Black Sea wheat exporters, led by Russia, dominate Egypt's wheat imports via a tender system. The tenders are managed by the GASC and their outcomes are communicated worldwide by financial news agencies. Building on a transaction‐specific dataset on GASC tenders (2011 ‐ 2019), results of our cointegration analysis find wheat export markets of Russia, France and the USA highly integrated with the GASC tender price. Estimates from the multivariate VECM indicate strong price interdependencies between the GASC tender price and Russian and French export prices, indicating fierce competition in the GASC tender market. Despite the high market share of wheat exporters in the Black Sea region and Russia in particular, tests on weak exogeneity suggest a leading role of the French wheat export price. We further find that leadership of US wheat prices is weak in the GASC tender market.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the top destination for Russian food exports, grains in particular. Focusing on Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, this chapter shows that Russia’s food trade with MENA countries is strongly affected by bilateral political relations. Russia banned most food imports from Turkey over a political conflict in 2016. In the same year, improved intergovernmental cooperation with Saudi Arabia resulted in a diversification of Russia’s food exports to the Gulf country, and in 2019, Iran’s accession to the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) led to increasing food trade with Russia. Food imports in MENA countries are usually managed by powerful state trading enterprises (STEs), which recurrently disapprove food products originating from Russia based on non-adherence to food quality standards. Our analysis shows that Russia is successfully working to open additional destination markets, while simultaneously impeding imports of food products that it aims to produce domestically.

Russia’s food policy has been defined by the quest for food security for more than a decade, which in the Russian context includes import protectionism, self-sufficiency, and import substitution, marked by the adoption of Food Security Doctrines in 2010 and 2020. This chapter first investigates the impact of food security policy on domestic production. Food security policy has combined with an increase in state support for domestic production, leading to notable increases in output and self-sufficiency for selected commodities. The chapter also examines the impact of food security on agri-food exports, which have become a priority since 2018. Although Russia has become a leading exporter of wheat, the influence of food security is seen by the introduction of export quotas on grain starting in 2020. Despite protectionism, Russia has not withdrawn from the international food market but rather is an active and significant player as both food importer and exporter.

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