Despite South-South solidarity rhetoric, BRICS lacks a coherent multilateral food security architecture | Photo Credit: Lisovskaya

As India takes the BRICS Chair Presidency for 2026, the bloc stands at a crossroads. New Delhi’s ‘Humanity First’ framing seeks to pivot BRICS beyond its reputation as a macroeconomic counterweight to Western institutions towards a more people-centred alliance.

Following its expansion, the bloc’s geographic, demographic and agricultural footprint has grown dramatically. BRICS nations account for nearly half of the world’s population, spanning some productive territories and several food-stressed economies.

BRICS countries dominate global agricultural output while bearing a disproportionate burden of the world’s hungry — a structural condition demanding structural reckoning.

The contradiction is most apparent when examined country by country. Brazil is a leading agricultural exporter, yet millions remain hungry. This persists not because Brazil lacks food, but because income inequality, welfare volatility and political economy of agribusiness keep the poor excluded from domestic abundance.

India offers a useful vantage point but an equally honest mirror. While a net food exporter that overcame famine, it faces a nutrition risis. Despite producing enough calories and feeding 800 million people monthly through its Public Distribution System (PDS), diets remain calorie dense and lack protein and essential micronutrients. With one in three under-five children stunted, India exhibits that caloric sufficiency and nutritional adequacy are not the same.

Ethiopia, the newest and most food-insecure member, sits at the far end of this spectrum.

Despite South-South solidarity rhetoric, BRICS lacks a coherent multilateral food security architecture. Unlike the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy or ASEAN’s emergency reserves, BRICS coordinates mostly through bilateral agreements. Crucially, the New Development Bank (NDB) has heavily funded infrastructure while effectively ignoring rural food systems and resilience. Until the NDB establishes a dedicated food systems mandate with capital and measurable targets, this will remain a missed opportunity. Furthermore, export nationalism remains a corrosive force. For instance, India’s 2023 non-basmati rice export ban and the Russia-Ukraine war sent price shocks through vulnerable markets.

Beneath these political-economy failures lies a neglected nutritional crisis. The BRICS food cooperation framework relies mainly on caloric supply, prioritising food availability, price stability and supply chains. This framing fails to capture the full problem. The bloc faces the triple burden of under-nutrition, widespread micronutrient deficiencies and an accelerating epidemic of obesity and non-communicable diseases.

Women bear a disproportionate share of this burden. Rampant anaemia in India, Ethiopia, and rural China drives intergenerational cycles of stunted growth and cognitive disadvantage.

Strategic policy shifts

Any serious BRICS agenda must move beyond calories, prioritising women’s nutritional agency and equitable access to diverse, nutritious diets.

India’s chairship could drive a few decisive policy shifts. First, food security and improved nutrition must become a formal pillar of BRICS cooperation. This requires binding targets to reduce stunting and anaemia, establish social protection floors, limit export bans and share emergency food reserves.

Second, BRICS should mobilise equitable sharing of agricultural knowledge and technology, such as China’s precision agriculture, India’s large-scale PDS experience, Brazil’s smallholder credit programmes and the UAE’s desert farming innovations, among its members.

Third, smallholders and women producers must move to the centre of BRICS agricultural policy. Shifting away from purely export-oriented models requires reforming land tenure, expanding women’s property and credit rights and ensuring intra-bloc trade supports family farming alongside agribusiness. BRICS will ultimately be judged less on its ability to challenge the dollar or reshape the UN Security Council than on whether it improves the material conditions of the people it represents.

The writers are Senior Scientist and Director (Acting), respectively, at the ICAR-National Institute of Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NIAP), New Delhi. Views are personal

Published on June 11, 2026