The Economics of Agri-Food Supply Chain Resilience: Pandemics, Climate Shocks and Global Disruptions

Agri-food supply chain resilience has become a central economic concern as disease outbreaks, climatic extremes, trade restrictions and geopolitical disruptions expose interdependencies between production, processing, logistics, markets and household food access. Yet operational continuity alone is an incomplete measure of resilience: firms may recover output while consumers face unaffordable diets, workers lose earnings and costly buffers transfer risks between regions or supply-chain tiers. This critical narrative review examines how shocks propagate through agri-food systems, why decentralised incentives may diverge from social welfare, and which private and public responses are supported by credible evidence. Peer-reviewed empirical studies, theoretical analyses, simulations and substantive reviews published from 2004 to 4 September 2026 were assessed through targeted scholarly discovery, bibliographic verification and thematic appraisal, with earlier conceptual antecedents considered where necessary. The synthesis distinguishes covariate from localised shocks, physical scarcity from purchasing-power failures, and short-term recovery from economically and environmentally sustainable adaptation. Pandemic evidence indicates heterogeneous disruptions: substantial losses for particular workers, farmers and perishable-product channels coexisted with adaptive capacity in other markets. Climate research supports material agricultural supply risks, although uncertainty remains about cross-sector transmission and simultaneous harvest failures. Trade and conflict studies indicate that diversification can buffer geographically specific losses but may propagate correlated shortages and policy-induced price instability. Crucially, recent economic modelling shows that private investment in risk reduction need not always fall below the social optimum; market power and the interdependence of protective investments can also produce overinvestment. The review proposes a welfare-centred appraisal of resilience that incorporates consumer access, distributional incidence, risk covariance, fiscal costs and long-run adaptation rather than equating resilience with inventory, localisation or digitisation. Evidence gaps concern comparable causal estimates, systemic risk spillovers, low-income consumers, and prospective evaluations of combined interventions. Context-specific portfolios of risk reduction, trade openness, social protection and adaptive infrastructure appear more defensible than universal prescriptions.