Food securityCOVID-19 Disruptions: Understanding Food Security Implications

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the world’s food systems and disrupting regional agricultural trade and value chains. The FAO has warned that food shortages are a real risk in the coming months.

The rapid global spread of the virus poses a worrisome add-on threat to millions of people living in countries already vulnerable to food insecurity, malnutrition and natural disasters, including climate-related disasters. This global health crisis will test our food and trade systems in ways never experienced before.

To help us understand this complex interplay of risks, the State of the Planet’s Francesco Fiondella spoke with Michael Puma, who is the director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University. Puma studies the susceptibility of the global food trade network to natural disturbances, including climate variability and change, and works on the food-security focused Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project. He has focused on characterizing the food supply portfolio of the six project countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Bangladesh) to understand dependencies on trade of major crops and the implied, associated trade of key nutrients.

Francesco Fiondella: What does the food supply portfolio of these six countries look like? How do they balance domestic production with import dependencies and how do these decisions affect their climate risk profiles?
Michael Puma:Trade is a critical factor for understanding food supply and its vulnerability to climate. In some ACToday countries such as Senegal, imports are essential because they make up almost 60 percent of the country’s domestic supply. In contrast, in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, imports make up about 15-17 percent of domestic supply, a value closer to the global average.

Many factors affect how countries balance domestic production and imports as decisions about the agricultural sector are made relative to a country’s economic situation. Yet the massive impacts of globalization are poorly understood, which means that we also don’t fully understand the risks associated with global interconnectivity. With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, we are now beginning to see just how vulnerable countries around the world truly are to global systemic disruptions. Multiple countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam and Cambodia, have imposed trade restrictions, while Egypt has accelerated purchase of grains. If these heavy-handed trade interventions continue, the crisis could intensify, triggering spikes in global prices as the world experienced in 2008.