Towards the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger: Exploring the Dynamic Relationships between Food Pricing, Agriculture, and Food Security - Volume II

Volume I of this Research Topic, hosted in the Agricultural and Food Economics section of Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, attracted 29 articles from 129 authors and surpassed 141,000 views, establishing a substantive evidence base on how food pricing, agriculture, and food security interact under SDG 2. The published contributions clustered around four strands: i) digitalisation and technology adoption in agriculture, including digital advisory services, blockchain in agri-food chains, and innovation-resource allocation for rural revitalisation; ii) trade, markets, and supply-chain resilience, including international agricultural trade-dependence networks and supply chains under pandemic stress; iii) climate adaptation and sustainable production, including sustainable cotton cultivation and mariculture under climate change; iv) and equity, gender, and nutrition-sensitive policy, including women's empowerment in rural settings and government food-subsidy programmes.Two patterns in Volume I motivate Volume II. First, the contributions were geographically concentrated, with a strong base of evidence from China, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, but limited representation from Africa or Latin America. Second, while Volume I richly described mechanisms, it left relatively little room for causal-inference designs, comparative cross-country work, and explicit evaluation of the wave of policy responses deployed since 2022, export restrictions, fertiliser subsidies, expanded social-protection and cash-transfer schemes, and price-stabilisation measures. Meanwhile, the global food system has continued to absorb compounding shocks: persistent geopolitical tensions affecting grain and fertiliser markets, intensifying climate extremes, El Niño-driven harvest losses, and uneven post-pandemic recovery that has disproportionately burdened informal urban populations and smallholder-dependent rural communities. The goal of Volume II is to assemble comparative, evaluative, and causally-identified evidence that moves the field from problem-mapping toward actionable, context-sensitive policy design with particular attention to under-represented regions, equity, gender, and the integration of nutrition outcomes.We welcome empirical analyses, causal-inference studies, comparative case work, mixed-methods research, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses that extend or revisit themes from Volume I. Submissions integrating nutrition outcomes, equity dimensions, climate adaptation, or under-represented regions are particularly encouraged. Subthemes include, but are not limited to:• Causal evidence on food-price transmission to household food security and nutrition• Evaluation of social-protection, cash-transfer, and food-subsidy reforms (2022-2025)• Climate shocks, El Niño, and price volatility in agricultural commodity markets• Trade-policy responses: export restrictions, fertiliser markets, and regional food security• Digital agriculture, AI, and precision farming - extending Volume I evidence on technology adoption• Gender, smallholders, and equitable access to food under price pressure• Urban food insecurity and the informal food economy• African and Latin American case studies, and cross-regional comparative work• Resilience measurement, early-warning systems, and nutrition-sensitive policy design Topic editors: Noshaba Aziz, Wioletta Żukiewicz-Sobczak, Hongguang Sui Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82216/towards-the-sustainable-development-goal-of-zero-hunger-exploring-the-dynamic-relationships-between-food-pricing-agriculture-and-food-security---volume-ii