ROME, April 21 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 pandemic is threatening food security where people depend on small-scale farming or fishing for their livelihoods, but a global food crisis is "entirely avoidable" if policy makers take timely action, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

 

"FAO is particularly concerned about the pandemic's impacts on vulnerable communities already grappling with hunger or other crises ... as well as countries that rely heavily on food imports, such as Small Islands Developing States, and countries that depend on primary exports like oil," FAO said in a statement earlier this month.

 

Vulnerable communities include small farmers, pastoralists, fishers, informal laborers, and the 10 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean who depend on school meals as a primary source of food, FAO pointed out.

 

"But there is no need for the world to panic. Globally, there is enough food for everyone. Policy makers around the world need to be careful not to ... turn this health crisis into an entirely avoidable food crisis," FAO said.

VULNERABLE COUNTRIES AT RISK

 

According to FAO senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian, the pandemic has not led to a global food crisis, but it has caused world trade to contract drastically and almost all currencies to depreciate against the U.S. dollar.

 

This in turn spells trouble for the world's most vulnerable countries, most of whom rely heavily on exports while also importing staple foods: there is less money coming in, and it takes more money to buy necessities.

 

"The longer the pandemic goes on, the more the danger that these countries will give up trying to control the virus because they simply don't have the resources to do so, or they will try to impose lockdowns, which could mean disaster," Abbassian told Xinhua.

 

"(These are countries where) if people don't go to work, they won't have money. It's not like they have checks show up in their bank accounts: they literally won't be able to feed their families, so they might have to sell their livelihoods -- for example, their sheep -- just to get money to buy food," explained Abbassian.

 

Abbassian, who also serves as secretary of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), an inter-agency platform for food market transparency and food security that was launched in 2011 by the G20 Ministers of Agriculture, compared the current situation to "a ticking time bomb."

 

"In my opinion we have two choices," he said. "We can wait and do nothing, or we can look at the facts and assume that the likelihood of having a crisis in one of the vulnerable countries is very high, and ask ourselves what we can do right now to at least make it less painful."

 

The world's most vulnerable countries include those needing external food assistance for a number of reasons, including drought and war. According to the March 2020 issue of Crop Prospects and Food Situation, a FAO quarterly global report, right now there are 44 countries around the world in this category -- 34 in Africa, eight in the Near East and Asia, and two in South America and the Caribbean.

 

MUST ACT "QUICKLY, STRATEGICALLY"

 

In an April 16 conference call with more than 40 agriculture ministers from Africa, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu said that while lockdowns help contain the spread of the virus, they also have negative side effects.

 

"Border closures restrict trade and limit food availability in many countries, particularly those dependent on food imports, including several African countries and the Small Island Developing States," Qu said in a transcript of the call provided by FAO.

 

"Many models applied elsewhere will not work for Africa, (where) much of the food is not bought in supermarkets, but in open-air village markets and on the streets," Qu pointed out.

 

"This involves many informal economic actors, most of them without adequate fallback positions," he said, adding "we need to act quickly and strategically" to build safety nets for these informal food supply systems and livelihoods.

 

"We need to work together to ensure that disruptions in food supply chains are minimized as much as possible in the short-term, and to improve the resilience of agricultural production in the medium and long term," Qu told the African ministers.

 

The way forward, he suggested, is to "produce more, better, and locally" while fostering regional and inter-regional trade.

 

REGIONAL SOLUTIONS IN AFRICA

 

He was echoed by FAO chief economist Maximo Torero, also assistant director general of FAO's Economic and Social Development Department.

 

"Sub-Saharan Africa has a significant amount of import dependency but there is also a lot of food, so we must work to eliminate logistical problems ... and help smallholders (small farmers)," Torero said on the conference call.

 

The African Union and its member states are working on a free trade agreement and "this is a great opportunity to accelerate this process," Torero said.

 

Another participant on the call was Ibrahim Hassan Mayaki, chief executive officer at the Secretariat of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), who believed that "we need to think in terms of regional solutions, and allow regional free trade to exist."

 

An example of a regional solution would be for governments and central banks to tide small farmers over by extending "soft loans so they don't run out of cash and food."

 

"We should also invest in digital innovation so we can increase the capacity to liaise with small-scale farmers ... and we must support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in rural areas -- they are the ones who will build the local supply chains," Mayaki said.

 

NEPAD is a socio-economic development flagship program of the African Union, adopted by African leaders at the 37th Summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) held in Lusaka, Zambia, in 2001. Enditem