Smart Agriculture Development: How Can Rural Digital Transformation Enhance the Resilience of Food Security? (Foods 2026, 15(3), 426)

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Open Access Article

by
Yingjie Song

,
Yi Song

and
Qiusu Wang

*

School of Finance, Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai 264000, China

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Submission received: 6 December 2025 / Revised: 14 January 2026 / Accepted: 22 January 2026 / Published: 24 January 2026

Abstract

The essential prerequisite for the state to ensure the stable production and supply of grain and other key agricultural products is to enhance food security resilience and transform traditional agricultural production and management models. This study utilizes panel data from major grain-producing counties in China from 2012 to 2023. Adopting the 2020 “National Digital Rural Pilot Program” as a quasi-natural experiment, it applies a difference-in-differences (DID) model to assess the program’s impact on food security resilience and its underlying mechanisms. The results demonstrate that digital rural development has a significant driving effect on food security resilience, with more pronounced effects observed in Southern regions, areas endowed with abundant labor resources, and regions with lower economic development levels. Mechanism analyses indicate that digital rural development plays a role in enhancing food security resilience through scaled grain operations and agricultural technological progress. Furthermore, resource allocation efficiency and fiscal transparency exert a positive regulatory effect in impacting food security resilience through digital rural development. This study elucidates the mechanism through which digital rural development enhances food security resilience, offering valuable policy insights for the coordinated advancement of rural revitalization and agricultural digitization.

1. Introduction

Food is the cornerstone of national security, food security is the fundamental guarantee for the stability and sustainable development of the national economy and society, and food security resilience serves as the critical support for withstanding risks and consolidating the baseline of food security. Together, these three components constitute the material foundation and security guarantee for national stability, social development, and public well-being. Currently, a confluence of multiple risk factors is synergistically exacerbating threats to global food security, including increasingly severe global climate change [1], a resurgence of geopolitical conflicts [2], and heightened volatility in international food trade [3]. Some low-income countries are even facing food shortages. Food security resilience, which denotes the capacity of food systems to withstand shocks and stresses while maintaining essential functions, constitutes a fundamental pillar for ensuring stable food production and sustainable supply. As the world’s most populous nation, China has been making sustained and substantive contributions to global food security and its resilience through a series of effective and systematic measures. During the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the government articulated the strategy to “comprehensively consolidate the foundation of food security”, delineating a systematic framework to contribute to food security resilience. Correspondingly, the 2025 Central Document No. 1 explicitly emphasizes the imperative to “continuously enhance the supply security capacity of grain and other key agricultural products”. By implementing targeted measures, including “stabilizing cultivated areas while enhancing yields, reinforcing technological support, and improving income safeguards”, it seeks to efficiently operationalize capacity-building programs that help bolster the resilience of the grain system to risks and ensure a stable supply.

Despite a sustained average annual growth rate of 1.45 percent in China’s grain output over the past decade, signifying long-term steady progress, significant disparities persist in grain production efficiency and cultivated land quality relative to developed nations. These gaps are further amplified by the international context, resulting in accumulating external pressures on China’s food security. Frequent extreme climate events, such as droughts, floods, and typhoons across various regions, have substantially disrupted the normal growth cycles of grain crops, impeded biomass accumulation, and consequently diminished yields. This situation underscores the structural vulnerabilities within China’s food security system when exposed to abrupt external environmental shocks [4]. Meanwhile, the reallocation of land away from grain production amid urbanization and agricultural modernization [5], combined with the low profitability of grain cultivation that discourages farmers’ planting enthusiasm, has created systemic incentive distortions [6]. These internal factors collectively undermine the endogenous stability of food security. This indicates that ensuring China’s food security extends beyond maintaining total grain output and necessitates a transition toward greater resilience.

