Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: COVID19 and the opportunity for food sovereignty Walden Bello

“Covid-19 Provides an Opportunity for Breaking with the Global Food Supply Chain”

By Walden Bello

Food has been very much front and center in the Covid 19 story.

First of all, hunger is following closely on the heels of the pandemic, especially in the global South.  The UN’s World Food Program says that the pandemic will double the number of people experiencing acute food insecurity, from 130 miilion in 2019 to 265 million in 2020.  This figure is likely to be a gross underestimate, says Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Research Center, who claims that over 2.5 billion people might eventually be rendered hungry by the pandemic.

Indeed, one can say that, unlike in East Asia, Europe, and the US, in South Asia, the food calamity preceded the actual invasion by the virus, with relatively few infections registered in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as of mid-March of 2020, but with millions already displaced by the lockdowns and other draconian measures taken by the region’s governments.

In India, as the renowned writer P. Sainath, founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India, put it, “We gave a nation of 1.3 billion human beings four hours to shut down their lives…One of our legendary civil servants, had said, ‘A small infantry brigade being pushed into a major action is given more than four hours’ notice.’”  With little money for food and rent, migrant workers were forced to trek hundreds of kilometers home, with scores beaten up by police seeking to quarantine them as they crossed state lines.  Estimated at some 9 to 139 million, these internal migrants, largely invisible in normal times, suddenly became visible as they tried to reach their home states, deprived of public transportation owing to the sudden national lockdown.  With people dying along the way, a constant refrain in  this vast human wave were the desperate words, “If coronavirus doesn’t kill us, hunger will!.”

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