Five forces reshaping food systems in 2026

Guest commentary on how food systems are being reorganised

Thank you to everyone who responded so thoughtfully to last week’s issue. It was great to see the article resonating with lots of people. I’ve shared a few excerpts below from comments that pushed the argument further and opened up important adjacent questions.

This issue also grew directly out of those conversations. After I posted my piece on LinkedIn, Maryam shared her commentary. I read it, admired its clarity and scope, briefly considered including it in Thin’s Pickings, and then decided that it deserved more eyeballs. With Maryam’s and ODI’s permission, I’m republishing it here in full.

And a quick PSA: stay vigilant online. A hacked email from a trusted contact cost me two full days of digital housekeeping. Nothing was compromised, thankfully. Just my nerves.

Photo by me.

Maryam Rezaei is the food systems lead in ODI climate and sustainability team. The original article is here.

The World Economic Forum in Davos was dominated by talks around a paradigm shift in technology, AI and what organisers call ‘geoeconomic confrontation‘. Food systems rarely featured, but the geopolitical forces now influencing the global economy are impacting food security, trade and resilience more than ever.

That reality was captured by the Canadian Prime Minister who told the Forum that the rules-based international order is over, and countries must develop strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, and finance: ‘A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options‘.

Food systems are now being reorganised around national protectionism, and geopolitical alignment, rather than a shared global vision like the SDGs. The five forces below show how this shift is already reshaping who eats, who trades, who produces - and who is left exposed:

1. Humanitarian food assistance is being redesigned under scarcity - and millions of people are being left behind

WFP’s 2026 Global Outlook projects 318 million people will face crisis levels of hunger while the agency can only reach 110 million. Doing so would require $13 billion but funding is forecast to fall short by half. Pipeline breaks are already hitting DRC, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan, with ration cuts and complete suspensions looming by early 2026.

For the first time in history, the four largest donors have slashed their aid for two consecutive years. USAID, the world largest agrifood donor, was dismantled in mid-2025, with 83% of programmes cancelled. At the same time, the UK is cutting overall aid to 0.3% of GNI (down from 0.7% in 2020) and Germany and France are reducing budgets. The OECD projects a 9-17% aid drops in 2025 alone, with further reduction through 2027. Humanitarian aid was always scarce, but in the past, scarcity triggered mobilisation and burden-sharing. Whereas now, chronic underfunding is no longer a global insurance mechanism, but a safety net tied to geopolitics.

Under these constraints, responsibility is transferred to national systems and communities without financing, procurement capacity, or governance protections to sustain it. Global summits like the UK’s Future of Aid conference may provide a new framing, but the lived reality is that humanitarian assistance will fall short in reaching the most vulnerable.

2. Defence budgets are displacing investments in food security at historic scale

Food insecurity and hunger have often been framed as a ‘threat multiplier‘. Post-conflict countries with high food insecurity are 40% more likely to relapse into conflict within a decade. Yet public budgets are being reallocated toward defence at the expense of social protection, nutrition and climate adaptation. The US defence budget will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026, while non-defence discretionary spending faces 23% cuts. Europe is also increasing military spending. Much of this reflects real security threats - from the war in Ukraine to rising instability across multiple regions - but its consequences are being absorbed through cuts to development, climate and food security spending. The consensus that food security and nature loss are security issues has not disappeared; what has changed is how it is prioritised when budgets tighten.

Oxfam analysis shows that less than 3% of G7 military spending could finance hunger eradication and meaningful debt relief. Whether governments ringfence social protection and climate adaptation from defence expansion may prove to be one of the most decisive factors shaping food security outcomes in 2026.

3. Trade measures and market access rules are reshaping food systems

On 1 January 2026, The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism was operationalized. CBAM was designed to prevent carbon leakage, protect European climate ambition and create incentives for cleaner production globally.

While currently covering fertilizers (not food directly), CBAM fundamentally reshapes who can compete in European agricultural markets by redistributing costs and power along value chains. Developing countries are largely unprepared: Out of 70 low and lower-middle income countries, only one has carbon pricing in place, and only six are currently considering it.

Similar dynamics are emerging through U.S. tariff and subsidy policies, which are increasingly used to secure domestic supply chains and geopolitical leverage, with spillovers for agricultural export. Together, carbon pricing, sustainability reporting and tariff regimes are shifting value toward those who control data, certification and compliance and away from small producers who lack the capital to navigate them.

In 2026, the struggle over food sovereignty is shifting from farms to trade regimes, where market access is becoming the primary instrument of power.

4. Price stabilisation is mistaken for resilience, ignoring structural vulnerability

Some commodity forecasts suggest that global food prices could ease modestly in 2026. FAO’s Food Price Index fell for four consecutive months at the end of 2025, and USDA projects slower price growth.

But this should not be mistaken for enhanced food security and shift focus away from the structural fragility that prevents three billion people from having access to healthy diets: foods hit by extreme weather rising in price four times faster than others; climate-linked production losses can cascade across regions, eroding safety margins; La Niña patterns threaten disruptions in 2026; and energy-fertilizer linkages remain tight, with 60-80% of nitrogen fertilizer costs tied to natural gas prices.

But policy responses continue to treat volatility in the short-term, trying to mitigate it through export bans, universal subsidies and price controls. Without shifting from short-term price management to long-term risk reduction, food systems will remain permanently exposed to the next climate and energy shock.

