Abstract
Abstract This study investigates the principal determinants behind the recent escalation in global food commodity prices and evaluates their implications for food security across Arab nations amid an evolving risk of a global food crisis from 2020 to 2025. Utilizing machine learning techniques, the research analyzes price trends during the period (2000–2024), identifying the key factors on both the supply and demand sides that affect ricing prices, with a focus on period 2020-2024, which witnessed some global shocks. The results indicate a significant increase in the global food consumer price index, rising by about 51.4% in 2022 compared to pre-crisis levels in 2015, with more pronounced increases in North Africa reaching 105.4%, Libya and Egypt experienced increases of 115.8 % &150.8%, respectively, these fluctuations are attributed to a range of interconnected factors, including the ongoing social and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, rising energy costs, and supply chin disruptions resulting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in addition there has been an expansion in biofuel production. The Arab countries, which are characterized by their high reliance on food imports, have been exposed to imported inflation, a significant increase in food import expenses, and a weakened local capacity to ensure access to nutrition, undermining regional food security. The study highlights the urgent need for strategic interventions, that enhanced the resilience of the agricultural sector and diversify supply networks to mitigate future price shocks. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Keywords: food commodity prices, global food crisis, Arab food security, machine learning, supply chain disruption.