Coronavirus: Food Insecurity

While blogging about COVID-19, I've spent time looking at food mainly from the supply side. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. Though the virus has swept through meat processing plants and farm land, it doesn't appear like we will see a serious supply problem in the near future. Yes, we do have stories about meat shortages, but I don't think that has had a major issue on the ability on Americans to consume.

I happened to come across this Bloomberg article via the LA Times (Jul 29) that reported the following regarding demand:

Food insecurity for U.S. households last week reached its highest reported level since the Census Bureau started tracking the data in May, with almost 30 million Americans reporting that they’d not had enough to eat at some point in the seven days through July 21.

That seems like a lot of people. Yet, I was curious about how that compared to prior data points. CNN (Jul 31) provided a bit of comparison:

Before the pandemic, there were an estimated 37.2 million Americans who were potentially food insecure, according to Katie Fitzgerald, chief operating officer of Feeding America, a national network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs.
Now, of course, we're dealing with two different data sources here. The Census Bureau is saying 30 million while the Feeding America agency had an estimate of 37.2 million prior to the pandemic. Based on that, we see a drop, but we don't have an apples to apples comparison. I did look at links that led me to the Census Bureau, but honestly I couldn't find any press releases that summarized the data in a manageable way. The link took me to Excel files that were survey results (which wasn't based on the total US population). However, CNN did have the following quote from Katie Fitzgerald:

"We believe that over the next 12 months we are looking at 54.3 million Americans who will be estimated to be food insecure," Fitzgerald told CNN. "That's 17 million more Americans, about a 46% increase."

Okay, now that indicates a significant increase. This food insecurity in America appears to be an economic issue for families versus food producers not being able to meet demand.

This got me curious about what was going on across the globe. I found this Brookings (Jul 14) article with the following:

The Global Network Against Food Crisis, an alliance of United Nations and partner agencies, cautioned this year that the COVID- 19 pandemic could lead to 265 million people suffering from “acute food insecurity, which requires urgent food, nutrition, and livelihoods assistance for survival,” that is, a food crisis. That figure is double 2019’s 135 million across 55 countries.

Like with the US food insecurity articles, I decided to go to the source document at Global Network Against Food Crises. Now like with the US Census Bureau, I couldn't find anything about 265 million people being impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I did find some interesting reasons for why we should anticipate a food insecurity crisis: 

On the food supply side, harvests have been good and the 2020 outlook for staple crops is promising. However, movement restrictions necessary to contain the spread of the virus will disrupt the transport and processing of food and other critical goods, increasing delivery times and reducing availability of even the most basic food items. 

. . . Rising unemployment and under-employment is likely to severely reduce people’s purchasing power. 

. . . Movement restrictions (and illness) are likely to limit the availability of agricultural labour, which will contribute to rising food prices.

So once again, one of the main drivers for food demand issues is personal finance. Also, though supply this year is good, there are transportation problems that could arise.

Voice of America (Jul 31) had this about Latin America:

The disease is driving hunger and food insecurity in a region already facing economic, social and political instability, as well as drought and the start of the hurricane season, WFP said.

The agency projects the number of people in Latin America and the Caribbean facing severe food shortages in coming months will rise to 16 million.

. . . [WFP Executive Director David Beasley] said many farmers are barely eking out a living because of the pandemic, which is preventing them from selling their crops. 

“Just in the areas where WFP [is] in this region alone, we have seen a substantial increase in over 11 million people that are marching toward the brink of starvation," he said.

Okay, so Latin America is seeing an increase from 5 million to 16 million facing food insecurity? That's what I take away from the report. That's a dramatic increase. Though that is still lower than the 54.3 million estimate in the United States (there are probably different definitions being used).

Yet here's one part of the quote that has me concerned for the food supply, ". . . many farmers are barely eking out a living because of the pandemic, which is preventing them from selling their crops." Here's the question: will farmers have the money to plant crops in 2021?