More and more people were going hungry or lacking reliable access to food even before Covid-19 hit in 2020, and “the main effect of the pandemic was to sharply increase the deteriorating trend in food security” in low- and middle-income nations, said an Iowa think tank. “Most of the increase in the number of food-insecure people from Covid-19 in 2020 was driven by large Asian countries, particularly India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.”
Loss of income, particularly among unskilled laborers, was the direct cause of the rising level of food insecurity, said the working paper from the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University. “Few sectors exhibit price increases as income contractions reduce demand in most sectors and most countries.”
In India, an additional 63 million people were food insecure because of the pandemic, out of a total of 216.7 million in 2020. The number declined to 188.4 million, or 14 percent of India’s population, in 2021 as the world began to recover economically.
For their study, the three authors of the paper, from the University of Nebraska and USDA, developed an economic model to estimate food insecurity in 80 low- and middle-income countries as a result of the pandemic as well as if there had been no pandemic. “We find that the aggregate real income shocks and those affecting unskilled labor were the major cause of a considerable increase in food insecurity,” they wrote, “with the number of food insecure increasing by 163.2 million in 2020 compared to a 2020 but-for-Covid baseline.”
The paper, “The impact of Covid-19 and associated policy responses on global food security,” is available here.