Vulnerability of Lean Food Supply Systems to Hybrid Attacks for Import-Dependent Democracies

The paper constructs a formal game-theoretic model of a deliberately manufactured food-price crisis as a potential adversarial attack vector in highly interdependent food markets. A state or non-state actor may combine information operations with proxy supply-drain activities to destabilize import-dependent democracies. Drawing on the economic voting literature, which finds that inflationary shocks are systematically associated with declines in incumbent support in democratic elections, I extend the political destabilization model beyond the ``unrest'' framing dominant in the existing literature to incorporate electoral impact in democratic targets. The framework integrates supply chain dynamics, characterized by system ``leanness'', with a strategic model of attacker decision-making. Preliminary parameterization for five import-dependent economies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, UK, Egypt) indicates substantial heterogeneity in vulnerability. A within-country comparison across protected and unprotected commodities in three East Asian economies shows domestic price responses eight to eighteen times larger for market-regime than for TRQ-protected staples. The framework suggests that geographically distributed buffer stock policies and information environment resilience merit evaluation not only as price-stabilization tools but also as national security investments.