The global balance of food distribution demonstrates a paradoxical trend in which physical food shortages have ceased to be a key threat to humanity.
Although the proportion of the world’s critically undernourished population has dropped to 7.8% (equivalent to 645,000,000 people in absolute terms) by 2025, the economic accessibility of quality food remains extremely low.
Currently, more than 2.1 billion people around the world regularly face moderate or severe forms of food insecurity. At the same time, over 2.6 billion citizens do not have the financial opportunity to create a complete, balanced and healthy diet for themselves.
Financial structure of retail value
An analysis of the distribution of costs within food supply chains shows that the root of the problem lies far beyond farmers’ fields. About 70–75% of the final retail cost of products on the shelf is formed after the raw materials leave the boundaries of a particular agricultural enterprise.
The contribution of intermediate technological links, which include primary and advanced processing, transport operations and wholesale trade, takes up up to 40% of all costs. As a result, any successes of farmers in the sector of increasing productivity are leveled out if logistics routes are too complicated and storage is expensive.
The relationship between infrastructure and prices
Expert calculations mathematically prove the direct dependence of the price tag in a store on the quality of communications.
There is a clear pattern: an increase in the overall efficiency index of logistics systems by 10% automatically leads to a reduction in the final cost of a healthy food set for the consumer by approximately 5.5%.
An additional improvement in the condition of exclusively road infrastructure by the same 10% allows reducing retail prices by another 2.5%. These indicators become critical when it comes to the distribution of perishable consumer goods.
Scaling global trade flows
The transport component exerts even more powerful pressure on pricing when products enter international markets. In value terms, the volume of global food trade has made a giant leap, increasing from $400 billion in 2000 to $1 trillion in 2024, and by the end of 2025 this figure has exceeded the $2 trillion mark. According to long-term forecasts of analysts, the dependence of states on the reliability of cross-border transport corridors will only increase in the foreseeable future.
Forecast of supply and demand imbalance
Long-term forecasting of the development of agricultural markets indicates the persistence of deep geographical gaps between macroregions. Major areas of excess food production and areas of concentrated demand will diverge even further by 2035.
For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, food import volumes will increase by 55% compared to current levels, which will require a radical restructuring of the entire port and highway infrastructure of the planet. Other developing regions with high population growth rates will also record an increase in purchases.
Requirement for stress resistance of routes
Modern geopolitical reality dictates new rules for designing supply chains, where the main criterion is not cheapness, but the survivability of the system. Agri-food corridors must remain operational even if individual transit nodes fail completely.
Historical shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and current logistics bottlenecks in the Azov-Black Sea basin clearly demonstrate this need. Transport infrastructure can no longer be seen as a purely service sector; it has become a fundamental element of national security.
Multimodal diversification strategy
The only adequate response to modern challenges is the creation of flexible cargo distribution systems with a high degree of variability.
Analysts and market participants need to view supply chains as a single complex, combining diversification of modes of transport and pools of partners. The formation of duplicate land and sea routes requires large investments, but it is this approach that guarantees the stability of supplies of raw materials and maintaining a normal level of business profitability.
