The Future of Food Security in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Verhagen, W.H.; Böhl, David; Cannon, Mallory; Pulido, Andres; Pirzadeh, Audrey; Nott, Iris; Moyer, Jonathan D.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4006474

Cited by 6 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…More than four years of progress against poverty have been erased by the COVID-19 pandemic [ 61 ], demonstrating the fragility of current food systems [ 29 ]. Worldwide and particularly in fragile contexts, malnutrition and food insecurity have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic due to an increase in unemployment and a decline in household incomes; constraints on the availability and affordability of nutritious foods; interruptions of health, nutrition, and protection services; and limited opportunities for physical activities [ 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 ]. School closures, movement restrictions, and nationwide lockdowns impacted food systems by disrupting the production, transportation, and sale of fresh, nutrient-rich, and affordable foods, which, in turn, led to price volatility and forced millions of families to rely on low-cost, nutrient-poor alternatives, thus influencing children’s dietary intake through changes in their home food environment [ 67 ].…”

Section: Climate Change Interactions With the Agro-ecosystem And Effe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Interlinkages between Climate Change and Food Systems: The Impact on Child Malnutrition—Narrative Review

et al. 2023

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The pandemics of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change represent severe threats to child health. They co-occur; interact with each other to produce sequelae at biological, psychological, or social levels; and share common underlying drivers. In this paper, we review the key issues concerning child diet and nutritional status, focusing on the interactions with climate and food systems. Inadequate infant and young child feeding practices, food insecurity, poverty, and limited access to health services are the leading causes of malnutrition across generations. Food system industrialization and globalization lead to a double burden of malnutrition, whereby undernutrition (i.e., stunting, wasting, and deficiencies in micronutrients) coexists with overweight and obesity, as well as to harmful effects on climate. Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are worsening child malnutrition, impacting the main underlying causes (i.e., household food security, dietary diversity, nutrient quality, and access to maternal and child health), as well as the social, economic, and political factors determining food security and nutrition (livelihoods, income, infrastructure resources, and political context). Existing interventions have the potential to be further scaled-up to concurrently address undernutrition, overnutrition, and climate change by cross-cutting education, agriculture, food systems, and social safety nets. Several stakeholders must work co-operatively to improve global sustainable nutrition.

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Section: Climate Change Interactions With the Agro-ecosystem And Effe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Interlinkages between Climate Change and Food Systems: The Impact on Child Malnutrition—Narrative Review

et al. 2023

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“…But integrated assessment models on undernourishment can learn from shorter term policy models that implement a wide range of policy measures on both food supply, food access and socio-economic change. Policy measures in these models cover a wide-range of options including improvements in agriculture 34 , infrastructure development 34 , trade 4,35,36 , social protection schemes 37 , (female) education improvements 8,38,39 , access to water and sanitation 8,39 , improved governance 39 , income growth 3,39 and gender equality 39 . Changes in health, education, infrastructure, agricultural R&D and gender equality interact and will in turn affect patterns of economic growth, inequality and broader socio-economic progress [40][41][42] .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, in 2019 food insecurity affected over 690 million people and long-term projections suggest that the world and individual countries are not on track to end hunger even by 2050 [2][3][4][5] . Adding to these challenges, COVID-19 has further amplified food insecurity, both in the short and longer-term [6][7][8] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy strategies to achieve zero hunger by 2040 at the country-level

Verhagen

Böhl

Pulido

et al. 2023

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Sustainable development goal 2 aims to end hunger in all its forms by 2030, achieved through a joint policy strategy on raising food production and food access. Most model-based projections on undernourishment towards 2050 focus on sustainably producing enough food, rather than on ending hunger. We compare policy strategies on food supply and food access to lower undernourishment in 2040 for 151 countries. Here, we show that in a Business-as-Usual scenario (BaU) 3.3% of the world population is undernourished by 2040. We develop 27 regional policy target-scenarios on Producing More Food (PMF), Raising average Caloric Consumption (RCC) and within-country Equal Food Distribution (EFD). RCC lowers undernourishment to 2.2%, followed by EFD (2.6%) and PMF (2.7%). For world regions results are mixed, with either RCC or EFD generating the strongest reduction in undernourishment. For individual countries, 90 countries achieve SDG2 in 2040 in the BaU-scenario. In PMF, 18 additional countries achieve SDG2, versus 30 countries in EFD and 38 countries in RCC. Both food supply and food access policy strategies can achieve SDG2, but raising food access results in greater progress at all scales. Long-term food security studies should move beyond environmentally sustainable agricultural policy strategies, as socio-economic policies on food access and inequality policies will determine the future of food security.

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“…The poverty model is embedded within a larger system of agricultural, demography, education, economic, energy, environmental, health, infrastructure, governance, security, and technological models [54]. IFs has been used in a variety of research on poverty and other measures of human development [4,5,8,48,[55][56][57], with a recent focus on the effects of COVID-19 on extreme poverty, and more generally human and economic development [17,19,[58][59][60].…”

Section: Modeling Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The impact of COVID-19 on human development isn't limited to direct, proximate drivers of poverty, on GDP growth or inequality. It includes effects on education, government debt and finance, international financial flows and trade, undernourishment, child stunting, and broad SDG achievement [17- 19,60,93,94]. Combinations of impacts will jointly shape the future impact of COVID-19 on extreme poverty, and more broadly human development.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

How many people is the COVID-19 pandemic pushing into poverty? A long-term forecast to 2050 with alternative scenarios

et al. 2022

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the course of human development. In this manuscript we analyze the long-term effect of COVID-19 on poverty at the country-level across various income thresholds to 2050. We do this by introducing eight quantitative scenarios that model the future of Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG1) achievement using alternative assumptions about COVID-19 effects on both economic growth and inequality in the International Futures model. Relative to a scenario without the pandemic (the No COVID scenario), the COVID Base scenario increases global extreme poverty by 73.9 million in 2020 (the range across all scenarios: 43.5 to 155.0 million), 63.6 million in 2030 (range: 9.8 to 167.2 million) and 57.1 million in 2050 (range: 3.1 to 163.0 million). The COVID Base results in seven more countries not meeting the SDG1 target by 2030 that would have achieved the target in a No COVID scenario. The most pessimistic scenario results in 17 more countries not achieving SDG1 compared with a No COVID scenario. The greatest pandemic driven increases in poverty occur in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

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The Future of Food Security in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Interlinkages between Climate Change and Food Systems: The Impact on Child Malnutrition—Narrative Review

Interlinkages between Climate Change and Food Systems: The Impact on Child Malnutrition—Narrative Review

Policy strategies to achieve zero hunger by 2040 at the country-level

How many people is the COVID-19 pandemic pushing into poverty? A long-term forecast to 2050 with alternative scenarios

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