COVID-19 has raised questions about the resilience of agri-food trade to global shocks to the system. This paper analyses the changes in agri-food trade (values, extensive and intensive margin and diversification) during the pandemic at global and regional level. It also considers parallels in the changes in agri-food trade and changes of various COVID-19-related factors (infections, deaths, mobility, policy stringency, industrial production output). The results show that changes in trade remained limited to short-term disruptions that mostly occurred at the extensive margin of trade and, primarily, at the height of policy stringency, mobility reductions and the overall reduction of economic output. The trade of staples was most resilient, while that of other agri-food products declined considerably. Inter-regional trade of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean proved generally more resilient than these regions’ intra-regional trade.

Recent trade disruptions and their consequences on supply chains show the importance of stable trade relations for exporters' economic planning and importers' supply security. Both instability in trading partners' economic 'government selection, monitoring, and replacement'; 'efficiency of policy formulation and implementation'; and 'respect of citizens and state for institutions'. Finally, we rank the importance of these attributes with regard to their impact on trade duration.We focus on agri-food exports from SSA countries to the individual EU-28 members for several reasons. In many countries in SSA, the agri-food sector has the largest share in GDP and trade, indicating the importance of this sector. The EU-28 and even several individual EU-28 countries are major destinations for SSA agri-food exports (WITS, 2021; World Bank, 2021a; World Bank, 2021b) 2 whereas the duration of these trade relationships are low 1 Countries worldwide have recently implemented institutional reforms as the drawbacks of institutional instabilities are evident (Boudreaux and Holcombe, 2018;Kanani and Larizza, 2021). Countries are also concerned about the stability of their trade relationships (WTO, 2018;Huang et al., 2020). 2 The Netherlands, the UK and France are the top three destinations of food products from SSA (WITS, 2021).partners supports the stability of trade links and should be carefully considered when establishing new trade relations.

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