Covid-19 immediately triggered food security concerns. Early in the pandemic, the World Food Programme estimated that Covid-19 will double the number of people facing food crises from 130 million to 265 million in 2020. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization followed suit, suggesting that levels of hunger around the world could increase dramatically due to the impact of the pandemic on jobs, incomes and livelihoods.

In this policy brief, we set the frame to think about the pandemic’s impacts on food security by summarising evidence on the hypothesised causal links.