5. Philanthropic capital is reshaping food systems financing, but not replacing public investment

As development aid shrinks, a structural shift is underway in how food systems are financed. This shift is occurring alongside state-backed investments and extractive practices by major powers that often operate beyond multilateral accountability.

Some philanthropies are filling different gaps: The Rockefeller Foundation committed $100 million to regenerative school meals; Gates Foundation pledged $1.4 billion for smallholder farmers, and IKEA Foundation is focusing its considerable resources on regenerative agriculture and renewable energy.

But philanthropic capital is not replacing public risk-sharing, it is selecting which parts of the food system deserve to be funded. When Gates’ COP30 position reframed climate action away from emissions cuts, it demonstrated how concentrated capital can reshape policy discourse, independent of democratic processes or multilateral consensus.

Corporate investment dwarfs philanthropic funds, but analysis shows most large companies are not taking sufficient action to transform systems, and accountability remains voluntary. Capital flows to what is profitable, not necessarily what is urgent. The poorest and most food insecure are therefore the least attractive to invest in, raising a question for 2026: whether food systems in low- and middle-income countries, already struggling to guarantee returns or align with philanthropic priorities, will be financed at all.

What this means for global food systems in 2026

The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit was built on aligning multilateral collaboration, national pathways and multi-stakeholder governance.

That architecture is now being tested by a world moving toward geopolitical rivalry, fiscal retrenchment and strategic self-insurance. It is not redundant - but it is being stress tested and challenged. In 2026, food systems outcomes will depend on political choices between who is protected and who is exposed.

Governments that allow defence spending, exclusionary trade rules and geopolitically aligned finance to crowd out nutrition, social protection and climate adaptation, will widen gaps in equity and resilience. Those that protect social investment, build compliance capacity for smallholders, and integrate food systems into climate and security strategies can still maintain progress under these constraints.

By the end of the year, these trade-offs will be clearer: whether humanitarian systems adapt without reducing coverage, whether sustainability trade rules become bridges or barriers, and whether food security and nutrition are treated as a strategic investment or a fiscal burden. Those choices will shape not just 2026, but the trajectory of food systems transformation for the years to come.

Last week’s issue sparked some thoughtful and pointed responses. Below are excerpts that add important dimensions to the discussion. (You can read the full comments by clicking on the names.)

“Great article, and I agree with most of your analysis. Except, for the title! We do have an enormous production problem in that we are trapped in a production system that by and large is built on mono-cropping annual crops requiring huge inputs of water, synthetic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, and soil tillage. This production system is the root cause of the degradation of soils, water bodies, biodiversity, and most importantly the diversity of the soil microbiomes that are at the root of soil fertility and crop productivity. These record yields you speak about are built on an essentially extractive system, mining soils and water bodies…” - Karel

“While it is true that the problem of hunger and food insecurity mainly concerns access and rights, we cannot overlook the issue of production.
Family and small-scale farming is now being brought to its knees by an economic system that favours large-scale production. Food poverty and the right to food also concern part of the productive sector - those who cannot compete in the market due to extremely high production costs and the lack of adequate state subsidies.” - Francesca Benedetta Felici

“Why do price shocks ripple across continents?
Why is volatility treated as inevitable rather than a failure?
Because grain is no longer primarily priced by farmers or harvests, it is now valued on financial markets, where futures trading volumes vastly exceed the physical grain actually produced. Food has become an asset class - and volatility has value.
And the physical flow of that food?
Concentrated in the hands of just four companies — the ABCD of global grain trading — quietly sitting between the field and the plate, shaping access, timing, and price…
👉 If we’re producing more food than ever before, why are financial markets and a handful of firms allowed to decide who can afford to eat?” - Seamus Higgins (In case you’re interested, here’s my piece on the ABCDs.)

“Also, there are some areas in which we might consider returning to our ancestors’ food systems! For instance, today’s grains bred for high yield are less nutrient-rich: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/why-modern-food-lost-its-nutrients/“ - Chris Lewis

Thin’s Pickings

1. Beef and lamb get 580 times more in EU subsidies than legumes, study finds - The Guardian

   Ajit Niranjan on Foodrise’s report that also found pork was subsidised nearly 240 times more than legumes and dairy received 554 times more than nuts and seeds.
   

2. Good pieces on MAHA

   Professor Sara Silverstein appeared on Timothy Snyder’s substack with a piece titled Consumptive Capitalism, arguing that MAHA is offering “solutions that reject science and public health”. She draws a historical parallel to tuberculosis - or “consumption” as it was known - and how those with financial means could afford treatment.

   David Wallace-Wells’s “The MAHA Coalition is Falling Apart” touched on the less palatable aspect of MAHA - the vaccine sceptic branch - following official confusion over Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine.

   Perhaps this is why, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be pivoting away form vaccines and towards food, where MAHA’s position is much more popular, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported in the NYT.

   There has often been “a huge gap between the administration’s rhetoric on food and its policy actions” but this might be changing, wrote FoodFix’s Helena Bottemiller Evich, an always-reliable chronicler of American food policy.
   

3. Improving the nation’s diet: the impact of ultra-processed food - British Medical Association

   This concise 18-page report contains sobering statistics: in England, 64% of adults are overweight or obese and 10.5% of 4-5 year olds and 22.2% of 10-11 year olds were classified as obese.

   The BMA argued that “the UK has suffered from a succession of voluntary policies alongside delayed and weakened regulation” and called for stronger policy intervention and move the focus away from individual responsibility.

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