On 24 March 2020, the Chair of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Thanawat Tiensin, addressed governments with an urgent warning. The state of food security and nutrition had already been alarming before the outbreak of COVID-19, but he expected the rising numbers of insufficiently nourished people to be aggravated as a result of the pandemic, “with the poor – notably the urban poor – people living in remote areas, migrant and informal sector workers, people in humanitarian crises and conflict areas, and other vulnerable groups likely to face the worst consequences”. Tiensin recalled that after the financial crisis of 2008, the economic downturn had morphed into a full-blown food crisis. Therefore, he warned that “we must avoid this from happening again, for the sake of our peoples and our planet.”
A month later, unfortunately, the Corona pandemic is not only expanding from a health crisis into global recession; the political instruments put in place to deal with Covid-19 are also on their way to causing a hunger pandemic as David Beasley, Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme calls it. Yet, while the economic downturn is easily described in terms of negative growth and a high number of job-losses, the food crisis has so far received less attention because its characteristics are confusingly contradictory. This unfolding food crisis affects poor consumers in the form of a crisis of access to food. However, the pandemic first and foremost reveals a crisis of planning and production in the agricultural process.
This is observable in the OECD, where supermarkets have been struggling to meet the high demand and have rationed key products such as vegetables, milk and pasta, while, at the same time, farmers in many places are unable to market their produce, and have been forced to destroy a year’s harvest of vegetables or dump millions of liters of milk because the closure of restaurants, school serveries and public events has curbed demand and caused prices to plummet. In many countries of the global South, the crisis of agricultural planning and production will have shocking effects over the coming weeks.
