The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) report on the impact of Covid-19 on food security in the world should get greater attention from governments. The UN body has estimated that about 45 million people have been pushed into acute poverty and food insecurity all over the world since the virus started spreading, pushing governments to declare lockdowns and other measures which have disrupted lives and livelihoods. About two-thirds of the most severely affected people are from South and South-East Asia and others are from sub-Saharan Africa. The report says that the world economy will take an $8.5 trillion hit in the next two years and about 49 million people may go below the extreme poverty line. The gains that the world made in the alleviation of poverty in the last many years would be wiped off in a few months.
A very large number, if not most, of the people who will lose their food security, will be in India because the country accounts for much of the population in the worst-affected parts of the world. The FAO has seen deteriorating employment conditions, the distress of famers and farmworkers, and disruption of transport systems, markets, industry and supply chains as some reasons for the collapse of subsistence support for the most affected people. All these have affected the poorest sections of people, including migrant workers and many others, badly. Schemes have been announced to help them to cope with the situation, like free supply of food grains, work under MNREGA and other programmes, and schemes like ‘one nation, one card’. It is anybody’s guess how effective they are and how well they are implemented. The ‘one nation, one card’ scheme, for example, is good but large numbers of families and individuals do not have ration cards at all in most states.
The FAO has suggested that cash-based assistance and distribution of life and livelihood-saving food will be needed, along with measures to maintain liquidity and financial inclusion in rural areas. It also wants food production, distribution and marketing to be declared essential services. There are other suggestions too which can be adapted suitably to the conditions prevailing in individual countries. All disasters hit the poorest people worst and so their requirements need to be given special attention to. When governments are busy fighting a disaster, the condition of the poor is usually forgotten. That leads to a bigger humanitarian disaster later. The report has pointed out that the pandemic has revealed the gaps that have existed in food systems for years, and they need to be plugged.