The Protein Sovereignty Index

Country assessment

United States

We assess the United States as Resilient (77.7). It produces more protein than it consumes in almost every animal category, with input dependence rather than volume the binding constraint on that surplus.

The system's real vulnerability sits upstream and structural: 92 per cent of potash is imported,[10] a single company produces the country's elemental phosphorus and its glyphosate,[14] and four firms slaughter 85 per cent of fed cattle.[7]

Access and affordability is solid rather than exceptional, with 4.5 per cent of the population unable to afford a healthy diet, underperforming its wealth, and 13.7 per cent of households food insecure in 2024.[27][8] The defining recent fact is that in February 2026 the federal government invoked the Defense Production Act over a herbicide and its chemical feedstock, having formally found that American agricultural productivity rested on one producer that "does not meet our annual needs".[14]

The protein system

The United States supplies 123.1 grams of protein per person per day, of which 82.5 grams are animal derived, split between meat at 50.3 grams, dairy at 22.6, eggs at 4.87 and fish at 4.68, with plant sources contributing 40.2 grams.[1][2] Total meat supply runs at 122.1 kilograms per person per year, the fourth highest of 188 countries and roughly 2.7 times the world average of 45.1 kilograms.[3] The system operates at about twice any nutritional requirement, so its sovereignty question concerns durability and inputs rather than sufficiency.

Production is correspondingly large. Red meat and poultry output reached 106.7 billion pounds in 2025 against domestic use of 97.1 billion pounds, with exports of 16.7 billion pounds and imports of 7.1 billion.[4] Pork covered 127 per cent of domestic use and broilers 116 per cent, while beef covered 90 per cent. Milk production of 231.7 billion pounds and egg production of 8,765 million dozen both left the country a net exporter, the latter even in a year of severe disease losses.[4]

The feed base is the foundation and the export engine, with the 2025/26 corn crop at 17.0 billion bushels, soybeans at 4.26 billion bushels and soybean meal output of 63.0 million short tons, 20.3 million of which was exported.[4] One common assumption deserves correction. The United States is the second largest soybean exporter rather than the first, shipping 41.4 million tonnes in 2025/26, about 22 per cent of world trade, against Brazil's 115.0 million tonnes, and in soybean meal both Argentina at 29.0 million tonnes and Brazil at 25.0 million exported more than the American 18.4 million.[4] American soybean exports also fell by roughly a fifth from 51.5 million tonnes the previous season, which USDA attributes to increased competition.[4] Seafood is the mirror image of the grain and meat picture: capture fisheries landed 4.21 million tonnes in 2024 and aquaculture only 468,000 tonnes,[22][23] while roughly 80 per cent of the seafood Americans eat is imported.[17]

Durable domestic capacity: 83

Quantitative score 86, adjusted down 3 points

Capacity is the strongest pillar and still short of the ceiling. On volume the country is comfortable, with surpluses in pork, poultry, dairy, eggs and feed protein.[1][4] Two exceptions and one trend hold the score below the high eighties. Beef self-sufficiency has fallen to 90 per cent, and the herd behind it stood at 86.2 million head on 1 January 2026, the smallest since 1951, with beef cows down 1 per cent year on year and the 2025 calf crop down 2 per cent.[5] Seafood is a genuine gap, with domestic aquaculture at one tenth of national fish output and capture volumes drifting from 4.65 million tonnes in 2023 to 4.21 million in 2024.[22][23] The wild fishery itself is comparatively well governed, with 42 of 522 managed stocks classified as overfished, 23 subject to overfishing and 51 rebuilt since 2000,[18] a stronger record than most large fishing nations can show.

We applied a downward adjustment of 3 points because single-year self-sufficiency ratios flatter a base that is contracting in two places at once. The cattle cycle is at a 75-year trough,[5] and the irrigated feed belt of the High Plains has lost about 286.4 million acre-feet of recoverable storage since around 1950, with an area-weighted decline of 16.5 feet and individual well declines reaching 265 feet.[13] Water that took millennia to accumulate is being converted into one season of feed at a time.

