Resilience indicators toolkit and resilience assessment
A short excerpt from Deliverable 1.3
January 2026
Author: L. Piscitello (Politecnico di Milano)
Resilience assessment and the capacity to resist, adapt, and recover from shocks
Global food supply chains have been increasingly tested by systemic shocks, from geopolitical tensions to climate and macroeconomic issues. In the MENA region, cereal supply chains are particularly vulnerable due to a heavy reliance on imports and variable local production. Egypt and Morocco, the two focus countries of the STAPLES project, exemplify these challenges: Egypt is projected to produce only 9.3 million tonnes of wheat in 2025 against a demand exceeding 20 million tonnes, while Morocco faces recurrent droughts that cause sharp year-to-year production swings. These vulnerabilities reinforce the need for resilient agrifood systems (Kenawy et al., 2025; Pratt., et al., 2018).
Resilience in this context refers to the capacity of a global supply chain to resist, adapt, and recover from shocks, ensuring food security and sustainability within the agrifood sector. Effective resilience requires understanding both vulnerability (exposure to risks and disruptions) and capacity to respond (ability to absorb, adapt, and recover from shocks). The framework organizes this capacity along three dimensions (Yang et al., 2025; Hosseini et al., 2019):
- Absorptive capacity (readiness before a shock)
- Adaptive capacity (flexible response during a shock)
- Restorative capacity (rapid recovery after a shock)
Mapping resilience: literature review
The research focuses on assessing resilience within the cereals Global Value Chain (GVCs) in Egypt and Morocco. The first step was a systematic literature review, run in January 2025, complemented by analysis of secondary data sources (including UNCTAD, FAO, and World Bank datasets). This analysis aimed at identifying existing metrics and indicators for evaluating resilience at two levels:
- Macro-level (country): indicators assess a country’s preparedness to anticipate and withstand stressors and shocks, and include both economic-based measures (e.g., import dependency, concentration indices) and network-based measures (e.g., centrality, connectivity in global trade networks).
- Micro-level (firm): indicators capture how firms respond across the three resilience phases, focusing on coping strategies, operational flexibility, and recovery capabilities.
The review classified indicators along two main dimensions: exposure and vulnerability, and response and recovery. This classification provides – together with the analysis conducted in Deliverable1.1 and Deliverable1.2 – a structured framework for understanding resilience across actors and scales in the agrifood system.
Surveying the cereal global value chain
Building on the literature review, a survey was developed to collect data from actors involved in the cereal GVC in Egypt and Morocco. The survey aims to map the firm-level strategies that companies used to cope with shocks experienced after 2020 such as trade disruptions, climate-related challenges, and international and regional conflicts.
The survey is structured in four sections aligned with the resilience framework:
- Firm profile
- Exposure to shocks
- Resilience capacities (absorptive, adaptive, restorative)
- Post-shock performance
The survey targets a representative sample of actors along the cereal value chain, including agricultural producers, storage operators, processors, and importers, and is being administered in coordination with ASCAME and the local Chambers of Commerce in both countries. Translations into French and Arabic have been developed to ensure accessibility across the target population.
The survey results, once finalised, will provide empirical evidence on how cereal GVC actors in Egypt and Morocco have responded to recent shocks. The collected data will be analysed through econometric modelling to identify the determinants of firm-level resilience.
More specifically, the analysis will:
- Identify the most effective indicators for measuring vulnerability and resilience across different types of actors along the value chain.
- Establish critical thresholds for these indicators — the values beyond which a firm’s capacity to absorb, adapt, or recover from shocks becomes compromised.
- Map the coping strategies that firms have implemented, distinguishing those that proved effective from those that did not.
These findings will feed into the Resilience Indicators Toolkit and inform the Decision Support System (DSS) developed within the project, providing policymakers and supply chain actors with actionable tools to monitor risks and strengthen preparedness.
Next steps in the analysis
Deliverable 1.3 provides the methodological backbone for resilience assessment in the STAPLES project. It translates the conceptual framework of supply chain resilience into operational tools:
- a validated set of indicators
- a structured questionnaire
- the critical thresholds, through econometric analysis, that will feed directly into the STAPLES Decision Support System
By combining a systematic literature review with primary data collected from actors in Egypt and Morocco, the deliverable bridges the gap between academic research and practical application. The result is an evidence-based toolkit that enables policymakers and supply chain actors to monitor vulnerabilities, benchmark resilience capacities, and identify the most effective strategies for coping with future shocks.
An overview of the project context of the deliverable
This deliverable plays a key role in operationalising the assessment of resilience across the cereal value chain. By translating the conceptual and analytical work developed in earlier tasks into a structured set of indicators and a data collection tool, it provides the basis for integrating empirical evidence into the project’s overall framework. This enables a consistent link between the analysis of structural vulnerabilities and the identification of practical, evidence-based strategies to strengthen resilience in the MENA region.
This deliverable was carried out within the framework of the STAPLES project, part of the PRIMA Programme, supported by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 2333. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the PRIMA Foundation or the European Union, and neither of them can be held responsible for the information contained.
