Unlocking Somalia’s food production: the role of trade openness, poverty, and institutional quality

Food production remains an elusive aspiration for Somalia, persistently undermined by entrenched poverty and fragile governance systems. Limited integration into global trade networks further exacerbates the nation’s struggle to secure stable and nutritious food supplies. Therefore, this study investigates the links between these variables and their influence on food production using sophisticated econometric approaches such as the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL), dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), and Granger causality tests over the period 1991–2020. The findings indicate that trade openness significantly enhances food production by 0.019%, whereas poverty significantly constrains farmers’ productive capacity—through limited access to inputs, credit, and technology—by 0.42%. Although institutional quality holds conceptual significance, its direct effect on food production seems minimal, indicating that meaningful enhancements in governance may necessitate an extended period. Considering the results, Somalia’s pathway to sustainable food production hinges on transformative approaches that actively dismantle poverty barriers, strategically open trade channels, and patiently nurture institutional maturity to foster long-term resilience in the food system.