Resource headroom: 70

Quantitative score 70, no adjustment applied

Absolute endowment is exceptional and largely pre-committed. The United States holds 0.45 hectares of arable land per person[21] and 8,437 cubic metres of renewable internal freshwater per person,[20] both far above the global distribution, and its negligible aquaculture sector places almost no claim on wild fishmeal stocks that have already peaked. What limits the score is intensity. A diet of 122.1 kilograms of meat per person per year, weighted towards beef, is the most resource-hungry configuration available at scale.[3] Corn and soybeans occupied 180 million planted acres in 2025/26, with 37 per cent of the corn crop consumed as feed and residual, a further 33 per cent processed for ethanol and its feed by-products, and 62 per cent of the soybean crop crushed.[4]

National water abundance is not located where the feed is grown, and the aquifer data show the difference plainly.[13] We make no adjustment here: ethanol diversion capacity is scored in shock endurance, and we decline to credit uncropped rangeland or conservation acreage without a sourced figure for how much could return to production.

Testing that endowment against realisability evidence points the same way rather than against it. Land equipped for irrigation fell from 26.99 million hectares in 2000 to 24.69 million in 2024, and its share of cropland eased from a 2021 peak of 17.13 per cent to 15.96 per cent, a contraction independently confirmed by the 2022 Census of Agriculture, which found irrigated cropland at a 30-year low of 54.9 million acres against a 2017 record of 58.3 million.[36][38] Cropland fell 13.1 per cent and arable land 13.6 per cent in absolute terms between 2000 and 2024, and cropland per person fell 28.6 per cent, from 0.63 to 0.45 hectares.[36] None of this describes a resource base being expanded into. Capital is not the constraint: the agriculture orientation index for credit stood at 0.744 in 2024 against USD 83.0 billion of agriculture, forestry and fishing credit, a functioning market that simply is not being deployed to grow the cultivated or irrigated footprint.[37] The 25.8 million acres enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, capped at 27 million for fiscal 2025, sit outside that footprint by policy design rather than by capital constraint; returning them to production would mean unwinding conservation contracts, not financing new ones.[39]

Import exposure: 84

Quantitative score 84, no adjustment applied

This is the pillar on which the United States' import independence is most pronounced. Meat and poultry imports equalled 7.3 per cent of domestic use in 2025, feed protein is domestically produced with soybean meal imports of 0.84 million short tons against 63.0 million short tons of output,[4] and no protein flow of consequence transits Hormuz, Malacca, Suez or Bab el-Mandeb.

Two qualifications keep the score in the mid-eighties. Beef imports reached 5.4 billion pounds in 2025, 18.6 per cent of beef use, and are forecast at 6.1 billion pounds in 2026, roughly 21 per cent of use and an all-time record, driven by the herd contraction and by industrial demand for lean trimmings.[4] Supplier diversity mitigates this: Brazil is the largest single origin at 23 per cent of year-to-date imports in early 2026, followed by Australia at 19 per cent, Canada at 14, Mexico at 11 and New Zealand at 9, so the top five account for 77 per cent and two of them share a land border.[6] Seafood is the real dependency, with about 80 per cent of consumption imported and 6.3 billion pounds of edible product landed against 2.5 billion exported in 2023.[17] We could not compute partner-level concentration for seafood, and we record that as the largest unmeasured exposure in this pillar.

Upstream dependence: 66

Quantitative score 70, adjusted down 4 points

Here the reputation and the data diverge. The United States supplies its own feed and most of its own nitrogen: ammonia net import reliance was 5 per cent in 2025 across 38 plants, 57 per cent of capacity sited in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas on domestic natural gas, with 88 per cent of output going to fertiliser.[12] Potash is the opposite. Net import reliance was 92 per cent in 2025, with Canada supplying 79 per cent of imports, Russia 12 per cent and Israel 3 per cent, and the USGS notes bluntly that no substitute exists for potassium as a plant nutrient and that there is no government stockpile.[10]

Phosphate appears comfortable at 16 per cent net import reliance until the derivative chain is traced.[11] Florida producers are contending with declining reserves and lower phosphorus pentoxide content, imports of rock come almost entirely from Peru, roughly 85 per cent of elemental phosphorus imports come from Kazakhstan,[25] and Executive Order 14387 records that a single domestic producer makes both the country's elemental phosphorus and its glyphosate-based herbicides, that more than 6 million kilograms of elemental phosphorus are imported annually, and that there is no direct chemical alternative to glyphosate.[14][15] Phosphate rock and potash were both added to the critical minerals list in November 2025.[10][11]

