Any calls to move towards a centrally planned economy or autarky are strongly advised against, as this would only be to the detriment of food security in the Global South.

Trade agreements with the European Union (EU) and Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) significantly influenced the liberalisation of agri-food products in Western Balkan (WB) countries. In all Western Balkan countries, there has been an intensification of the trade of agri-food products and a partial change in the regional and commodity structures of trade. This paper aims to identify comparative advantages of agri-food sectors and consider its tendencies during the EU integration process. Additionally, this paper will discuss some opportunities for improvement of the export positions of agri-food products. In that context and based on the literature review, the indexes of revealed comparative advantages and its modified version will be used as a main method for analysis in this research. Results showed that all Western Balkan countries, except Albania, have comparative advantages in exporting agri-food products. It is evident that Serbia has the highest level of comparative advantages in this sector. Moreover, this paper suggests that all countries should aim to provide the best possible positions for their agri-food products during pre-accession negotiations for EU membership and take the necessary steps towards increasing the level of competitiveness in the common EU market.

Although the concept of self-sufficiency has been accepted both in developed and developing countries, alternated with periods of its rejections, the food crisis from 2007/08 and COVID-19 pandemic returned focus to the availability of countries to be self-sufficient in food production. Considering the concerns over ensuring food security in many countries, the main objective of this paper is to estimate the ability to fulfill the feed demand of the population in the eight countries of South-East Europe (SEE), which is in crisis conditions, such as pandemic especially important. In that context, the food self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) is calculated for total food production, as well as for different food groups. The next step in the methodological framework was to estimate the influence of different factors on the self-sufficiency ratio, as it depends on natural, financial, economic, and political factors. The results show that the SEE region expresses a high level of SSR in food, so it shows that the region is quite ready to respond to the challenges posed by the crisis. However, as the SEE region is a group of very different countries, regional cooperation should be strengthened as food production is considered.

Trust in information originating from a company is becoming essential, as consumer preferences are increasingly versatile and oriented towards credence attributes. Social media, which emerged as a dominant means of online communication, might help increase consumers’ trust in companies. The paper empirically investigates a conceptual trust-building mechanism that could occur on companies’ social media pages. A survey was conducted among social media users in Belgrade (Serbia). The collected data were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling. It confirmed that in an interactive environment of companies’ social media pages, trust can be built towards two objects. The first one is trust among consumers, and the second one is trust towards a company. The results also confirm a connection between trust and an intention to purchase, both being also related to a consumer’s willingness to obtain information. Therefore, the result can serve as a basis for creating more effective marketing campaigns where a company is the source of information regarding credence (added-value) attributes of its products.

Over the last two decades, three countries in the Black Sea Region—Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan—became global leaders in grain production and trade, and replaced the USA and France as the most previous largest wheat exporting countries. In this study we investigate world wheat price linkages and identify the current “price leaders” of the global wheat market. This empirical analysis is focused on the price relationships between eight of the largest wheat exporting countries and uses a cointegration framework and a vector error-correction model. The results show that, regarding price formation on the world wheat market, the French price is more important for transmitting price signals to other wheat export markets compared to the USA. Furthermore, our results indicate that, despite being leaders in wheat export volumes, the Black Sea wheat prices in Russia and Ukraine adjust to price changes in France, the USA, and Canada. Albeit unrealistic in the short run, the creation of the futures market in the Black Sea region might significantly improve the participation of Black Sea markets in price formation of the global wheat market.

System dynamics and agent-based simulation modelling approaches have a potential as tools to evaluate the impact of policy related decision making in food value chains. The context is that a food value chain involves flows of multiple products, financial flows and decision making among the food value chain players. Each decision may be viewed from the level of independent actors, each with their own motivations and agenda, but responding to externalities and to the behaviours of other actors. The focus is to show how simulation modelling can be applied to problems such as fairness and power asymmetries in European food value chains by evaluating the outcome of interventions in terms of relevant operational indicators of interorganisational fairness (e.g., profit distribution, market power, bargaining power). The main concepts of system dynamics and agent-based modelling are introduced and the applicability of a hybrid of these methods to food value chains is justified. This approach is outlined as a research agenda, and it is demonstrated how cognitive maps can help in the initial conceptual model building when implemented for specific food value chains studied in the EU Horizon 2020 VALUMICS project. The French wheat to bread chain has many characteristics of food value chains in general and is applied as an example to formulate a model that can be extended to capture the functioning of European FVCs. This work is to be further progressed in a subsequent stream of research for the other food value chain case studies with different governance modes and market organisation, in particular, farmed salmon to fillet, dairy cows to milk and raw tomato to processed tomato.