ANGOC Statement on ProtectingLand Rights and Ensuring Food Security in the Time of COVID-19
The COVID-19 global pandemic has exposed many of our underlying fragilities and risks as a people – a heartless economy with widening inequities, destruction of our environment, unjust distribution of land and natural resources for shelter and livelihood, growing pollution and congested cities, the lack of basic access to food and nutrition, and the absence of universal health care, all amidst our planet’s growing vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
Meanwhile, large-scale deforestation, degradation and fragmentation of natural habitats, trade in animal species and plants, anthropogenic climate change – continue to drive the emergence of new diseases. More than half of global pandemics were borne out of zoonotic transmission of diseases from animals to humans, ushered in by clearing forests to make way for farmlands and commercial areas.
As scientists and medical experts try to find cures for COVID-19 and vaccines for SARS- CoV-2, economists, technocrats, and political leaders have responded to the pandemic, while starting to prepare for the “new normal.” Since March this year, governments have scrambled to address this pandemic primarily through physical distancing measures, travel restrictions, curfews, lockdowns and community quarantines.
Yet while COVID-19 started as a health crisis, present incidences suggest that the pandemic is quickly evolving into crises of poverty, hunger and malnutrition which burdens small scale farmers, agricultural workers, landless people and slum- dwellers the most.
Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, an estimated 821 million people worldwide were already undernourished in 2018, with the majority of the world’s hungry people living in low-income countries, where 12.9% of the population is undernourished.1
The food system is directly affected by the pandemic through disruptions in the food supply chains and markets. At the same time, the capacity to produce and distribute food is hampered as a result of loss of jobs and decreases in purchasing power, especially of those who are poor and vulnerable.
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