Amid Covid-19, The Time To Act Now To Protect Food Security

With the impacts of the pandemic on food and nutrition being felt around the region, planning is needed to avoid higher food prices, decreased nutrition and reduced food security.

- Hans Woldring, Susann Roth

COVID-19 has captured the full attention of governments across the world. Their immediate focus has been on strategies to manage both the pandemic from a public health perspective and the economic and financial fallout through the implementation of varying economic rescue packages.

While understandably these are key priorities, people living in the locked-down cities of Asia and the Pacific are worrying about fresh food markets that are closed, dwindling stocks in supermarkets and the broken supply chains of local fruit and vegetable deliveries while food is held up on the wharves. It’s getting harder every day to get food.

Possible impacts

We need to start thinking about the possible impacts of the current crisis on food and nutrition security, and what options exist for governments to minimize food and nutrition security risks.

Reduced working hours or unemployment will cut incomes for tens of millions of workers in Asia. This reality is well underway. For many, household income could easily fall to levels that cause severe financial hardship, and both the quantity and quality of the weekly food basket will deteriorate.

For families who live paycheck to paycheck, their resilience to reduced incomes is often limited, and the impact of reduced income will be rapid and potentially severe.

While efforts are underway to hand out basic food, it may not cover the nutrition needs of populations and definitely not those of children and pregnant women. Low nutrition food, even when consumed for just for a couple of months, has longterm impacts on children’s brain development and overall health.