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While the FAO Food Price Index saw a minor increase in July, it remains 16 percent below its July 2022 levels. Rising vegetable oil prices drove the month-to-month increase.

Multilateral trade negotiations over agriculture present a complex set of challenges: Finding a balance between the diverse interests and positions of the 164 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is exceedingly difficult due to the importance and varied sensitivities of this sector across countries. Those with significant agrifood exports want new market opportunities and thus promote greater trade liberalization; other members, generally importers, prefer to focus on increasing domestic production and protecting their domestic markets.

Russia’s July 17 withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI), has sparked fears of reduced exports of wheat and other key commodities to developing countries, along with other market disruptions.

On July 20, India announced that it would restrict exports of non-basmati rice to calm domestic rice prices that had risen more than 30% since October 2022 (Figure 1). The ban would halt overseas sales of the grain with “immediate effect,” the government announced, and is estimated to cover about 75%-80% of Indian rice exports.

With the world already reeling from the high food prices and other economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the outbreak of conflict in Ukraine in February 2022 again raised the specter of a major global food security crisis. Since that time, analysis of the extant and potential future impacts of the conflict on food and fuel prices, trade, food security, and poverty has been a primary focus for policymakers, researchers, and development professionals around the world.