Economic resilience of agri-food systems under structural transformations.

Abstract

The article substantiates the theoretical and methodical grounds for studying the economic resilience of agri-food systems under the cumulative pressure of military, economic, climatic, digital, logistical, and market transformations that have shaped the development of Ukraine's agricultural sector since 2022. The theoretical basis draws on the resilience framework developed within the SURE-Farm project, which defines resilience through the unity of robustness, adaptability, and transformability, complemented by composite approaches to assessing farm economic resilience and by empirical evidence on the fit between adaptive governance and farm resilience capacity. It is shown that the war, the 2024 drought, the reorientation of logistics through the EU-Ukraine Solidarity Lanes, and the screening of the agricultural negotiating chapter for EU accession act on Ukraine's agri-food system simultaneously, yet affect each resilience capacity unevenly. A methodical approach is proposed for assessing economic resilience based on five indicator blocks — production, financial-economic, market-logistical, institutional, and ecological — aggregated into an integral index and assessed differentially for agroholdings, medium-sized enterprises, farmer enterprises, service cooperatives, and personal peasant farms. Drawing on official data from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, KSE Institute estimates, and an analytical review of farm structure by the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), the differentiation of resilience levels across agroformation segments is characterised. The practical significance of the findings is defined for shaping differentiated state agrarian policy, building a risk-management system, and substantiating post-war recovery priorities for Ukraine's agricultural sector.