The COVID-19 Pandemic and Food Insecurity in Peru, by Eduardo Zegarra
Foto: Southern Voice.
The sanitary crisis, due to the coronavirus in Peru, is also becoming a food crisis. A recent survey by INEI to families in Metropolitan Lima and Callao during the first week of May 2020 attests to that. 14% of households said they had been unable to buy protein-containing foods such as meat, fish, and eggs. In 73% of these households, the cause for this was the lack of economic means. We are talking about the equivalent to at least 1 million people. Extrapolating these figures to urban Peru, this could mean more than 3 million people in cities with food-insecurity nationwide. That is without counting what is happening in rural areas. The economic standstill of the quarantine has also struck them.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food security is based on four pillars: availability, access, safety, and stability. All are related to safe and nutritious food consumption by the population. Problems on any of these fronts imply food insecurity. It can range from:
– a mild situation, where some foods are scarce, but people still eat every day;
– intermediate, where people skip a few meals a day;
– to a very severe one, where people stop eating altogether for a day or more.
Data from the INEI survey shows us that several million people in our country are already going through intermediate to severe food insecurity. The same poll asked how confident families feel about their capacity to afford the food they need over the next four weeks. 30% said they felt insecure, and 47% felt somewhat insecure. That means that 77% are unsure about their ability to access food. Such data indicates that in Peru, we are now even further away from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Nr 2 “zero hunger”.
Markets: Sources of Contagion
In recent weeks, outbreaks of infection were also detected in several food markets, both wholesale and retail, in Lima and the countryside. Initially, assessed markets in Lima showed infection rates of over 50% of the vendors. And in the case of the two most important wholesale markets, the infection figures were over 70%. These contagion numbers are generating a significant disruption in food supply channels in Lima and Callao, as well as in large inland cities. Several markets are being closed by health or municipal authorities. All this is happening without a comprehensive plan. The problems of contagion in the food chains are systemic and require a lot of coordination and legitimate authority to mitigate them.
If the lack of control situation in markets continues, then we will have another big problem: the lack of safety and a decrease in food availability. And it will not be because agriculture is not producing what is necessary to feed us. On the contrary, it is doing so and very well, mainly family farming. But it will be because of the total inability of our cities to regulate and modernize their food marketing systems for domestic consumption. Curiously, Peru is a leader in fruit and vegetable exports worldwide, due to excellent sanitary systems. But at the same time, the country is lagging in the health and safety of its domestic food trade.
The government has only just reacted to the problem. President Vizcarra recently announced that the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS) would “reactivate soup kitchens”. This measure is essential, and experts and social leaders support it. However, it requires enormous social mobilization and multisectoral coordination. Undeveloped capacities of coordination are a serious problem at the national, regional, and local public apparatus level. For many years now, we have not taken into account the popular organizations that used to manage collective problems like these. That includes, for instance, mothers’ clubs, soup kitchens, health networks, peasant communities/patrols and neighbourhood councils. Amid the pandemic, and with the clock ticking, it is urgent to rebuild this social and organizational tissue.
Family Farming and Food Security
The neglect of family farming does not play in favour of food security either. Agricultural unions like CONVEAGRO were the first ones to raise the need for an agricultural production bonus (Bono Agrario). The idea was to help millions of small farmers who were facing a drastic fall in agricultural and non-agricultural income. However, the government did not take up the proposal. It continued to insist on bonds focused on targeting low-income families. But that policy has led to minimal aid coverage. Even worse, it has led to delays in putting together “beneficiary lists”.
Such problems are taking their toll on hundreds of thousands of small producers who have lost their crops. They have received very little income from the food they produced. They even had to sacrifice livestock because they cannot feed them anymore. Agricultural decapitalization will have consequences for the next farming season. This situation will again put food security at risk, in terms of availability and stability.
We have reached a point where it is urgent to create an agency for food security in our country at the highest presidential level. We need a powerful entity with decision-making capacity. It must be able to allocate resources to strengthen all relevant aspects of the agri-food chains that are key to feeding Peruvians. It is a vital measure, not only to face the current crisis. The time has come to start building sustainable food and nutritional security for Peruvians.
