Food security and stockpiling: A return to Realism?

Over the past decades, Western policymakers have operated under an assumption that now appears dangerously complacent: that global markets and just-in-time logistics would keep shelves stocked indefinitely. The idea of strategic food reserves was dismissed as a relic of the Cold War, unnecessary in an age of frictionless trade. Today, a more sober, realist food policy is emerging. Climate volatility, weakened trust in international markets, and, increasingly, geopolitical tensions have prompted governments across the globe to build up their emergency stockpiles of staples such as wheat and rice[1], a tacit admission that the era of assured plenty has ended.

What changed? Three shocks arrived in quick succession: a pandemic that exposed the brittleness of supply chain, Russia's invasion of Ukraine that turned food into a weapon, and accelerating climate chaos that has made harvests unpredictable. Together, these shocks demolished the theory that open markets would always deliver. National food security, it turns out, cannot always simply be outsourced to global commodity traders and container shipping.

China's strategic accumulation

If food stockpiling is making a comeback in the West, China never abandoned it. Thierry Pouch, chief economist of the French Chambers of Agriculture, estimates that China has accumulated 60% of global maize reserves and 45% of global wheat reserves, as well as continuing to build up national stocks of rice.[2] The Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy rests on its capacity to feed 1.4 billion people, and it will not leave that outcome to market vagaries or foreign goodwill. Whether motivated by market volatility, climate risk, or contingency planning for conflict with Taiwan, the message is clear: China is preparing for a world where food supplies cannot be assumed.

Europe's institutional response

The European Union has reached similar conclusions, though characteristically through multilateral frameworks rather than unilateral accumulation. The EU Preparedness Union Strategy and EU Stockpiling Strategy seek to hard-wire principles of resilience into policy. The European Food Security Crisis preparedness and response Mechanism (EFSCM) provides early-warning capacity, coordinated monitoring, and collective response capability when food system disruptions hit. This represents a fundamental shift from market dependency toward strategic autonomy in food, a recognition that the Single Market, for all its benefits, may not always be able to guarantee food supplies under stress.

Calorie calculations

National stockpiling planning often begins with a simple calorie calculation: multiply population by daily calorie requirements (typically, but not always, 2 000 calories per person[3]), determine how many months of supply are needed, and work backwards to tonnage. This principle works well for policymakers: it offers bureaucratic clarity and allows ministers to announce concrete targets to an anxious population.

But such calorie arithmetic is limited. Calories are not fungible. Numbers alone don’t tell us what should be stored or for how long. More fundamentally, the calorie approach assumes a functioning society. It presumes people have access to cooking facilities, clean water, and intact distribution networks. A warehouse full of wheat flour is useless if the electricity grid has collapsed, trucks cannot move, or water systems have failed. While calorie calculations are a useful starting point, they shouldn’t be mistaken for a complete food strategy.

Scandinavia: rebuilding what was forgotten

Sweden and Norway offer contemporary examples of how a generation of policymakers were convinced that history had ended, but are now having to re-assess their thinking on food stockpiling. These Scandinavian states demonstrate the difficulty of resurrecting capabilities that were deliberately dismantled.

Sweden started to wind down its food stockpiles from 1995, when it joined the EU. European integration, the thinking went, had rendered such precautions obsolete. Thirty years on, the Swedish government has announced “the most sweeping modernisation of Sweden’s total defence since the end of the Cold War”.[4]  While its policy begins with a calorie calculation -the Swedish National Food Agency estimates that 3 000 calories per person per day need to be secured during a state of heightened alert[5]- the Swedish government’s emergency plans also promisingly adopt a food systems approach. The most recent government budget allocates 2.1 billion Swedish kronor to build up not just preparedness stockpiles of grain, but also “critical input goods for primary production” (and) later stages in the food supply chain”.

