Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Digital technologies are increasingly deployed to strengthen food security under climate stress, resource constraints, and geopolitical disruption. This review synthesizes two largely separate bodies of scholarship: an international literature on digital agriculture and the four classical dimensions of food security, and a rapidly expanding Chinese literature on the digital economy and agricultural economic resilience. Three claims emerge. First, digital technologies strengthen all four dimensions of food security through distinct mechanisms: (1) availability through productivity and input-use efficiency gains, which operate mainly through institutional intermediation, including land transfer, socialized services, industrial integration, and human capital, rather than through adoption alone; (2) access through market information and digital finance; (3) stability through traceability, early-warning systems, and insurance; (4) and utilization through traceability, nutrition information, and mobile payments. Second, quasi-experimental evidence shows that digital infrastructure, digital finance, and artificial intelligence raise the resilience of grain production and value chains, mainly through socialized services, land transfer, industrial integration, and human capital rather than adoption alone. Third, the benefits are conditional and unevenly distributed: the direction of spatial spillovers depends on absorptive capacity, market integration, and factor mobility.
Author: Yang Shen
Institution: Xiamen University
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
OpenAlex ID: W7223134273