The current world economy has suffered a great crisis since 2008, which has affected all western countries and industries. With this approach, this paper attempts to analyse its effects on European Union (E.U.) exports, particularly on agro-food exports. The main objective of this study is to analyse export competitiveness in order to identify the strongest and weakest countries in E.U. between 2007 and 2012, being the former the previous year to the beginning of the current crisis and the latter the last year with available data about exports and deflators. These data have been homogenized by transforming them into constant 2007 prices. The Shift-Share methodology is used, complemented with different elasticities to describe other interesting regional dynamics. Finally, econometric relationships between them and the elasticity of regional development are established. Among the main conclusions, the strength of the European agro-food sector must be highlighted. By using econometric models, it can be observed then that a strengthening of the agro-food sector could have a positive impact on the development of these countries. Finally, from the disaggregated results, an important role of the eastern countries is observed in this sector.