco & Smith, 2022). The policymakers and other stakeholders will have an important role to increase the resilience of the agricultural and food sectors (Vicente-Vicente et al., 2021), to better deal with unexpected shocks (Darnhofer, 2021), that may increase in the future (Karoliina et al., 2023). The promotion of shorter supply chains may be between better solutions (Yovchevska, 2021). Policy design and planning are critical for effective implementation (Sangha et al., 2022).