No abstract

Even in high-income countries like Israel, children have been particularly vulnerable to the surge in food insecurity driven by quarantines, unemployment, and economic hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under normal circumstances, School Feeding Programs (SFPs) can help to ensure child food security. In the wake of the pandemic, policy makers worldwide have been challenged to adapt national SFPs to provide nutritional support to children (and indirectly to their families) during extended school closures. Most national SFPs implemented contingency plans to ensure continued nutritional support for children. In Israel, where SFPs were largely suspended during long periods of mandated school closing, there was a loss of 30–50% of feeding days for the ~ 454,000 children enrolled in the program. The lack of emergency contingency planning and failure to maintain Israeli SFPs during school closures reveals longstanding structural policy flaws that hindered coordination between relevant ministries and authorities and impeded the mobilization of funds and existing programs to meet the emergent need. The school feeding law does not identify child food security as an explicit aim, there are no benchmarks for monitoring and evaluating the program to ensure that the food aid reaches the children most in need, even routinely, and the Ministry of Education had no obligation to maintain the program and to marshal data on the participants that could be acted upon in the emergency. Moreover, because Israeli SFPs are “selective”, in other words, implemented according to community risk (low-income, high poverty rate) and geographical factors, attendant stigma and financial burdens can make participation in the program less attractive to families and communities that need them the most. We argue that Israel should make urgent, long-term improvements to the SFPs as follows: First, eliminating childhood food insecurity should be made an explicit goal of legislation in the broader context of national social, health, and nutritional goals, and this includes ensuring SFPs are maintained during emergencies. Second, the government should assume responsibility for the routine assessment and data collection on food insecurity among Israeli children. Third, SFPs should be subjected to rigorous independent program evaluation. Finally, a “universal” SFP providing nutritious diets would likely improve the health of all Israeli children, across all socioeconomic backgrounds. These steps to guarantee that Israeli children have food to realize their full physical and cognitive potential would emphasize Israel’s firm commitment to support multiple dimensions of health, educational achievement, and societal values, to combat the complex and long-term consequences of the pandemic, and to prepare for the next one.

Food is and has always been political power. When unequally distributed and not universally accessible, food is a potent tool of domination and social control. Yet despite its significance, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, food availability was rarely discussed as a principal political issue outside the global South. Since then, the world has had to grapple with the fallout from two leading grain exporters warring with each other. From the outset of the conflict, Russia has used food both as a shield and a weapon against international interference, with the world's most vulnerable countries becoming collateral damage. This is not an accident. Since the early days of Russian president Vladimir Putin's rule, the regime has sought to prevent domestic unrest and insulate itself against potentially crippling Western sanctions by promoting Russia's food independence.Russia's focus on nutritional self-sufficiency sets the country apart from almost all modern autocracies. While many authoritarian regimes have adopted industrial import-substitution policies, in Putin's Russia it is the substitution of food imports with domestically produced crops that is crucial for regime survival. Food thus offers an important lens for understanding autocracy in Russia. Recognizing food as a powerful political tool allows us to move beyond the currently dominant focus on institutions or repression for understanding Putin's grip on power to the broader framework of mechanisms of authoritarian stability.The outcomes of the Kremlin's food-import-substitution policies