Norway, although not a member of the European Union, has similarly reinstated a grain stockpiling programme, having dismantled its national reserves in 2003. The Norwegian government is currently working with four private companies to accumulate 82 500 tonnes of grain by 2029. This, the government hopes, will be enough to sustain Norway’s population of 5.6 million people for three months in the event of a crisis.[6]

The Scandinavian experience offers a broader lesson. Stockpiling is not simply a matter of purchasing commodities and storing them. It requires institutional memory, appropriate infrastructure, quality protocols, and well functioning public-private coordination. Rebuilding strategic food stocks takes years, not months.

Switzerland: the comprehensive model

Landlocked Switzerland provides perhaps the most sophisticated and comprehensive model of stockpiling in existence, a unique blend of individual responsibility, strategic communication, and food systems thinking -in addition to vast stockpiling of food- all overseen by the Swiss Federal Office for National Economic Supply (FONES).

At the household level, the Swiss government provides multilingual guidance on how much emergency food and water people may need to keep stored should a crisis hit, as well as an online calculator for emergency food and water storage.

At the national level, FONES assumes an average energy consumption of about 2 300 calories per person per day. The range of compulsory stocks cover between three to four months of population needs (sugar, rice, cooking oils and fats, bread wheat, durum wheat, dual-purpose wheat, protein sources for food, and coffee[7]). Crucially, FONES also mandates that national strategic reserves extend to production inputs including nitrogen fertiliser and canola seeds for agriculture. In other words, Switzerland has recognised that physical stockpiles of food are meaningless without the agricultural inputs to sustain domestic agriculture if a crisis extends beyond months into growing seasons.

These strategic food reserves are held not by the Swiss government, but by approximately 300 private companies that import, process, or transport food. They are obliged to maintain sufficient stocks and are compensated by the government for doing so. This compensation is financed by import surcharges and fees: every inhabitant of the country pays 13 Swiss francs a year towards it.[8]  Swiss authorities have understood that food distribution, processing and preparation also require the necessary energy infrastructure. As a result, Switzerland also maintains compulsory stocks of 4½ months’ worth of petrol, diesel and heating oil, stored by Carbura, the Swiss Organisation for Stockholding of Liquid Fuels.

The Swiss model works because it acknowledges the complexity of food systems. Switzerland knows that food security is not a single problem but interlinked dependencies requiring systemic attention, and that managing food stockpiles demands specialised expertise and resources. The alternative -to assume that markets will always provide, even in emergency situations- is strategically untenable for a small, landlocked state historically mindful of encirclement.

The stockpile paradox

As governments consider food stockpiling with increasing seriousness, they confront an uncomfortable paradox: physical reserves, however comprehensive, mean nothing without functioning infrastructure. Stockpiling food is, in some respects, straightforward. Stockpiling resilience and the capacity to maintain critical infrastructure under stress is profoundly harder. A government can pre-emptively fill silos with grain and still watch its population go hungry if electricity grids collapse or fuel supplies are severed. True food security depends on the complex web of energy, transport, water, and communications systems that we have become so accustomed to.

The return to strategic stockpiling signals a deeper shift. For three decades our dominant assumption has been that economic interdependence would constrain conflict and markets would efficiently allocate resources, including food. That assumption is under huge strain. The question now is whether states possess the institutional capacity, political will, and public support to rebuild what a previous generation dismantled.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/18d75e20-b63e-4f47-8f63-58c0cc4bca22

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLkRTfbRqgM

[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/healthy-diet

[4] https://www.government.se/press-releases/2025/09/new-package-for-stronger-civil-defence/

[5] https://www.world-grain.com/articles/21974-sweden-securing-emergency-grain-stocks

[6] https://millermagazine.com/blog/norway-resumes-grain-stockpiling-amid-global-uncertainties-5779

[7] https://www.reservesuisse.ch/compulsory-stocks/?lang=en

[8] https://www.swisscommunity.org/en/news-media/swiss-revue/article/switzerlands-emergency-stocks

Article photo reproduced from Swiss Federal Office for National Economic Supply (FONES) https://www.bwl.admin.ch/en/strategic-stockpiling