Decomposing the Global Agri-Food Value Chains

The global agri-food value chains (GAFVCs) are complex networks involving a range of regions, industries, and resources (such as labor, capital, and imported inputs). The global value chains in the agri-food sector are of critical importance to the world’s food security, as well as its environmental and human health outcomes. Although the transformation of agri-food GVCs merits greater attention to design public and private interventions to promote economic and environmental sustainability, there is a dearth of research that quantifies the distribution of consumer food expenditures of value-added activities along the GVCs. In order to address this knowledge gap, by using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and United Nations (UN) statistical databases, we estimated the distribution of value added along the agri-food GVCs by primary factors (i.e., operating surplus, labor, taxes and subsidies, and imports) and by five major industry groups (i.e., agriculture, forestry, and fishing; wholesale, retail, and motor vehicle repair services; transportation; accommodation and food services; and manufacture of food products, beverages, and tobacco). In addition to describing the methodology for decomposing food dollars, this study applied the decomposition results to evaluate countries’ vulnerabilities to the GAFVCs disruptions, as an example of how to apply the extended food dollar series to conduct systematic, global, and economy-wide research. This effort provides a more comprehensive understanding of the different stages of the agri-food GVCs across regions, and the interactions between supply chain stages, primary factors, and regions, which contributes to the achievement of many of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in GAFVCs