Food system resilience requires moving beyond zero-sum growth-defense frameworks

Agricultural systems are increasingly challenged by climatic instability, pest outbreaks, and pressure to reduce dependence on external inputs. However, agricultural evaluation systems remain strongly focused on productivity under optimal conditions, with less emphasis on resilience and adaptive capacity. One driver of this bias is the longstanding assumption that plant growth and defense are inherently antagonistic. Although plant biology now shows that growth and defense are dynamically coordinated rather than strictly competitive, this vision remains poorly integrated into agronomic evaluation and policy. In this Perspective we argue that persistent zero-sum interpretations of growth-defense relationships may constrain how resilience, stress tolerance, and sustainability are integrated into agricultural evaluation systems. Reframing growth-defense antagonism as a systems and policy problem may help align agricultural evaluation frameworks with the multifunctional demands imposed by climate change and sustainable food production.