One of the most important features in the international trade over the recent decades has been the increased fragmentation of the production process. This has been facilitated, in part, by the development and maturation of global value chains (GVCs).The improved availability of value-added trade data allows us to identify more clearly what fragment in the production chain is internationally competitive in a particular country. The paper examines global agri-food export performance in the light of these changes with special emphasis on the impacts of economic crisis using the concept of normalised revealed comparative advantage (NRCA) in terms of both gross exports and value-added for 61 countries over period 1995 and 2011. Systematically comparing these distributions reveals significant differences for NRCA based on gross exports versus value-added data.