The real deadly global pandemic: acute food shortages

Posted By : Rina Latuperissa
10 Min Read

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Beyond the questions surrounding the availability, effectiveness and safety of a vaccine, the Covid-19 pandemic has led us to question where our food is coming from and whether we will have enough.

According to a United Nations World Food Program (WFP) report, Covid-19 might have left up to 265 million people with acute food shortages in 2020. The combined effect of the pandemic and the emerging global recession “could, without large-scale coordinated action, disrupt the functioning of food systems,” which would “result in consequences for health and nutrition of a severity and scale unseen for more than half a century,” states another UN report.

In the United States, “food insecurity has doubled overall, and tripled among households with children” because of the pandemic, states a June 2020 report by the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern University, which relied on data provided by the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

In a recent interview with CBS News, IPR director Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach warned that these statistics would likely “continue to hold,” with the numbers indicating particularly dramatic rises in food insecurity among black and Hispanic families.

Globally, the effects of Covid-19 on food security are equally, if not more, severe. According to a CBS News report, WFP director David Beasley told the UN Security Council in April 2020 that the world is on “the brink of a hunger pandemic.”

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