A new report is sounding the alarm on a critical vulnerability in the U.S. food supply: a near-total reliance on foreign manufacturers for essential nutritional components.
The Institute for Feed Education and Research, otherwise known as iFeeder, recently highlighted that the United States has largely offshored the production of vitamins and amino acids necessary for both livestock and human health.
Leah Wilkinson, chief policy officer of the American Feed Industry Association, tells Mid-West Farm Report that this shift has created a precarious bottleneck.
“So our foundation, the Institute for Feed Education and Research, just released a report last week that studied our dependency on foreign suppliers for vitamins and amino acids,” she explains. “And what that study found was that we are dependent solely on one country, China, for almost 99% of the vitamins and amino acids that we study.”
This dependency poses risks beyond just rising costs, Wilkinson says. She warns that any supply chain disruption could lead to animal welfare issues, reduced production efficiency, and broader food security threats. To combat this, the industry is exploring “friend-shoring” trade agreements and public-private partnerships to revitalize domestic manufacturing.
The conversation comes as the “Make America Healthy Again” movement gains steam, potentially reshaping how ingredients are regulated. Because the same vitamins used in animal feed often end up in human products like infant formula, the industry is pushing to ensure that any new regulations remain science-based and predictable, maintaining the “gold standard” of U.S. food safety.
