Abstract
In April 2020, when most businesses in the United States were shut down because of Covid-19, many people became unemployed and their incomes vanished. They lined up at the charitable food banks in their neighborhoods, but the shelves were quickly emptied. At the same time, many large farms buried their crops because the restaurants and hotels they served had closed. Some news agencies said the obvious solution was for government to organize transport of those farms’ produce to food banks or to idle restaurants for distribution to people in need. Only the federal government could make that work at a large scale, perhaps with the help of the National Guard and the U.S. army’s logistic capacities. It didn’t happen. Where are governments’ plans for dealing with food system disruptions, in the US and throughout the world?
Highlights
In April 2020, when most businesses in the United States were shut down because of Covid-19, many people became unemployed and their incomes vanished
For many low-income countries already suffering from widespread hunger, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a crisis within a crisis (Cantillo 2020; Dahir 2020; FAO 2020a; Human Rights Watch 2020; Lederer 2020; Reguly and York 2020; Yaffe-Bellany and Corkery 2020)
Across the United States, crops were not harvested, milk was dumped, restaurants closed, farm workers and meat packing plant workers were infected by the virus (Creed 2020; Grain 2020; Lussenhop 2020), long lines emptied charitable food banks (Burnett 2020; Shikina 2020), and disease patterns worsened (Nestle 2020a; Nestle 2020b)
Summary
Disaster can be defined as “A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts.” (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2020). There is a need to prepare for unanticipated sudden changes. Measures are likely to focus on local food production, food imports, storage, and distribution arrangements. All of these can be switched from normal to emergency modes of operation, but this will be done quickly and well only if those transitions are planned well in advance
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