Impacts of COVID-19 on people’s food security: Foundations for a more resilient food system

A Report on global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food systems and their actors, focusing specifically on the consequences that the pandemic had brought on the food security and nutrition of those who have been affected by the crisis. This included formal and informal actors of the food supply chains (from producers to street vendors) as well as consumers, in both rural and urban environments. Building on this assessment, the task was then to draw on key principles of resilience in the context of humanitarian and food security crisis, to identify preliminary elements of a food system resilience research agenda. The assessment was based on a methodical mapping of the information available worldwide, collected with electronic search engines in four different languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese). Analytically, two main concepts were used to unpack and analyse the effects of COVID-19 on people’s food security and nutrition: the concept of food security per se and the concept of food environment. Several dimensions were then included in the analysis: food availability (supply); food access (affordability and physical accessibility); food utilization (quality and safety); stability; proximity; convenience; food waste and losses; and diversity of food items. In addition, elements of people’s wellbeing were considered, including agency and self-efficacy, prevalence of domestic violence, and increased risk of exposure to the virus. The quality of the evidence was assessed using two standard criteria: knowledge elaboration and quality of data, and the level of analytics applied to the data was adjusted to the quality of the information. In total, more than 9,630 documents discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the food security of the different actors of food systems between January and December 2020 were identified, using a combination of keywords specifically chosen to address the objectives of the study. After removal of documents with low representativity and/or low reliability (mainly news media and personal social media reports), we were left with 337 documents covering 62 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas.