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  • Publication | 2020

Impacts of COVID-19 on food security and nutrition: developing effective policy responses to address the hunger and malnutrition pandemic

Global Food and Nutrition Security

This issues paper updates and extends the HLPE’s earlier analysis by providing a more comprehensive and in-depth review of the main trends affecting food systems that have resulted from COVID-19 and associated lockdown. It also expands the analysis of the pandemic’s implications for the various dimensions of food security: availability, access, utilization, stability, agency and sustainability. The paper analyses that more than any other dimension of food security, food access has arguably been the most affected by the COVID-19 crisis. The HPLE makes 6 main policy recommendations:

  1. Implement more robust targeted social protection programmes to improve access to healthy and nutritious foods;
  2. Ensure better protections for vulnerable and marginalized food system workers and farmers who are disproportionately affected by the crisis;
  3. Provide better protections for countries that depend on food imports;
  4. Strengthen and coordinate policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic impact on food systems and food security and nutrition, including at the international level;
  5. Support more diverse and resilient distribution systems, including shorter supply chains and territorial markets;
  6. Support more resilient food production systems based on agroecology and other sustainable forms of food production.
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