Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global food security and nutrition in 2020

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to help make sense of what we know about the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security and nutrition at the global level, how we know it, and what we expect to find when more data and analyses are available. It is important to keep in mind that the "global" indicators discussed are derived from common methodologies and applied uniformly to common country data sets. This has advantages but, where possible, needs to be complemented by more in-depth data and analysis in a country. This country-specific data may not be directly comparable to others or be aggregated at the global level. They may be crucial in understanding the country's context and formulating appropriate policy responses. The paper presents 4 pieces of the COVID-19 puzzle. The first is an overview of the measures of food security and nutrition at the global level, based on country-level estimates, followed by a discussion of those indicators for 2019 in the period prior to the epidemic. This is followed by a short discussion of how COVID-19 and other restrictions made things a lot worse. Finally, current estimates are given.