COVID-19 undermines food security both directly, by disrupting food systems, and indirectly, through the impacts of lockdowns on household incomes and physical access to food. COVID-19 and responses to the pandemic could undermine food production, processing and marketing, but the most concerning impacts are on the demand-sideeconomic and physical access to food. This paper identifies three complementary frameworks that can contribute to understanding these effects, which are expected to persist into the post-pandemic phase, after lockdowns are lifted. FAO's 'four pillars'-availability, access, stability and utilisationand the 'food systems' approach both provide holistic frameworks for analysing food security. Sen's 'entitlement' approach is useful for disaggregating demand-side effects on household production-, labour-, trade-and transfer-based entitlements to food. Drawing on the strengths of each of these frameworks can enhance the understanding of the pandemic's impacts on food security, while also pinpointing areas for governments and other actors to intervene in the food system, to protect the food security of households left vulnerable by COVID-19 and public responses.

Twenty years after Poverty and Famines elaborated the entitlement approach as an innovative and holistic approach to famine analysis, debates about some of its fundamental assertions remain unresolved. This paper examines four limitations acknowledged by Sen himself: starvation by choice, disease-driven rather than starvation-driven mortality, ambiguities in entitlement specification and extra-legal entitlement transfers. It concludes that Sen's approach is significantly weakened, both conceptually and empirically, by its methodological individualism and by its privileging of economic aspects of famine above sociopolitical determinants. A complementary analysis is required, one that recognizes the importance of non-market institutions in determining entitlements, famine as social process and epidemiological crisis, and violations of entitlement rules in the complex emergencies that typify most contemporary famines.

Risk and vulnerability have been rediscovered as key features of rural livelihoods and poverty, and are currently a focus of policy attention. The poor themselves try to manage uncertainty using a variety of ex-ante and ex-post risk management strategies, and through community support systems, but these are both fragile and economically damaging. State interventions working through food, labour or credit markets have proved expensive and unsustainable in the past, though encouraging and innovative institutional partnerships are emerging. This article argues that the way forward lies in new approaches to social protection which underpin production as well as consumption: new thinking recognises the food security and livelihood-protecting functions of public interventions (such as fertiliser and seed subsidies) which were previously dismissed as 'marketdistorting'.

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