How agricultural chains fail

Mechanism, stages, indicators

Every entry is built from three things. The mechanism is how the disruption arises and propagates. The chain stages place it in the sequence from production through assembly, processing, inland transport, the border, international transport, and the destination market. The observable indicators are the signals that it is materialising — things a reader can go and check in their own chain, rather than assertions about anyone else’s.

Risks connect to what they act on: commodities with a documented exposure, the logistics operations the mechanism disrupts, the trade concepts it interferes with, and the standards and frameworks that exist to address it.

Why nothing here is scored

This page describes a risk mechanism — how a disruption arises, propagates, and is observed — and deliberately assigns no likelihood, severity, or risk score. Such numbers depend on the specific chain, route, season, counterparty, and jurisdiction, and a generalised score would be an invented quantity presented as evidence. Assessment against a real chain requires that chain’s own data.

This is the section’s most consequential rule, and it holds in prose too: no entry ranks a mechanism, calls one more serious than another, or attaches a level to it. A description of how a thing happens is defensible from published evidence. A number saying how likely it is to happen to you is not — it depends on your chain, your route, your season, your counterparty, and your jurisdiction, none of which a reference page knows.

What this is for

Knowing the mechanism is what makes an assessment possible. It tells you which question to ask about your own chain and which data would answer it. The assessment itself is work that only the holder of that data can do, and each entry states what it would require.