Food Industry Development, Export Performance, and Sustainable Agricultural Value Added in Algeria: An ARDL Approach to Environmental and Food Production Policy

This study evaluates the contribution of the food and beverage industry and food and beverage exports toward sustainable agricultural development in Algeria.Considering the pressure for food security, resource scarcity, and the imperative for diversification away from hydrocarbons, the paper poses whether agro-industrial activities enhance the agricultural value added and addresses the food system resilience and sustainable development of the environment.The study analyzes the annual data of the National Office of Statistics of Algeria and uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), bounds testing approach to analyze the short and long run relationships of agricultural value added, gross production of the food industries, and food and beverage exports.The findings affirm that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship among the stated variables.It is shown that in the long-run, a 1% increase in gross production of the food industries is associated with a 0.491% increase in agricultural value added, and a 1% increase in food and beverage exports would yield a 0.107% increase in agricultural value added.The error-correction coefficient showed that around 82% of short-run deviations from the long-run equilibrium are corrected within a year.This shows that the food-processing and export capacity may be associated with stronger the agricultural development of Algeria, sustainably framing agro-industrial growth, the reduction of post-harvest losses, and the environmentally sustainable food production policy.