The potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and nutrition security are extraordinarily diverse, stemming not only from the disease itself but also from its indirect consequences and from responses to it. COVID-19-related risks can cascade through food systems, potentially affecting nutrition outcomes for people and societies far from the sites of primary impacts. Individual food-supply chains may be linear, but the overall supply of food is frequently organized in much more complex networks. Thus, rather than considering food production or consumption – or even entire supply chains – in isolation, it is important to recognize the systemic nature of these components, their interactions with each other, and the broader drivers of the socio-economic, political and environmental conditions in which they occur. This will help to identify the potential pathways through which pandemic-related food and nutrition security risks may be propagated and/or mitigated through food systems, even if these outcomes have not yet materialized.
A food system contains all the elements – environment, people, inputs, processes, infrastructures and institutions – and activities connected to the production, processing, distribution, promotion, preparation and consumption of food, and the output of these activities, including socio-economic and environmental outcomes (Figure 1). Food systems influence consumer choices and diets, driving food and nutrition security outcomes; consumer behaviours, in turn, inform and interact with decisions taken throughout networks of food supply chains and in the broader food environment, all of which shape the overall nature and sustainability of food systems. The latter are also shaped by and interact with a series of drivers which determine the socio-economic and environmental context within which food systems operate, including the capacity of competing and supporting ecosystem services.
Improving sustainability and resilience in food systems
Food and nutrition security is both an outcome and an enabling condition of sustainable food systems and sustainability more generally. The Committee on World Food Security’s High Level Panel of Experts defines a sustainable food system as one that ‘ensures food security and nutrition for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition of future generations are not compromised’.
Sustainable food systems must function, and support ecosystem services, in ways that permit them to nourish future generations. They must also be resilient in the face of shocks, in a manner that ensures short-term nutrition security is not compromised.
Food system resilience – defined as the capacity over time of a food system and its units at multiple levels, to provide ‘sufficient, appropriate and accessible food to all’, in the face of various and even unforeseen disturbances – is therefore a key component of food system sustainability. It depends on four characteristics: 1) robustness, or the capacity to withstand shocks; 2) capacity to absorb shocks; 3) flexibility, and thus rapidity to recover from shocks; and 4) resourcefulness and adaptability to recover from shocks. To develop these characteristics, systems need to be anticipatory and adaptive, transforming and reorienting themselves to become more resilient to future risks. The more resilient a food system is, the fewer impacts it will experience from any disturbance, and the more capacity it will have to recover rapidly to – or improve upon – pre-shock functioning to support nutrition security and ecosystem services.
Impact transmission pathways
If considered in overly simplistic terms, a hazard has a direct impact on anything that is both exposed and vulnerable to it. Additionally, most hazards can lead to chains or cascades of risk where the initial impact can have knock-on effects on other parts of the system, depending on the exposures and vulnerabilities of each part of the system to each subsequent impact. A hazard therefore has the potential to cause impacts that propagate through time and space to affect actors and activities far removed from the initial event.
An example of indirect effects in food systems is when a major drought affects cereal harvests in a ‘breadbasket’ region and leads, not just to food insecurity in the drought-affected region, but to the imposition of export restrictions by the affected country, which then commonly affects global cereal supplies and global food prices, and can even cause political instability in import-dependent and food-insecure countries where lack of food or unaffordable prices lead to hunger.
In such instances, the cascade of risk and/or responses to events within the cascade may amplify the initial impact. In other cases, a dissipation of risk and appropriate responses may reduce or deflect the harm, depending on how resilient different components of the system are prior to the materialization of impacts and how successful the responses to those impacts are at reducing exposures and vulnerabilities.
There are multiple ways in which hazards can trigger a series of impacts, including across borders, through remote linkages such as price signals and climate-variability links (‘teleconnections’), and by interacting with and compounding the effects of other prior, coincidental or subsequent risks.
Under such circumstances, the impacts can cause whole systems to fail. This is systemic risk, defined as ‘the threat that individual failures, accidents, or disruptions present to a system through the process of contagion’.
There are therefore three important considerations in examining the risks that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to food and nutrition security in the UK:
- Other than for those directly infected by the COVID-19 virus, the pandemic is unlikely to be a direct cause of nutrition insecurity. Rather, it is a potential catalyst which may trigger or amplify changes in the food system, either in series or in parallel. Understanding the nature of these pre-existing circumstances, the potential changes that they might undergo and the likely risk-transmission cascades is key.
- Just because any given impact has not yet materialized does not mean that it will not do so in the future. To understand potential risks, it is important to consider the various exposures and vulnerabilities of different activities and actors within global food systems, and how these interrelate.
- In seeking to reduce the risks that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to food and nutrition security in the UK and elsewhere, interventions need to reduce exposures and vulnerabilities. Responses can target the immediate risks faced by the focal populations, or they can be designed to interrupt or reduce the severity of risk transmissions further upstream by reducing exposures and vulnerabilities elsewhere in the system. Equally, the design and implementation of risk-reduction measures need to take account of the various ways these may interact with system dynamics and affect the resiliency or fragility of activities, actors, and outcomes in food systems beyond the UK.