Two further dependencies sit outside the mineral data. Seed genetics are domestic and concentrated, with two firms accounting for 72 per cent of planted corn acres and 66 per cent of soybean acres in 2018 to 2020,[7] and 42 per cent of hired crop farmworkers held no work authorisation in 2020 to 2022.[9] We applied a downward adjustment of 4 points for the one-factory chokepoint that the aggregate ratios conceal, and granted the executive order no offsetting credit, because delegating allocation authority over existing output differs from funding new capacity.

Access and affordability: 82

Quantitative score 82, no adjustment applied

The United States clears this pillar comfortably without approaching the ceiling its income would suggest. The share of the population unable to afford a healthy diet was 4.5 per cent in 2025, or 15.7 million people, easing from a 2022 peak of 5.4 per cent through 5.2 per cent in 2023 and 4.6 per cent in 2024, and still above the 2.9 per cent low of 2021.[27] That places it inside the 2 to 10 per cent range, an affordability reading that underperforms what its wealth would predict. Prevalence of undernourishment is reported at 2.5 per cent, the censored floor below which FAO stops publishing a precise figure, in every year from 2001 to 2023,[28] a strong reading that carries no information about direction. Child stunting was 3.8 per cent in 2022, up from 3.4 per cent in 2018,[29] low in absolute terms yet higher than several peer high-income economies. Domestic food price volatility is real without being extreme: food-at-home prices rose 11.4 per cent in 2022, 5.0 per cent in 2023, slowed to 1.2 per cent in 2024, and are running at an estimated 2.3 per cent in 2025, with a 2026 forecast of 2.7 per cent inside a 1.6 to 3.9 per cent range.[30]

Physical distance to shops is the indicator most often assumed to be the American weakness, and the primary evidence points the other way. In 2019, 33.2 per cent of low-income people and 33.6 per cent of households on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program lived more than one mile from the nearest supermarket, supercentre or large grocery store, against 39.8 per cent of the population as a whole and 40.9 per cent of moderate and high-income people.[31] USDA attributes this to population density, low-income people tending to live in more crowded areas, and notes that the result may contradict the common narrative of poor foodstore access among low-income populations.[31] Distance in the United States is a feature of low-density settlement rather than of poverty, and the group it genuinely constrains is narrower: roughly 2.0 million households with no vehicle live more than a mile from a store.[31] What holds the score back is affordability and outcomes rather than geography. Within the 78 to 90 band the United States is lifted by undernourishment at the reporting floor and by food-at-home inflation held inside a 1.2 to 5.0 per cent range since 2023,[30] and held down by an unaffordability share of 4.5 per cent, weaker than its wealth would predict, and by a household food-insecurity rate of 13.7 per cent recorded alongside a national protein surplus.[8] Together those put the pillar at 82; no adjustment applies, because the indicators already register the pattern that abundance at the national level does not reach every household.

Shock endurance: 73

Quantitative score 70, adjusted up 3 points

Endurance rests on slack and speed rather than on reserves. Corn ending stocks equalled 12.2 per cent of use in 2025/26 and soybeans only 7.7 per cent,[4] and we found no disclosure of any government protein or grain stockpile, while the USGS confirms none for the three fertiliser nutrients.[10][11][12] Against that, 5.55 billion bushels of corn, a third of the crop, sits in discretionary industrial use and could be redirected towards feed,[4] four large animal protein streams substitute for one another, and the country can outbid any competitor on world markets.

The avian influenza episode is the best available test, and the system passed it slowly and expensively. Across four HPAI outbreaks since 2015, the worst run of animal-disease events in American history, 221.7 million birds have been lost in total, of which 178.8 million were laying hens.[24] The current wave, which began in October 2024, drove retail egg prices to a peak of 6.23 dollars a dozen in March 2025, roughly triple their 2023 trough.[19] Yet by 1 March 2026 the layer flock had been rebuilt to 315.8 million hens on a record 144.9 million replacement pullets, even while 9.47 million layers were still being lost in February 2026 alone, and New York wholesale prices had fallen from about 533 cents a dozen a year earlier to 154.82 cents.[6] Retail prices were 2.14 dollars by June 2026.[19] We credited 3 points for that demonstrated biological recovery.

