Agri-food systems as critical infrastructure: Rethinking national resilience and security

(USDA)

By Deniz Karakoc • May 29, 2026

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 wellbeing. 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.

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.