Agri-Food Systems as Critical Infrastructure: Rethinking National Resilience and Security
Editor’s Note:
This essay is from the Security & Defence PLuS Emerging Voices Series, which highlights the next generation of scholars and practitioners shaping thinking on strategy, security, and defense. The series brings together perspectives from PhD candidates and early career researchers, grounded in the complex geopolitical realities of the 21st century.
The collection explores a “Latticework of Resilience” that connects often-overlooked sectors, such as subnational diplomacy and critical infrastructure inherent in agriculture security, to the core of national security. Taken together, the essays emphasize the importance of adaptive, multidisciplinary approaches to building resilience in an increasingly complex global environment.
The first event in the Emerging Voices series was held at Arizona State University on 2 March 2026, with events to follow at King’s College London and UNSW. Watch the event recording: The Emerging Voices Series: Strategy, Security & Defence at Arizona State University.
National security is often framed in terms of military capabilities, technological competition, and geopolitical strategy. Yet recent global disruptions – from the COVID-19 pandemic to supply chain crises and geopolitical conflicts – have exposed a critical gap in this perspective. The stability of nations depends not only on defense systems, but on the resilience of the infrastructures that sustain everyday life by ensuring economic and social well-being. Among these critical infrastructures, agri-food systems stand out as foundational yet under-recognized. While they are typically viewed as economic sectors, agricultural and food systems are, in reality, complex infrastructures that connect production, processing, transportation, trade, and consumption across local and global scales. When these systems function effectively, they remain largely invisible; when they fail, the consequences are immediate and far-reaching, affecting economic stability, public health, and social cohesion. Recognizing agri-food systems as critical infrastructure is therefore essential to modern conceptions of national security.
From Efficiency to Resilience
For decades, food supply chains have been shaped by a pursuit of efficiency. Advances in logistics, trade liberalization, and technological innovation have enabled food to be produced at scale and transported across vast distances at relatively low cost, significantly improving availability and affordability. However, this efficiency has come with the expense of redundancy as such optimally designed systems often rely on tightly coupled interconnections, limited alternatives, and just-in-time logistics. While these features enhance performance under normal conditions, they also amplify vulnerabilities during disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these weaknesses through labor shortages, processing bottlenecks, and disruptions in transportation networks, while the war in Ukraine demonstrated how shocks in key production regions can reverberate across global markets, affecting prices and access far beyond the immediate area of conflict. These events underscore the extent to which agri-food systems operate as deeply interconnected networks, where farms, processing facilities, transportation hubs, ports, and markets are linked through flows of goods, information, and resources.
Within such networks, disruptions rarely remain localized. Instead, they propagate through interdependencies in ways that are often difficult to anticipate. A disruption in one component, such as a processing facility or transportation corridor, can alter flows across the entire system, leading to secondary effects that may be more severe than the initial shock. For example, the temporary closure of a major processing plant does not simply reduce local capacity; it can redirect supply flows, create bottlenecks elsewhere, and increase pressure on already constrained infrastructure. These cascading dynamics reveal that systemic risk in agri-food systems is not only a function of individual component failures, but of the structure of the network itself. In particular, concentration, lack of redundancy, and limited substitutability between supply chain entities can significantly increase the likelihood of widespread disruption.
Transportation infrastructure plays a particularly central role in shaping these dynamics. Railways, highways, and ports serve as the backbone linking production regions to consumption centers, both domestically and internationally. Disruptions to these systems – whether due to extreme weather, infrastructure failure, or geopolitical constraints – can propagate rapidly, leading to shortages and price volatility in distant regions. At the same time, structural dependencies within supply chains, such as reliance on a small number of dominant processing facilities, can create “too-big-to-fail” conditions in which localized failures generate system-wide consequences, as observed in the meat processing sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. These patterns highlight the importance of understanding not only where critical infrastructure exists, but how it is embedded within broader system dynamics.
Transparency of System Characteristics
A critical yet often overlooked dimension of resilience lies in system visibility. While much attention has been given to physical infrastructure and supply chain structure, less emphasis has been placed on the ability of decision-makers to observe, interpret, and respond to system dynamics in real time. Agri-food systems are frequently characterized by fragmented data, limited transparency, and incomplete knowledge of interdependencies. As a result, policymakers and practitioners often lack the information necessary to identify vulnerabilities, anticipate disruptions, or coordinate effective responses. This lack of visibility is not merely a technical limitation; it is a structural barrier to resilience. Without a clear understanding of how components are connected and how flows evolve under stress, interventions may be misdirected or delayed.
Improving resilience therefore requires investment not only in physical infrastructure but also in open knowledge systems, data integration, and analytical tools that provide visibility into supply chain operations. Such visibility enables a shift from reactive crisis management to proactive risk identification and strategic planning. However, achieving this level of transparency is inherently challenging. Agri-food systems involve a wide range of actors, including private firms, public agencies, and international organizations, each with their own incentives and constraints. Data sharing may be limited by concerns over confidentiality, competition, and security. As such, enhancing visibility requires not only technological solutions, but also institutional arrangements that facilitate trust, coordination, and governance across stakeholders.
