Market Access

With one in six people around the world almost entirely dependent on international trade to meet their food needs, agricultural trade can clearly play a pivotal role in both addressing and exacerbating food security challenges. While progress has been made to bring attention to food security needs in trade negotiations in recent years, harmful policies like temporary food export restrictions are still a common reaction to price spikes, market disruptions, and production shortfalls – shocks that are likely to become increasingly frequent due to climate change and ongoing conflicts.

In 2019, an estimated 690 million people around the world were undernourished, and nearly 3 billion people were unable to afford healthy diets. The world has the potential to make significant progress in reducing those numbers by 2030 – with the right investments.

With the Russia-Ukraine conflict disrupting global supply chains, roiling markets and raising food and fuel prices, some governments have responded with restrictions on agricultural exports. While these policies may be domestically appealing, however, they have wider ramifications for global food prices and food security, according to the May AMIS Market Monitor. The report emphasizes that restrictive trade measures like export restrictions will further limit available food stocks, raise food and fuel prices even higher, and push poor populations into more acute food security.

Economic growth in developing countries is often constrained by a lack of access to regional and global markets. Without reliable access to fair, transparent markets, the poor in developing countries stand little chance of escaping poverty and hunger. In recent years, the call for structural reforms of global markets has increased, focusing largely on protectionist trade policies such as export restrictions and tariffs.

The HarvestChoice AgMarketFinder Tool is a collaborative development innovation from IFPRI , Esri , and SpatialDev .