The weaknesses are domestic. Four firms slaughter 85 per cent of fed cattle, 67 per cent of hogs, 53 per cent of broilers and 55 per cent of turkeys,[7] concentrating national supply in a small number of plants and corporate networks. Policy preparedness is a framework more than a grain or protein stock: NSM-16 of November 2022 requires threat assessments and biennial reporting, and it does establish a National Veterinary Stockpile and a National Plant Disease Recovery System, but neither is a food or protein reserve.[16] Distribution also fails at the margin even in surplus, with 13.7 per cent of households, 18.3 million containing 47.9 million people, food insecure in 2024.[8] Export markets add volatility, with beef shipments to China down 95 per cent year on year to just 4.1 million pounds in the year to February 2026,[6] which cuts revenue rather than supply.

Crisis purchasing power scores 60, a mixed picture rather than a uniformly reassuring one. Official reserve assets stood at 254.5 billion dollars in July 2025,[32] against annual goods and services imports of 4,110.0 billion dollars in 2024;[33] on our own calculation that covers under a month of imports, a reading that would ordinarily flag severe distress. We do not read it that way here, because the United States buys internationally in its own currency and does not depend on a stock of foreign exchange to pay for imports the way a country without a reserve currency does. Market access remains the deepest and most liquid available to any sovereign, even though Moody's stripped the country's last top-tier credit rating in May 2025, moving it to Aa1 on a trajectory of federal debt rising from 98 to a forecast 134 per cent of GDP by 2035 and interest costs from 18 to 30 per cent of revenue over the same period.[34] Social protection has demonstrated real scaling capacity: SNAP participation rose 14 per cent and benefit spending 66 per cent within two quarters of the 2020 shock.[35] The indicators put the pillar at 70, a modest pull down from the reserve-currency dollar's deep market access against thin headline reserve cover; the existing +3 adjustment stands unchanged, keeping the pillar at 73.

Trajectory

Direction of travel is mixed and mostly slow. Executive Order 14387 gives USDA priority and allocation powers over phosphorus and glyphosate supply and immunity for compliant producers,[14] which manages a shortage rather than ending it. New capacity is thin: a Michigan potash project holds a conditional 1.26 billion dollar Department of Energy loan commitment for 800,000 tonnes of muriate of potash a year, against imports of 5.6 million tonnes,[10] and the Idaho phosphate mine approved in October 2025 replaces a nearby mine expected to run out of ore within the decade.[26] Rebuilding the cattle herd is a three to five year proposition given a 4.71 million head beef replacement heifer inventory,[5] so record beef imports are the near-term equilibrium.

The levers are few and identifiable. A second domestic producer of elemental phosphorus or glyphosate, a working domestic potash mine, a marine aquaculture sector large enough to close part of the seafood gap, decongestion of cattle and hog slaughter, and a legal, stable farm workforce would each raise a pillar. Absent those, the United States remains what this assessment finds: a protein superpower whose vulnerabilities sit upstream of the farm gate and inside its own processing plants.

