Food System Efficiency May Come at a Cost to Resilience

Food systems designed around efficiency may not necessarily prove the most resilient when shocks occur.

In a world increasingly affected by extreme weather and rapidly shifting geopolitical conditions, redundancy should not always be viewed as inefficiency. A new global study suggests that alternative food sources can help countries absorb shocks without letting them translate into worsening food insecurity.

Some apparent redundancy can effectively function as insurance.– Christophe Béné, Alliance of Bioversity International

“Our analysis looks at the diversity of sources through which countries obtain their food. We find that greater food-supply redundancy is associated with a greater ability to buffer shocks and limit their translation into worsening food insecurity,” Christophe Béné, lead author of the paper and principal scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, told Olive Oil Times.

Food systems encompass everything involved in feeding a population, from production and processing to transport, storage, distribution and consumption, along with the institutions, infrastructure and markets that support those activities.

Béné said the study does not suggest that efficiency is undesirable. Instead, it indicates that optimizing an “individual value chain” — the sequence of activities and businesses involved in bringing a specific food product to consumers — “may not necessarily optimize the resilience of the food system as a whole.”

“What may look redundant under normal conditions can become extremely valuable when one source or route is disrupted,” he said.

Within individual value chains, reducing unused capacity, limiting storage or relying on fewer suppliers can make economic sense.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was conducted by 27 researchers from institutions worldwide. They examined data from 87 countries between 2011 and 2019, analyzing 11 factors that could influence how well food systems withstand shocks.

Those factors included the severity of shocks countries experienced, income levels, government effectiveness, social capital, food-price volatility and the availability of alternative sources of food.

To measure the latter, the researchers used the FAO’s Dietary Sourcing Flexibility Index, which assesses the diversity of food available through domestic production, stocks and imports, and therefore the availability of alternative sourcing options when disruptions occur.

“Our finding highlights that across countries, the severity of shocks alone does not determine how badly food security is affected,” Béné said.

To examine that relationship, the researchers compared countries exposed to different combinations of disasters and crises, including extreme weather events, conflicts, economic shocks and epidemics, and examined how the prevalence of undernourishment changed over time.

In a separate, broader descriptive analysis covering 105 countries, they found no clear pattern showing that countries hit by more severe shocks necessarily experienced greater increases in undernourishment. Some countries, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, faced shocks above the global average while still improving their food-security outcomes.

That distinction is central to the paper’s definition of resilience: the ability of a food system to weaken, or decouple, the relationship between the shock it experiences and the food-security consequences that follow.

The statistical analysis identified three factors whose improvement within a country was associated with smaller deteriorations in undernourishment: higher GDP per capita, stronger government effectiveness and greater food-supply redundancy.

The results also showed that countries with stronger social capital tended to perform better over the longer term, while persistent food-price volatility was associated with greater fluctuations in undernourishment.

Social capital refers to the networks of trust, cooperation and community relationships that help people and institutions coordinate and support one another, particularly during crises.

“Therefore, resilience cannot simply be reduced to how wealthy a country is,” Béné said.

The finding on redundancy is particularly significant because it raises questions about how food systems have traditionally been optimized.

Béné noted that previous research has shown that redundancy within an individual value chain usually comes at a cost. Maintaining alternative suppliers, transport routes, storage capacity, or other forms of spare capacity can appear less efficient than concentrating on the cheapest or most efficient option.

At the scale of an entire food system, however, that calculation changes. A source of supply that appears unnecessary when markets and logistics are functioning normally can suddenly become critical when another is disrupted by drought, war, a natural disaster or an economic crisis.

Still, Béné cautioned against interpreting the study as evidence of a simple trade-off in which efficiency must be sacrificed to achieve resilience.

“Our study does not quantify an efficiency–resilience trade-off,” he said.

Instead, the findings suggest considering efficiency over a longer time horizon. A system designed to minimize costs and unused capacity under normal conditions may prove far more expensive when disruption occurs.

“Some apparent redundancy can effectively function as insurance,” Béné said.

That insurance, however, should not be interpreted as a prescription simply to build duplicate infrastructure or accumulate larger stocks.

The study specifically measures diversification in food-supply sources. It does not determine whether that redundancy matters more than alternative transport routes, storage capacity or multiple suppliers.

“We specifically found evidence for the importance of diversifying food-supply sources,” Béné said. “We cannot say from our analysis whether this form of redundancy matters more than, for example, alternative transport routes, storage capacity or multiple suppliers.”

“For policymakers, the message is therefore not simply ‘build more redundancy’, but avoid excessive dependence on single sources or pathways while also strengthening the institutional capacities that allow food systems to anticipate and respond to shocks,” Béné said.

That message is becoming increasingly relevant as food systems face overlapping sources of disruption, from extreme weather linked to climate change to wars, pandemics and economic instability. The study itself focuses on acute shocks rather than long-term pressures such as gradual warming.

Béné said the same questions may also be relevant to highly specialized agricultural value chains such as olive oil, although the study did not examine individual commodities.

For the olive oil sector, this raises a related question: while specialization can make production and trade more efficient, it may also concentrate dependence on particular regions, suppliers or routes. In a sector heavily centered on the Mediterranean and increasingly exposed to climate extremes, the balance between efficiency and resilience may become harder to ignore.