Food resilience is reshaping global trade

International conflicts, embargoes, tariffs, regional wars, epidemic threats and climate disasters such as droughts, floods and El Niño are putting pressure on food systems. Whatever the crisis, the effects are similar: trade, industrial production and supply chains are disrupted.

The past several years have become a testing ground for food systems that support both domestic supply and international trade. Many governments now want to protect themselves against losing that resilience. Across developed countries, this has produced a race toward food security, described as “resilience” by the United States, Brazil, China and Japan, as well as by the European Commission and EU member states.

The scope of each strategy depends on how a government positions its country in the world and on its level of economic development. In July 2025, the US government announced the National Farm Security Action Plan, prepared by the Department of Agriculture. The plan describes American agriculture as central to national security and aims to address urgent threats from foreign adversaries while strengthening food and agricultural systems.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins explained the strategy’s central rationale on the day it was published: “We feed the world. We lead the world. And we will never allow foreign adversaries to control our land, our laboratories or our livelihoods.” The plan’s “Put America First” approach also calls for identifying partners, in practice countries that could cooperate with the United States if domestic production were unavailable.

China has taken a similar approach through a different framework. Its parliament adopted the Food Security Law in December 2023. The law seeks to ensure adequate reserves of agricultural products, especially grain, while also shaping domestic production, food trade and import and export policy. For the first time, it formally set food self-sufficiency as an objective and established a moderate import policy. Chinese tariffs on EU dairy products and pork, along with beef quotas and tariffs on global suppliers, are presented as partly political but also as tools for managing the domestic market.

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We feed the world. We lead the world. And we will never allow foreign adversaries to control our land, our laboratories or our livelihoods.