Sources

  1. Daily per capita protein supply (FAO Food Balance Sheets) · Our World in Data (2026 (data 2023))
  2. Per capita sources of protein (FAO Food Balance Sheets) · Our World in Data (2026 (data 2023))
  3. Per capita meat consumption by type (FAO Food Balance Sheets) · Our World in Data (2026 (data 2023))
  4. World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, WASDE-673 · USDA Office of the Chief Economist (2026)
  5. Cattle (January 2026) · USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2026)
  6. Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook, April 2026 (LDP-M-382) · USDA Economic Research Service (2026)
  7. Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness (EIB-256) · USDA Economic Research Service (2023)
  8. Food Security in the U.S. - Key Statistics and Graphics · USDA Economic Research Service (2026 (data 2024))
  9. Farm Labor (National Agricultural Workers Survey data) · USDA Economic Research Service (2025 (data 2020-22))
  10. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Potash · U.S. Geological Survey (2026)
  11. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Phosphate Rock · U.S. Geological Survey (2026)
  12. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Nitrogen (Fixed)-Ammonia · U.S. Geological Survey (2026)
  13. Water-level and recoverable water in storage changes, High Plains Aquifer, predevelopment to 2019 and 2017 to 2019 (SIR 2023-5143) · U.S. Geological Survey (2024)
  14. Executive Order 14387, Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides (91 FR 8703) · Federal Register (2026)
  15. Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ensures an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides for National Security · The White House (2026)
  16. National Security Memorandum on Strengthening the Security and Resilience of United States Food and Agriculture (NSM-16) · American Presidency Project (White House document) (2022)
  17. Fisheries of the United States · NOAA Fisheries (2025 (data 2023))
  18. Status of Stocks 2024: Annual Report to Congress on the Status of U.S. Fisheries · NOAA Fisheries (2025 (data 2024))
  19. Average Price Data: Eggs, grade A, large, per dozen (APU0000708111) · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2026)
  20. Renewable internal freshwater resources per capita (ER.H2O.INTR.PC) · World Bank (2026 (data 2022))
  21. Arable land, hectares per person (AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC) · World Bank (2026 (data 2023))
  22. Capture fishery production (FAO FishStat) · Our World in Data (2026 (data 2024))
  23. Aquaculture production (FAO FishStat) · Our World in Data (2026 (data 2024))
  24. Avian influenza epidemics and the US egg industry, 2014-2025 · Zootecnica International (compiling USDA APHIS data) (2025)
  25. FAQ on the 18 February 2026 White House Executive Order on elemental phosphorus and glyphosate · STEPS Center, North Carolina State University (2026)
  26. BLM Approves Caldwell Canyon Phosphate Mine in Idaho · U.S. Bureau of Land Management (2025)
  27. Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet (CoAHD), prevalence of unaffordability, data, July 2026 release (SOFI 2026) · FAOSTAT (2026 (data 2025))
  28. Prevalence of undernourishment (% of population) (SN.ITK.DEFC.ZS) · World Bank (FAO data) (2026 (data 2023))
  29. Prevalence of stunting, height for age (% of children under 5) (SH.STA.STNT.ZS) · World Bank (UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates) (2026 (data 2022))
  30. Food Price Outlook, Summary Findings · USDA Economic Research Service (2026)
  31. Low-Income and Low-Foodstore-Access Census Tracts, 2015-19 (EIB-236), the report accompanying the Food Access Research Atlas · USDA Economic Research Service (2022 (data 2019))
  32. U.S. International Reserve Position, 11 July 2025 · U.S. Department of the Treasury (2025)
  33. U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, December and Annual 2024 · U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (2025 (data 2024))
  34. 2025 United States Sovereign Rating Action · Moody's Ratings (2025)
  35. Emergency allotments, participation increase led to 66-percent increase in SNAP benefits in second half of FY 2020 · USDA Economic Research Service, Charts of Note (2021)
  36. Inputs: Land Use (cropland, arable land and land area equipped for irrigation, United States, 1961-2024) · FAOSTAT (2026 (data to 2024))
  37. Investment: Credit to Agriculture (agriculture orientation index for credit, United States, 1991-2024) · FAOSTAT (2026 (data to 2024))
  38. 2022 Census of Agriculture: Irrigated cropland reaches a 30-year low in 2022 · USDA Economic Research Service, Charts of Note (2024 (data 2022))
  39. USDA Accepts Nearly 1.8 Million Acres Through 2025 Conservation Reserve Program Enrollment · USDA Farm Service Agency (2025)

What we could not measure

The FAO/World Bank undernourishment series for the United States has been capped at its 2.5 per cent reporting floor every year since 2001, so it carries no information about change over time; USDA's own food-insecurity measure (13.7 per cent of households, 2024) is used as a domestic check instead. Child stunting is measured only every few years (2016, 2018, 2022), too sparse to confirm a trend. No agency discloses strategic food or protein reserve holdings, and seafood supplier concentration, the largest unmeasured import exposure, could not be quantified.

Published August 2026 ·How scores are produced