The Ties That Bind: The Ukraine War and African Food Dependency

The Ukraine war had severe but uneven effects on African food markets. I argue that corridor dependency, defined as reliance on Russian and Ukrainian cereals, drove this variation. I develop a Black Sea Corridor Dependence (BSCD) metric, which captures the three-year prewar share of cereals imported from Russia and Ukraine in a country’s total cereal supply, and contrast it with the FAO Cereal Import Dependency Ratio (CIDR). Using a difference–in–differences design with country and year fixed effects and the FAO Indicator of Food Price Anomalies (IFPA) as the outcome, I compare countries above and below the median on each metric. Countries with higher BSCD experienced a 0.78 standard-deviation larger post-2022 increase in IFPA, while CIDR shows no effect. Mechanism checks indicate that the result is corridor-level, rather than driven by either supplier alone, and robustness checks support the design. Effects are strongest where supplier concentration and limited substitution capacity coincide, clarifying the scope conditions for external validity. Empirically, this study quantifies the conflict’s realized impact in Africa. Theoretically, it offers an empirical operationalization of relational dependency and links that structure to observed price outcomes. Draft Paper