New publication analyzes how compound shocks impact agricultural-food supply chain in the US

Agricultural-food supply chains are consistently under threat of disruption from both socioeconomic and natural shocks. Because of their importance to economic stability and food security, understanding how extreme stressors can compound and impact operation is paramount to building resilient food systems. 

New research from the University of Illinois looks back at several large-scale, overlapping shocks from 2018-2022 and analyzes how they affected transport and trade of food in the U.S. The team of researchers, led by Civil & Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Megan Konar, identified which places and commodities took the biggest hits, and which proved most flexible, in the face of disturbances like the COVID-19 pandemic, trade wars, and severe weather events. 

Historically, most research in this area has focused on how shocks specifically disrupt production, with little attention given to potential downstream effects like transportation, processing, and trade. Konar and her team worked to fill in these gaps, finding that both resilience and the degree of disruption varied widely by region, shock type, and connectivity to other places. 

A collaborative effort between Konar and Arizona State University Assistant Professor Deniz Berfin Karakoc (PhD 24), a CEE alumna and former member of Konar's lab, the study provides actionable outcomes for improving supply chain stability in anticipation of future disruption events. Two of Konar's current graduate students, Rui Zhang and Arushi Arnav, also contributed to the study. 

Overall, their work highlights the need for localized approaches to resiliency and disaster response in order to best mitigate the impacts of future shocks. 

The full paper, Compound shocks to agri-food supply chain transport and trade in the United States, was published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems on January 15, 2026.