In 2020, China officially launched the “National Digital Rural Pilot Program”, a strategic measure designed to contribute to the resilience of its food security system. Since its implementation, the digital rural pilot policy has contributed to agricultural modernization [7] by leveraging advanced technological innovations to increase grain yield and quality [8], improve land productivity [9], and augment human capital levels [10,11]. The adoption of digital agricultural technologies, particularly integrated water–fertilizer irrigation and precision farming systems, has increased grain yield per unit area, accounting for over 70 percent of the total growth in grain production. The application of digital technology and smart agriculture is associated with the advancement of traditional agricultural production through technological innovation [12]. By integrating agricultural production factors, it contributes to reducing grain production losses in quantitative terms [13] and enhancing resource allocation efficiency in qualitative terms [14]. This approach strengthens the stability and adaptability of the grain supply chain, thereby reinforcing the system’s resilience to external shocks and providing solid support for stable production capacity. Concurrently, as the digital rural initiative advances, over 90% of China’s administrative villages have achieved 5G coverage. Agricultural big data platforms, established through digital technologies, facilitate the real-time monitoring of national cropland cultivation status. This effectively curbs the conversion of farmland to non-agricultural and non-grain uses [15], thereby fortifying a solid defense for the stability of grain planting areas. Evidently, the implementation of digital rural development not only effectively mitigates external risks and internal structural contradictions within the grain industry but also constitutes a core pathway for enhancing food security resilience.

Since resilience thinking was introduced into agricultural research, food security resilience has been predominantly defined as the capacity of a food system to sustain its essential functions and structural integrity when confronted with diverse disturbances [16]. Existing research defines food security resilience as the ability of food systems to withstand shocks while preserving systemic stability [17]. The new era necessitates building a sustainable food security system that balances quantity, quality, and ecological sustainability, marking a strategic shift from a yield-centric paradigm toward multidimensional coordination [18]. Building upon this foundation, the core essence of food security resilience discussed in this study lies in the fundamental enhancement of a food system’s risk resistance capacity. This is achieved through structural adjustments and functional optimization in response to internal and external disturbances such as extreme weather and market volatility. Such resilience not only ensures stable food supply but also improves food quality, thereby realizing a “qualitative transformation”. It is not merely about immediate growth in quantitative indicators like food production volume or yield per unit area to achieve “quantitative expansion” [19]. Existing studies indicate that although the overall resilience of national food security has exhibited a fluctuating upward trajectory [20], significant regional disparities persist, with resilience levels being higher in central and eastern regions and lower in the western region, particularly more pronounced in major grain-producing areas [21]. Concurrently, the development of the current food system encounters a complex landscape shaped by multiple intertwined factors. Externally, uncertainties such as climate change [22,23], geopolitical conflicts [24], and economic cyclical fluctuations [25] continue to impose persistent impacts. Internally, key elements including the foundational conditions for agricultural production [26], the efficacy of scientific and technological innovation conversion [27], the implementation outcomes of policy subsidies [28,29], and the structure of the supply chain system still require substantial improvement [30]. Compounded by the inherent vulnerabilities of the grain industry and structural contradictions derived from imbalanced internal incentive mechanisms [31], this situation underscores the fact that enhancing resilience cannot be accomplished through internal self-adjustment and optimization alone. It urgently demands external support and systemic reforms to create synergistic effects. Digital technologies, encompassing big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, are propelling a profound paradigm shift in agriculture. This transformation derives from the robust data analysis and processing capabilities, as well as intelligent decision-support functionalities, inherent in digital technologies [32]. It injects a revolutionary driving force into the systematic enhancement of food security resilience. Unlike traditional approaches that primarily focus on short-term productivity gains, digital rural development achieves intelligent cultivation models through the deep integration of digital technologies across the entire agricultural value chain. This enhances the risk response capabilities of agricultural producers, thereby providing systematic external support for strengthening food security resilience. At this critical juncture of agriculture’s transition towards digitalization, informatization, and intelligent transformation, major grain-producing regions carry the vital responsibility of safeguarding national food security [19]. Hence, advancing the deep integration of digital rural development with agricultural production has emerged as a pivotal strategic pathway, one that contributes to the overall competitiveness of agriculture and guarantees stable supply in major grain-producing areas [33].

