Food security will not be solved by farming alone. It will be solved by infrastructure funded at scale
The next structural crisis may not be energy, finance or migration. It may be food. Not because we lack land, technology or knowledge, but because we lack inclusion.
The food system was built on the assumption that volume would always be there. But volume does not appear out of thin air, it comes from millions of small and medium growers. They are not the exception. They are the system.
If we don’t intervene now, it won’t be us who face the consequences, it will be the next two generations. Food crises do not erupt overnight. They accumulate slowly through fragmentation, under-investment and logistics failures, and then break abruptly. The only way to avoid a food security crisis is to industrialise inclusion. If small producers don’t enter the supply chain with technology and compliance, there isn’t enough volume to feed the system.
This is not a social argument. It’s a functional one. No country can secure food without volume, compliance and resilience. And here’s the part we rarely discuss: unlocking this transition will require billions, not to plant more farms, but to build the invisible infrastructure that makes the supply chain work.
Infrastructure for inclusion means: traceability, compliance, certifications, logistics, technical assistance, working capital, market access, export protocols, and digital systems that connect producers to buyers.
Large producers already operate this way. The system only becomes resilient when small and medium growers can operate this way too, because they are the majority of global supply. Food security will not be solved by farming alone. It will be solved by infrastructure funded at scale. At Equilibria, we’ve been prototyping that infrastructure: production, traceability, technical assistance, certifications and direct export, integrated into a system that connects small and medium producers to global markets.
Food is not just food. Food is infrastructure. And the real question is not if this transition will happen, but who will finance, lead it, and when.
Juan Pablo Duque is CEO of Equilibria, a Colombian lime export company that was selected as the best global agtech startup at leading US investment fair SelectUSA in 2025.
