Jasmin Wehner

Global and open trade fosters peace, economic prosperity and food security worldwide, but it faces growing instability due to multidimensional factors. A range of new developments threaten the resilience of trade networks, with direct implications for food security. These include escalating conflicts along cereal trade routes, supply‐chain disruptions such as COVID‐19, high food inflation affecting exchange terms, China's increasing dominance in global trade, fluctuating yields due to climate change and rising food demand in high‐growth countries. Appropriate policy responses are difficult to implement and typical short‐term responses such as export bans, quotas or higher import tariffs tend to transfer vulnerabilities to other countries and to amplify global market volatility rather than to stabilise it. To address these challenges, policymakers need to first evaluate if and when to respond to these disruptions, and hence need to assess the relative importance of these threats. This paper first identifies six major influences on the world's economy that have the potential to disrupt trade flows: Conflicts, COVID‐19, Currency, China, Climate change and inCome (the 6Cs). Second, it seeks to identify which of these factors are most relevant to cereal trade, using a gravity model of trade combined with the machine learning LASSO and Random Forest techniques. Results show that high income growth, China's weight and climate change are more consistently associated with trade fluctuations than abrupt events like COVID‐19 or conflicts. Trade participation is more vulnerable to abrupt events than trade intensities, while instability from exporter countries matters more than from importer countries. Results differ by region, with Africa and Asia being more subject to global risk. These insights guide policymakers in assessing the importance of disruptions on trade fluctuations and prioritising responses that enhance trade resilience and food security globally.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) represents one of the main initiatives of the European Union (EU) to develop and enhance agricultural sectors. This paper applies text mining and clustering to analyse changes in the CAP's main policy objectives based on 495 legislative texts adopted by the European Parliament. We develop an SSCIR‐3F analysis framework that identifies five core CAP policy concerns—food security (S), sustainability (S), competitiveness (C), farmer income (I), and rural development (R), abbreviated as SSCIR—illustrates their internal conflicts using the conflict triangle, and explains their changing importance over time using agricultural development stage theory (food, farm, and future, 3F). The text mining results show that the importance of these five dimensions has gradually shifted. Sustainability has become the most prominent dimension in recent years, followed by farmer income, food security, and rural development. Clusters of documents further support this trend, with two clusters emphasising biodiversity, ecosystems, forests, and climate change. The changing trend of budget allocation also supports our results that the major concerns of CAP have been shifting over time. Overall, the evolving SSCIR priorities indicate that the CAP is moving towards a fairer, greener, and more flexible direction.

In July 2025, we conducted a study with 935 participants on consumer willingness to pay for cucumbers in Lexington, Kentucky. We find that the more expensive a cucumber, the less consumers are willing to buy a cucumber. At USD 2 to 2.5 per slicing cucumber, buyers and non-buyers are nearly evenly split (53 percent vs. 47 percent).Price and minimal pesticide use are key attributes for consumers across age groups. Nearly half of consumers (45 percent) say price is a key factor, while 36 percent care a lot about fewer pesticides and 34 percent prioritize cucumbers with no pesticides at all. Most respondents are highly concerned about pesticides during production (36 percent) and residues on food (50 percent), while concern and knowledge about plastics, especially in production are much lower (14 percent).Highlighting the reduction in pesticide use from protective netting and clarifying that extra plastic is only used in production can help researchers and producers anticipate consumer preferences and tailor communication strategies accordingly.