Africa has not been spared by the COVID-19 emergency. Beyond the immediate health effects, the pandemic threatens the world’s already fragile food system, with particularly severe consequences in Africa. The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity believes that the solution lies in small-scale food producers and farmer-managed seed systems.

A broken food system

Africa is facing diverse conflicts, climate change, the biggest locust invasion in 70 years, and food and nutrition insecurity – in addition to COVID-19. The 2019 United Nations report, ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World’, provides key figures on the number of people suffering from hunger, as well as the rate of child stunting and wasting, and adult and child obesity. Worldwide, more than 820 million people still go to bed hungry, and more than 2 billion lack regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world’s hungry live in sub-Saharan Africa. It is so unfortunate that we live in a global society full of injustices, with hunger and obesity being two sides of today’s broken global food system.

 

Read the full paper here.

The paper first appeared on the ECDPM site. 

Author: John Kariuki Mwangi, ECDPM Great Insights magazine, Volume 9, Issue 3, ECDPM. 

Image courtesy of Oxfam East Africa via Flickr. 

The views are those of the author and not necessarily those of ETTG.