The COVID-19 Pandemic and Global Food Security

Mardones, Fernando O.; Rich, Karl M.; Boden, Lisa; Switt, Andrea I. Moreno; Caipo, Marisa; Zimin-Veselkoff, Natalia; Al-Ateeqi, Abdulaziz; Baltenweck, Isabelle

doi:10.3389/fvets.2020.578508

Cited by 96 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(60 reference statements)

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“…Mandatory public health initiatives to control and limit COVID-19 disease spread have led to dramatic changes in day-to-day routines, resulting in increased social isolation 1,2 , employment and financial insecurities 3 , and an altered food environment 4 . This is placing most of the world's population in a unique global experiment on a massive scale.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of COVID-19 on health behaviours and body weight: A prospective observational study in a cohort of 1.1 million UK and US individuals

Mazidii

Leeming

Merino

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Evidence regarding the impact of COVID-19 on health behaviours is limited. In this prospective study including 1.1 million UK and US participants we collected diet and lifestyle data ‘pre-’ and ‘peri-’ pandemic, and computed a bi-directional health behaviour disruption index. We show that disruption was higher in the younger, female and socioeconomically deprived (p<0.001). A loss in body weight (-0.57kg) was greater in highly disrupted individuals compared to those with low disruption (0.01kg). There were large inter-individual changes observed in all 46 health and diet behaviors measured peri-pandemic versus pre-pandemic, but no mean change in the total population. Individuals most adherent to unhealthy pre-pandemic health behaviours improved their diet quality (0.93units) and weight (-0.79kg) compared with those reporting healthy pre-pandemic behaviours (0.08units and 0.04kg respectively), irrespective of relative deprivation. For a proportion of the population, the pandemic may have provided an impetus to improve health behaviours.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of COVID-19 on health behaviours and body weight: A prospective observational study in a cohort of 1.1 million UK and US individuals

Mazidii

Leeming

Merino

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…Some scholars have called for paying more attention to the relations between agrifood systems, especially diets, and health [253,[312][313][314][315]. This is done, among other ways, by operationalizing the holistic and systemic concept of "One Health" [24,316,317], which relates the health of humans with that of animals and ecosystems/environment. Such a call, particularly timely and relevant in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected different components of the agri-food system, such as agricultural production, food distribution, and food consumption and dietary patterns [20,24,98,[318][319][320][321], carries implications in terms of food and nutrition security [24,320].…”

Section: Society and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is done, among other ways, by operationalizing the holistic and systemic concept of "One Health" [24,316,317], which relates the health of humans with that of animals and ecosystems/environment. Such a call, particularly timely and relevant in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected different components of the agri-food system, such as agricultural production, food distribution, and food consumption and dietary patterns [20,24,98,[318][319][320][321], carries implications in terms of food and nutrition security [24,320]. In this regard, referring to nutrition research in the US, Fleischhacker et al [320] argued that "The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has further laid bare these strains, including food insecurity, major diet-related comorbidities for poor outcomes from COVID-19 such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, and insufficient surveillance on and coordination of our food system" (p 721).…”

Section: Society and Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the one hand, current food systems generate adverse outcomes and, on the other hand, fail to eradicate hunger and malnutrition, especially in the Global South [16][17][18][19]. The failures and vulnerabilities of the current global agri-food system have been particularly manifest during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic [20,21], which affected food supply chains, food environments, and consumption patterns alike [22][23][24][25]. While more than enough food is produced [26], the problem of food insecurity persists [18,27,28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

2021

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Agri-food systems (AFS) have been central in the debate on sustainable development. Despite this growing interest in AFS, comprehensive analyses of the scholarly literature are hard to find. Therefore, the present systematic review delineated the contours of this growing research strand and analyzed how it relates to sustainability. A search performed on the Web of Science in January 2020 yielded 1389 documents, and 1289 were selected and underwent bibliometric and topical analyses. The topical analysis was informed by the SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems) approach of FAO and structured along four dimensions viz. environment, economy, society and culture, and policy and governance. The review shows an increasing interest in AFS with an exponential increase in publications number. However, the study field is north-biased and dominated by researchers and organizations from developed countries. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while environmental aspects are sufficiently addressed, social, economic, and political ones are generally overlooked. The paper ends by providing directions for future research and listing some topics to be integrated into a comprehensive, multidisciplinary agenda addressing the multifaceted (un)sustainability of AFS. It makes the case for adopting a holistic, 4-P (planet, people, profit, policy) approach in agri-food system studies.

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“…Although still limited in number, there is a growing amount of works qualitatively and quantitatively discussing the main Covid19-induced changes in various aspects related to food security (among others, [35,37,41,42,45,47,51,52,54,58,68,81]). Such changes, negatively affecting both supply and demand sides, concern the entire food supply chain (especially harvest, processing, trade, and logistics systems), the factor markets, the intermediate and final demand, as well as a series of macroeconomic factors, like fluctuations in exchange rates and in energy and credit markets, rise of unemployment and generalized economic contraction (for a detailed discussion about each of these changes, see [58].…”

Section: How the Pandemic Is Affecting Food Security: The Preliminary Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Can the Covid19 pandemic affect the achievement of the ‘Zero Hunger’ goal? Some preliminary reflections

Saccone

2021

Eur J Health Econ

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The ongoing Covid19 pandemic is producing dramatic effects on the economic and social life of many countries, which in turn may further undermine people’s health and well-being. This note focuses on some potential effects on the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 ‘Zero Hunger’ (Target 2.1) and, specifically, on the prevalence of undernourishment. After discussing the main changes induced by the Covid19 outbreak in various dimensions of food security, as identified by the preliminary literature on the topic, the note presents the dynamic estimates (GMM) of the recent determinants of food security, measured through the prevalence of undernourishment (SDG indicator 2.1.1), using a sample of 84 developing countries observed over the period 2000–2017. Since the rate of economic growth turns out to be a relevant determinant, the analysis quantifies the potential consequences that the economic downturn caused by the pandemic may have on the short- and long-run achievements of SDG 2 if proper counterbalancing measures will not be implemented. Such consequences in the short run would consist of millions of new undernourished people, while in the long run the progress made towards the ‘Zero Hunger’ goal are at risk of being completely reversed in the majority of countries. The note concludes by suggesting some directions for future research.

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The COVID-19 Pandemic and Global Food Security

Cited by 96 publications

References 40 publications

Impact of COVID-19 on health behaviours and body weight: A prospective observational study in a cohort of 1.1 million UK and US individuals

Impact of COVID-19 on health behaviours and body weight: A prospective observational study in a cohort of 1.1 million UK and US individuals

Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

Can the Covid19 pandemic affect the achievement of the ‘Zero Hunger’ goal? Some preliminary reflections

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