The BRICS group of new powers and emerging economies has developed food security as a key area of cooperation, and its members are now major actors in global grain markets. The group's 2024–2025 expansion has added new members and partners, including from Southeast Asia. This Perspective asks whether the enlarged group can use the new BRICS Grain Exchange (Exchange) initiative to orchestrate a new food security agenda for its participants. Drawing on the Jameel Index for Food Trade and Vulnerability, we map how BRICS expansion reshapes intra-BRICS trade in wheat, maize and rice, and identify where the Exchange could reduce food insecurity. The BRICS group's role as an orchestrator of internal and external institutional linkages is key to realizing food security gains for prospective Exchange participants. We argue that closer collaboration with the New Development Bank and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations can advance this a new food security agenda.
Agricultural technologies often fail to scale across regions, because adapting them to local conditions requires substantial, repeated, and often overlooked work. Based on 72 interviews with agri-tech founders, distributors, and farmers across diverse geographies, this paper identifies four recurring layers of regional adaptation: agronomic calibration, regulatory validation, service-system build-out, and cultural legitimacy work. These layers generate structured and path-dependent adaptation costs that are systematically underestimated and frequently duplicated.We introduce the concept of the liability of regionalization to describe this recurring cost structure. As public infrastructures for field trials, regulatory mediation, and service coordination have eroded or fragmented, firms reconstruct these functions independently, even in overlapping markets. While duplication is often seen as wasteful, we show that it also serves performative, protective, and risk-hedging functions under conditions of weak trust and institutional fragmentation.These dynamics reflect a governance gap: current innovation systems support entrepreneurial acceleration but lack mechanisms to convert private adaptation efforts into cumulative regional infrastructure. We argue for a policy mix that complements firm-level scaling instruments with shared validation platforms, interoperable learning systems, and co-governed adaptation institutions.Reframing regional adaptation as shared infrastructure rather than a firm-level hurdle highlights its role in shaping innovation efficiency, inclusion, and food-system resilience. Strengthening adaptation governance is essential for scaling technologies in ways that are both commercially viable and regionally inclusive.
Climate change poses systemic risks to food security, particularly in contexts of deep inequality. This study analyses how climate stressors interact with structural inequalities and governance to shape food security outcomes in Brazil. Using a convergent mixed-methods design — combining descriptive statistical analysis of closed-ended questionnaire items with thematic content analysis of open-ended responses, and integrating findings during interpretation — and drawing on 97 key informants with professional experience in food systems and related public policies, the findings suggest that climate change constitutes an important and interacting driver of food insecurity, operating through mechanisms of economic access, institutional fragmentation and structural inequality rather than through aggregate physical shortages of insecurity. Crucially, impacts manifest less through aggregate physical shortages than through disruptions in economic access, affordability, and price stability. Extreme events trigger supply chain instability that disproportionately burdens low-income populations and peripheral territories, revealing deep climate injustice. While community-based initiatives offer local resilience, findings show they are constrained by fragmented governance and insufficient public support. We argue that relying on local adaptation without state coordination risks reproducing inequality. The study concludes that effective adaptation requires integrated governance that links climate action with social protection. These insights from Brazil provide a critical framework for understanding climate-inequality nexuses in other Global South contexts.
Pacific Island Countries govern some of the world's most productive tuna fisheries, yet aggregate marine wealth does not guarantee equitable access to nutritious aquatic foods. This Perspective develops a framework for understanding that supply-access disconnect. We define connective infrastructure as the physical, digital, and organizational service systems that preserve, move, coordinate, and verify the circulation of aquatic foods between harvest and consumption. It develops a conceptual argument from published research and selected evidence relevant to different components of the framework: Kiribati's fiscal record, Tonga's 2022 compound infrastructure breakdown, and regional tuna statistics. Connective infrastructure mediates the conversion of marine resources into food access, with effects that depend on design, maintenance, and distribution. A political-economy perspective identifies how control over rights, finance, standards, expertise, and maintenance responsibilities shapes system design and effective access. Food policy should therefore pair production and conservation goals with maintainable logistics, proportionate information systems, and explicit distributional safeguards.
Agricultural systems are increasingly challenged by climatic instability, pest outbreaks, and pressure to reduce dependence on external inputs. However, agricultural evaluation systems remain strongly focused on productivity under optimal conditions, with less emphasis on resilience and adaptive capacity. One driver of this bias is the longstanding assumption that plant growth and defense are inherently antagonistic. Although plant biology now shows that growth and defense are dynamically coordinated rather than strictly competitive, this vision remains poorly integrated into agronomic evaluation and policy. In this Perspective we argue that persistent zero-sum interpretations of growth-defense relationships may constrain how resilience, stress tolerance, and sustainability are integrated into agricultural evaluation systems. Reframing growth-defense antagonism as a systems and policy problem may help align agricultural evaluation frameworks with the multifunctional demands imposed by climate change and sustainable food production.
