Hunger, Food Sovereignty and COVID-19 Pandemic: Food Risks During Lockdown.

Objective: This article focuses on describing the food scenario of families in Cali (Colombia), where almost half of the city's population could not guarantee their access to adequate feeding during COVID-19 crisis. Methods: Involved 1. Analyze laws to understand their relationship with access to food in Cali during lockdown; and 2. Identify changes in the eating practices of families from different socioeconomic levels and the strategies used by the city's public institutions during lockdown. Results: Feeding was not considered from the beginning of the lockdown, which generated a food crisis. Institutional responses were insufficient in quality and coverage, since feeding aid focused on calories and logistic aspects. The solutions implemented by households were guided by collective action and social organization around the community pots. Conclusion: The contrast between food security strategies (focused on availability and access) and food sovereignty (with an emphasis on the collective) shows the need for structural transformations in food policies and in the collective imagination that allow for designing new food models focused on community wellbeing and not on economic growth to future emergencies.

Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security.

In this paper we present the first global assessments of COVID-19's impacts on food systems and their actors, focusing specifically on the food security and nutritional status of those affected in low and middle-income countries. The assessment covers 62 countries and is based on the analysis of 337 documents published in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The review confirms the magnitude and the severity of an unprecedented crisis that has spread worldwide and has spared only a few. The analysis shows that the dimension of food security that has been most affected is accessibility, with reasonably solid evidence suggesting that both financial and physical access to food have been disrupted. In contrast, there is no clear evidence that the availability of food has been affected. Overall, data suggests that food systems resisted and adapted to the disruption of the pandemic. This resilience came, however, at great costs, with the majority of the systems' actors having to cope with severe disruptions in their activities. In contrast, grocery stores and supermarkets made billions of dollars in profits in 2020.