Dr Swati Nayak
Climatic vulnerability and supply chain disruptions frequently affecting the global food economy, the BRICS bloc have new challenges to face. The food reserves often visualized as emergency stockpiling, now need to be re-positioned for nutritional resilience, stability and fast-changing market and social systems.
While holding the strategic reserves remain critical for global food security, the current question is around what kind of reserves should be designated in response to climate and trade uncertainties, along with persisting issues of hunger and malnutrition. World Bank–FAO–WFP report (2025)-Strengthening Strategic Grain Reserves to Enhance Food Security, highlighted 343 million people in 74 countries facing acute food insecurity in 2024. This is nearly two times the number of people who were food insecure in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Multi-layered economic shocks have caused disruptions in trade and a rise in hunger, all of which have created new challenges to food security.
The matter became even worse in 2026. According to the World Bank, the ongoing war in West Asia has led to an impairment of oil and fertilizer transportation via the Strait of Hormuz, a very important link in the global agrifood value chains. There was a sharp rise in the cost of fertilizers from February to March 2026, with the cost of urea increasing by almost 46 percent in one month. In accordance with the predictions made by the World Food Programme, up to 45 million people can be driven into famine due to continued disruption.
This is a glaring challenge for BRICS countries as most of them are both leading agricultural producers/importers and consumers of fertilizer at the same time.
However, the classic view on food reserves is becoming increasingly obsolete. Traditionally, the objective of creating food reserves was mainly concerned with stabilizing prices or dealing with temporary shortages. The modern problem, on the other hand, is more intricate and required measures to guarantee not only an adequate number of calories, but also their nutritionally balanced nature, affordability, and continuous availability amidst disruptions. According to the synthesis report of the European Commission “Using Food Reserves to Enhance Food and Nutrition Security in Developing Countries,” food and nutrition security involves much more than mere physical availability of grain.
The transformation has become more significant in the context of BRICS nations, where despite the presence of abundance of food resources, food shortages still persist. India, for example, has broken the record for producing maximum quantities of foodgrains at 353.96 million tonnes during the period from 2024 to 2025, while simultaneously maintaining one of the largest food networks in the world. This fact was noted in a 2025 background note issued by the Government of India’s Press Information Bureau on the topic of From Harvest to Home: Building Resilient Infrastructure for Storage of Food Grains.
The emerging storage systems in India highlight how reserves can become more than mere stockpiles, moving towards active nutrition governance. The process of scientific storage, digitization, decentralization, and linkage with the Public Distribution System present an opportunity for diversifying reserves by adding biofortified varieties of major stocks - rice and wheat, and also pulses, millets, and fortified foods. This becomes all the more important because India is actively promoting crop diversification on the world nutrition stage.
In a similar manner, China is also looking to realign its strategy regarding its reserves within an approach that considers resilience within its food system. As it continues with stockpiling large amounts of rice, wheat, and maize, Beijing is now focusing more on intelligent storage, AI-powered food monitoring, cold chain logistics, and indigenous seeds. There is now more of a focus on ensuring that there is security through nutrition within the food supply chain as a way of cutting down post-harvest losses and achieving diverse diets.
The journey that Russia has taken also provides an example of yet another aspect of reserve policy, which is geopolitical resilience. The Russian state has made clear connections between food security and national security, increasing reserves, focusing on domestic production for its agriculture sector, and using grain exports and fertilizers as geopolitical tools in West Asia and Africa. In a world where sanctions, fragmented trade relations, and export controls are increasingly common, this is an important point.
There exists another example that is as valuable in its own way – South Africa. Instead of focusing on food availability as a whole, South Africa’s problems can be described as affordability issues and lack of access to nutrition. In this case, government interest is drawn towards nutrition-sensitive social protection, school feeding schemes, procurement, and climate-proofing of community food systems. In such a setting, reserves become less of an instrument for macroeconomic stabilization and more a tool facilitating the implementation of nutrition programs.
Moreover, the World Bank-FAO-WFP paper emphasizes that strategic reserves are most effective when they are “small, simple, and smart” and geared more towards emergency response than market management. Likewise, the European Commission synthesis highlights that while it is stock level, governance is what decides if reserves help or harm food security policy objectives.
This is significant as it impacts how BRICS can cooperate to improve their food security situation. Instead of setting up politically challenging but logistically impossible supranational reserves, BRICS may be better off developing an international system of coordination centered around data exchange, harmonized electronic tracking, early warning systems, standardized procurement criteria, and storage infrastructure upgrades.
It is important to note that the future of reserves needs to be linked to nutritional diversity. Reserves that are primarily based on rice and wheat will not meet the increasing threat of hidden hunger and micronutrient deficiency. There is a need to ensure a diversified mix of healthy/nutritious rice and wheat like bio-fortified rice/wheat, pulses, millets, fortified cereals, among others. This will make it possible for the BRICS nations to link their food security programs to public health programs.
It is also important to ensure climate resilience for the planning of reserves. With increasing frequency of floods, droughts, cyclones, and heatwaves, it is becoming necessary to ensure that these disturbances affect neither the production process nor storage processes at the same time. In this context, it has become necessary for the contemporary reserves to invest not only in conventional silos but in cold chains, distributed storage facilities, IoT-enabled monitoring systems, and moisture-control systems.
BRICS nations are best positioned to help change the paradigm regarding world food storage policy. Collectively, they play a major role in the world’s production of grains, fertilizer use, agriculture trade, and at-risk groups of people. With proper planning, their storage facilities can be transformed from mere emergency tools to secure nutrition, withstand weather changes, and ensure geopolitics stability.
The success of future food reserves will not only rely on the sheer amount of grains kept in their storage facilities. Instead, it will be about their ability to help keep societies stable through crises, ensure good nutrition outcomes for poor people, strengthen regional food production systems, and minimize dependence on weak global food supply chains. The question of food reserves for BRICS countries, therefore, should not be how to produce more food, but rather how to create smart nutrition-focused reserves.
(The Author is South Asia Lead, Seed Systems and Product Management, & India Country Manager (Interim), Norman Borlaug Field Award Recipient (World Food Prize) 2023, International Rice Research Institute.)
