Highlights:

Food systems worldwide are increasingly exposed to climate extremes, conflicts, pandemics, and economic shocks, raising concerns about their capacity to safeguard food security and nutrition. Although resilience is now central in global policy debates, empirical evidence on what enables national food systems to withstand shocks remains limited. Here, we analyze a unique multi-country dataset integrating measures of shock severity, governance, economic conditions, social capitals, and food-system characteristics. Using a causal resilience-as-capacity framework and a series of hybrid econometric models, we assess how structural factors and emergent system properties shape countries’ ability to limit rises in prevalence of undernourishment when affected by shocks. We show that experiencing more severe shocks does not systematically lead to worse food security: several highly affected countries—particularly in Asia—display encouraging outcomes despite severe disturbances. More generally, countries with stronger resilience capacities and more favorable food-system characteristics fare better during shocks. Especially, within-country improvements in government effectiveness, food-supply redundancy, or GDP per capita significantly reduce deterioration in undernourishment, while stronger social capital supports long-term improvement across countries. Together, these findings indicate that food-system resilience capacities can weaken the relationship between shock severity and food insecurity, with food-system resilience then understood as the ability to decouple food-security outcomes from shock severity. These findings provide one of the first global empirical assessments of the factors underpinning food-system resilience. Strengthening institutional effectiveness, enhancing redundancy, and investing in social capital emerge as critical pathways for building resilient food systems in an increasingly shock-prone world.