STAPLES – Stable food Access and Prices and Lower Exposure to shocks

STAPLES - Stable food Access and Prices and Lower Exposure to shocks

The STAPLES project aims to enhance policymakers' understanding of external shocks that can threaten the stability of food access, availability, and utilization, with a particular focus on the MENA region, especially Egypt and Morocco. Countries in this area are highly dependent on cereal imports to meet domestic food demand due to limited internal production caused by water scarcity.
To address this challenge and strengthen the resilience of MENA’s food systems, the STAPLES project has been launched, under the coordination of the Department of Management, Economics, and Industrial Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI).

Partners

Funded under the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA) programme and supported by Horizon Europe, the project brings together a consortium of nine partners from Italy, Spain, Egypt, and Morocco. These include three universities (POLIMI, UNISG, UIZ), three think tanks and research organizations—including the Collegio Carlo Alberto (CCA), the Economic Research Forum (ERF), and the Euro-Mediterranean Economists Association (EMEA)—two cooperatives (BRADANO and Al Madina), and a multi-country business network (ASCAME), which connects multiple Chambers of Commerce and Industry across the Mediterranean region.

Project objectives

Over a period of three years, STAPLES aims to co-create and disseminate new knowledge on external stressors and shocks affecting global cereal value chains (GVCs). The project will explore practical solutions that public and private actors within local supply chains can implement to mitigate and manage destabilizing factors. By leveraging digital tools, new insights and data from existing platforms will be integrated into a dashboard and decision support system, helping stakeholders adopt evidence-based recommendations and actionable solutions.

The CCA team, led by Prof. Giorgia Giovannetti and co-coordinated by Prof. Alessia Amighini, with the support of a researcher from the same institute, will focus on assessing the integration and dependence of MENA countries in cereal trade networks using network analysis. This approach recognizes that trade relationships are interdependent rather than isolated.

The research will begin by determining each country’s role and connectivity within the network, assessing the strength of their trade relationships. A multi-scenario analysis will then be conducted to evaluate potential future stressors and shocks from international markets and their impact on the supply chain. Once the existing stressors and shocks have been identified, a resilience assessment of MENA’s cereal value chain will be conducted to determine its weaknesses and strengths. This will be achieved by linking external stressors and shocks to quantitative resilience indicators at three levels: micro (e.g., firm), meso (e.g., sector, region, sector-region, value chains, and/or cluster), and macro (e.g., country).