Guest editorial: Financing resilient food systems

What the paper says

Recently, external shocks have greatly affected our food systems. Geopolitical crises, extreme weather and pandemics have caused substantial volatility in food production and prices, thereby threatening food security around the globe. Therefore, resilience-enhancing strategies play a crucial role in the sustainability transition of the food system (Meuwissen et al., 2019). Within these strategies, sustainable finance tools enable farmers and other food supply chain actors to sustain their businesses in times of such crises and adapt to changing climatic and market conditions. We here contribute examples of improved resilience measurement and management at different stages of food supply chains.This special issue aims to provide a better understanding of how financial and policy mechanisms enhance the resilience of food systems. Its intent is to assemble evidence on the factors that foster resilience across agricultural production, farm finance and food supply chains. Doing so requires understanding both how components of food systems respond to external shocks, such as climate variability, pandemics and other supply chain disruptions and how farm and food policies shape those responses. While merely scraping the surface of this broad theme, the contributions in this special issue address complementary dimensions of resilience research, including the measurement of supply chain resilience (Tack et al., 2026), drivers of farm economy resilience (Borisova et al., 2026; Lu et al., 2026; Ifft, 2026) and the role of consumer-focused support programs in strengthening local food systems (Dsouza et al., 2026).Tack et al. (2026) address a foundational challenge in the emerging resilience literature: how resilience can be credibly measured at different scales. They develop supply chain resilience metrics that integrate weather shocks with trade flow data to generate country- and commodity-level indicators that capture the capacity of agricultural trade networks to absorb and adapt to disruptions.Promoting a resilient farm economy is equally crucial for maintaining food supply. Borisova et al. (2026) examine how drought shocks affect farm profitability and evaluate the extent to which the federal crop insurance program mitigates such losses. Building on this perspective, Lu et al. (2026) show that spatial price basis risk can deter crop insurance participation. Together, these studies demonstrate the importance of aligning financial risk management instruments with on-the-ground market realities. Ifft (2026) complements this work by exploring how environmental regulations and associated externalities are capitalized into farmland values – perhaps the most important financial asset in agriculture.Finally, Dsouza et al. (2026) broaden the lens beyond farm-level mechanisms to study how local food voucher programs can benefit both consumers and producers. Their findings suggest that safety-net policies targeting household food access can also enhance producer stability and community-level resilience. In doing so, this paper complements the preceding farm- and market-level analyses in the issue by demonstrating that resilience-enhancing policies can operate simultaneously through consumer welfare, producer demand stability and local market institutions.In summary, the papers in this special issue illustrate the multifaceted relationship between agricultural finance and food system resilience: spanning issues of measurement, risk management, policy design and local market institutions. The research in this issue analyzes these issues from the perspective of farm finance, federal insurance policy, environmental regulation and global supply chains. By doing so, the issue contributes new tools and evidence to strengthen the capacity of food systems to withstand and adapt to future shocks.