These governance challenges become even more complex for the national agri-food system in the context of global trade. The U.S. agri-food systems are deeply embedded in international markets, with countries relying on imports for key commodities such as grains, fertilizers, and animal feed. This interconnectedness can enhance resilience by providing access to alternative sources of supply, but it also introduces exposure to geopolitical risks, trade restrictions, and disruptions in critical supply routes. Export bans, trade disputes, and instability in key producing regions can quickly translate into domestic shortages or price volatility. In this sense, resilience is not solely a domestic concern, but a function of global system dynamics. Policies aimed at increasing self-sufficiency may reduce exposure to external shocks, but can also introduce inefficiencies and reduce flexibility. Conversely, highly globalized systems may be efficient but more susceptible to cascading international disruptions. Managing this balance requires a nuanced understanding of how global interdependencies shape local outcomes.
At the same time, the increasing digitalization of agri-food systems introduces an additional layer of complexity. Digital platforms, data systems, and automated processes are now central to coordinating production, logistics, and distribution. These technologies can enhance efficiency and enable greater system visibility, but they also create new vulnerabilities. Cyber risks, system failures, and disruptions to digital infrastructure can have cascading impacts on supply chain operations, affecting everything from logistics coordination to resource allocation. As agri-food systems become more digitally integrated, resilience must encompass both physical and cyber dimensions. This requires not only securing digital infrastructure, but also ensuring that systems are robust to failures and capable of operating under degraded conditions.
Resilience to What, For Whom?
Beyond system-level considerations, resilience must also be evaluated in terms of its distributional impacts. Not all communities experience disruptions in the same way. Low-income households, rural populations, and regions with limited infrastructure often face greater risks of food insecurity during crises. This raises a fundamental question of resilience for whom? A system may continue to function at an aggregate level while still failing to meet the needs of vulnerable populations. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated this dynamic, as overall food availability remained relatively stable in many contexts while access became more difficult for certain groups due to price increases, income shocks, and disruptions in local distribution networks. Addressing these disparities requires incorporating equity considerations into resilience planning, ensuring that policies account for both system performance and distributional outcomes.
These considerations have significant implications for policy and system design. Recognizing agri-food systems as critical infrastructure calls for a shift from reactive to proactive approaches, with greater emphasis on identifying vulnerabilities and strengthening systems in advance of disruptions. It also necessitates integrated, cross-sectoral strategies that account for interdependencies between food systems and other infrastructures, including transportation, energy, water, and trade. Central to this effort is the development of data-driven and decision-oriented frameworks that leverage improved visibility to inform policy and investment decisions.
Importantly, advancing resilience requires moving beyond descriptive analyses toward prescriptive approaches that address how systems should be designed. This involves formulating and solving complex decision problems under uncertainty, where policymakers must balance competing objectives such as efficiency, resilience, cost, and equity. Questions such as where to invest in infrastructure, how to allocate resources during disruptions, and how to design supply chains that are both robust and adaptable cannot be answered through intuition alone. They require analytical frameworks that can capture system interdependencies, model disruption scenarios, and evaluate trade-offs across multiple dimensions.
In this sense, resilience analysis requires not only understanding existing vulnerabilities, but also proactively shaping system structure to mitigate risk. This includes decisions about redundancy, diversification, and connectivity, as well as the development of mechanisms that enable rapid adaptation in the face of uncertainty. These design choices must be informed by data and supported by models that can provide decision-relevant insights, rather than purely descriptive analysis.
However, it is essential to recognize that resilience involves inherent trade-offs. Increasing redundancy, enhancing transparency, and diversifying supply chains can introduce additional costs and complexity. Policymakers must therefore navigate these trade-offs carefully, balancing short-term efficiency gains against long-term system stability. The costs of building resilience are often visible and immediate, while the benefits are realized only in the face of disruption, making investment decisions particularly challenging.
Future of Agri-Food Related National Security
Looking ahead, the challenges facing agri-food systems are likely to intensify. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, affecting both production and infrastructure. Geopolitical dynamics will continue to shape trade patterns and supply chain stability, while technological changes will transform how food is produced, distributed, and managed. In this context, resilience must be understood as a dynamic and evolving process, requiring continuous adaptation and learning.
Ultimately, national security depends not only on defending against external threats but also on sustaining the systems that underpin daily life. Agri-food systems are central to this mission. Reframing food systems as strategic infrastructure is therefore both a conceptual and practical imperative. It requires recognizing interdependencies, addressing structural vulnerabilities, and investing in the visibility, transparency, and analytical capabilities needed to manage complex systems effectively. By placing agri-food systems at the center of resilience and security discussions, it becomes possible to advance a more comprehensive, adaptive, and forward-looking understanding of national security in the twenty-first century.