To achieve this, this study concentrates on major grain-producing areas as its research focus. It establishes an evaluation framework for food security resilience grounded in three core dimensions: resistance capacity, recovery capacity, and transformation capacity [34]. Utilizing this framework, the study examines the impact of the “National Digital Rural Pilot Program” policy on food security resilience and investigates its underlying mechanisms. The primary contributions of this research are threefold: (1) Perspective innovation—digital rural development represents a crucial policy instrument for promoting agricultural modernization. However, its potential effect on food security resilience has not yet undergone systematic empirical assessment. This study offers a novel perspective for utilizing digital rural initiatives to enable resilience governance and ensure food security. (2) Methodological advancement—methodologically, this study diverges from prior approaches that often relied on subjective comprehensive evaluation methods to measure digital rural development levels. By conceptualizing the “National Digital Rural Pilot Program” as a quasi-natural experiment and applying the difference-in-differences method, it mitigates the subjectivity inherent in evaluating digital rural initiatives, thereby furnishing more objective empirical evidence for national digital rural development. (3) Content enrichment—regarding research content, this study delves into the actual transmission mechanisms of digital rural development policies and elucidates their pathways for enhancing food security resilience. Specifically, from the standpoints of large-scale grain operations and agricultural technological advancement, it clarifies the mechanism through which digital rural development contributes to food security resilience, separately verifying the mediating roles of large-scale operations and agricultural technological progress. Furthermore, considering issues such as information asymmetry and the urban–rural digital divide, it investigates the moderating effects of resource allocation efficiency and fiscal transparency within the process of digital rural development enhancing food security resilience.

2. Theoretical Analysis

The essence of digital rural development lies in utilizing digital technology as the core driving force to bridge the urban–rural digital divide, thereby promoting the transformation of rural areas from traditional models towards digitalization, intelligence, and modernization. This approach addresses fundamental challenges in rural development, such as information asymmetry and inefficient resource allocation, and plays a critical role in enhancing food security resilience. The theoretical analytical framework illustrating the impact mechanism of digital rural development on food security resilience is presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Theoretical analysis framework.

2.1. The Direct Impact of Digital Rural Development on Food Security Resilience

From the perspective of new growth theory, technological progress constitutes the core driver of economic growth. In contrast to the “extensive growth” model driven by disordered resource inputs, the decisive force propelling sustainable economic development resides in achieving optimal resource allocation, transforming production methods, and enhancing productivity through endogenous technological progress [35]. Digital rural development leverages technologies such as the Internet, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to foster the deep integration of digital technologies with agricultural production practices, thereby providing comprehensive technological support for food security. By utilizing big data and information technology, agricultural resource inputs can be precisely identified and controlled, resulting in a reduction in the application of agricultural chemicals, including pesticides, plastic mulch, and fertilizers [36]. This approach not only optimizes grain production models and diminishes reliance on resource endowments but also enhances grain production efficiency and quality, consequently contributing to the foundation for sustainable food security. Meanwhile, grounded in transaction cost theory, digital rural development systematically reduces transaction costs throughout the entire grain supply chain. This addresses the pain points inherent in traditional grain systems, such as information asymmetry, opaque processes, and inadequate oversight, directly mitigating market friction and information gaps [37]. Consequently, it enhances the grain system’s operational efficiency and flexibility in risk response, bolsters the grain industry chain’s capacity to buffer against market fluctuations, and consolidates its overall resilience in risk management [38]. Based on the foregoing analysis, the first research hypothesis is proposed.

Hypothesis****1.

Digital rural development is conducive to ensuring food security resilience.

2.2. The Indirect Impact of Digital Rural Development on Food Security Resilience

(1)
The mediating effect of scale operations in grain production and agricultural technological progress:

Large-scale grain operations represent a pivotal pathway for modern agricultural development, signifying the transformation and upgrading of traditional smallholder farming models towards modernized and intensive practices. Grounded in the theory of economies of scale, replacing fragmented farming with centralized and standardized management can effectively address the inherent issues of low production efficiency and high production costs in traditional smallholder agriculture. Digital rural development vigorously propels the advancement of large-scale grain operations by enhancing agricultural productivity, establishing integrated agricultural industrial systems, and adv