ABSTRACT
The advent of COVID-19 had implications for various sectors of the economy, compounding the challenges set in motion by climate change. Whilst the dawn of 2021 came with hope for recovery from the pandemic, the beginning of 2022 came with another complexity of the Russia-Ukraine war, which hampered recovery efforts. This book examines the trends, dynamics, and implications of COVID-19 for agriculture, environment, and water sectors within the broader context of Sustainable Development Goals using a cocktail of primary and secondary research techniques. The book adopts the quantitative, qualitative, and multi-methods of enquiry. Findings show the increasing temporal trend of COVID-19 cases following periodic waves and spatially variable distribution of cases, with more cases in densely populated urban areas. These trends and dynamics, influenced by a web of intermingling factors, have had ramifications on the agricultural, environmental, and water sectors and subsectors with consequent negative outcomes on virtually all facets of life. The recovery process is being hampered by several factors ranging from poor governance, which results in policy distortions and other global factors. Climate change and the Russia- Ukraine war have complicated the COVID-19 recovery process by pushing up oil and food prices, rendering the poor more vulnerable to food insecurity and increased poverty, challenging Zimbabwe's economic resilience. Social safety nets and tackling climate change and other policy distortions are critical to ensure a sustainable future. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.
ABSTRACT
The stability of food supply chains is crucial to the food security of people around the world. Since the beginning of 2020, this stability has been undergoing one of the most vigorous pressure tests ever due to the COVID-19 outbreak. From a mere health issue, the pandemic has turned into an economic threat to food security globally in the forms of lockdowns, economic decline, food trade restrictions, and rising food inflation. It is safe to assume that the novel health crisis has badly struck the least developed and developing economies, where people are particularly vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. However, due to the recency of the COVID-19 problem, the impacts of macroeconomic fluctuations on food insecurity have remained scantily explored. In this study, the authors attempted to bridge this gap by revealing interactions between the food security status of people and the dynamics of COVID-19 cases, food trade, food inflation, and currency volatilities. The study was performed in the cases of 45 developing economies distributed to three groups by the level of income. The consecutive application of the autoregressive distributed lag method, Yamamoto's causality test, and variance decomposition analysis allowed the authors to find the food insecurity effects of COVID-19 to be more perceptible in upper-middle-income economies than in the least developed countries. In the latter, food security risks attributed to the emergence of the health crisis were mainly related to economic access to adequate food supply (food inflation), whereas in higher-income developing economies, availability-sided food security risks (food trade restrictions and currency depreciation) were more prevalent. The approach presented in this paper contributes to the establishment of a methodology framework that may equip decision-makers with up-to-date estimations of health crisis effects on economic parameters of food availability and access to staples in food-insecure communities.