STAPLES: strengthening resilience of cereal value chains

Countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions are particularly exposed to shocks in international food markets, and especially cereals, due to their low internal food production capacity and their high reliance on imports.

To address this challenge and increase the resilience of MENA food systems, the STAPLES project, coordinated by Politecnico di Milano, Department of Management Economics and Industrial Engineering, has kicked off.

The project, funded under the PRIMA programme and supported by Horizon Europe, brings together a consortium of nine partners from Italy, Spain, Egypt, and Morocco including universities, think tanks and research organisations, cooperatives and a multi country business network gathering several Chambers of Commerce and Industry of the Mediterranean region.

Over a timespan of three years, STAPLES aims at co-creating and disseminating new knowledge about the external stressors and shocks that are linked with global cereal value chains, along with potential solutions that local supply chain actors and policymakers can adopt to mitigate and manage effectively those destabilizing factors. Leveraging digital tools, new insights and data from available platforms will be integrated into a dashboard and a decision support system that will guide stakeholders in adopting evidence-based recommendations and actionable solutions identified by the project.

The POLIMI team is led by Prof. Federico Caniato and is composed of researchers from the Departments of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering (DIG) and Electronics, Information and Bioengineering (DEIB).

Altogether, they will be responsible for assessing the resilience of MENA’s cereal value chain, elaborating procurement recommendations for public and private storage, and developing digital tools informing private and public actors.

The project also sees the involvement of Fondazione Politecnico Milano who will support in project management and communication and dissemination activities.