As these lines were written, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was continuing to threaten countries around the globe. The worldwide consensus that physical distancing is an effective instrument for mitigating the spread of the virus has led policymakers to temporarily limit the freedom of movement of people between and within countries, cities, and even neighborhoods. These public health-related restrictions on human mobility yielded an unprecedented fragmentation of international and national food distribution systems. Focusing on food retailing - usually being modestly oligopolistic - we take a micro-economic perspective as we analyze the potential consequences this disruption has for the physical as well as for the economic access of households to food at the local level. As the mobility constraints implemented substantially reduced competition, we argue that food retailers might have been tempted to take advantage of the implied fragmentation of economic activity by exploiting their temporarily raised market power at the expense of consumers and farmers. We illustrate our point by providing empirical evidences of rising wholesale-retail as well as farm-retail price margins observed during the Covid-19 crisis. Subsequently, we review existing empirical approaches that can be used to quantify and decompose the micro-economic effects of crises on food demand and supply as well as the size and structure of the market, costs of trade, and economic welfare. The employment of such approaches facilitates policymakers’ understanding of micro-economic effects of public health-induced mobility restrictions on economic activity.

The Russian Federation’s efforts to expand its regional political influence culminated in launching a full‐scale war of aggression on Ukraine on 24 February 2022. As both countries are large exporters of commodities crucial for global food and energy security, the resulting abrupt supply chains disruptions created substantial uncertainty in commodity markets worldwide. This study quantifies to what extent this major shock induced global commodity prices to move more synchronously by gauging their time‐varying comovement. Using the concordance index, it analyses the development of 15 key global commodity price indices from January 2010 to July 2022. We find that the supply chains disruptions increased synchronisation of grain, energy and fertiliser prices at the global level in direction and magnitude. Moreover, they resulted in contagion across numerous food and non‐food markets, creating a global covariate shock to food and energy security. Notably, the increased synchronisation at broad scale restricts the ability of consumers to mitigate the adverse effects of food and energy price inflation by resorting to inexpensive alternatives. Hence, policymakers must improve the resilience of global food supply chains sustainably such that adverse effects of attaining the Sustainable Development Goals in crises can be minimised.