Experts fear worsening global food crisis if U.S. does not lead during pandemic
WASHINGTON — With global hunger projected to increase dramatically this year as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, humanitarian relief experts are calling on the U.S. government to play a leadership role in ensuring that global food supply lines remain open.
Thus far, the Trump administration and Congress have been preoccupied with alleviating the impacts of the pandemic at home, which experts say is understandable given the scale of the problem.
But time is also of the essence if the United States wants to ease what could become the worst food crisis in a century — which could lead to political destabilization in countries where Washington has national security interests, such as Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Foreign aid organizations want Congress to include $12 billion in additional international assistance in the next coronavirus emergency spending bill it sends to the president. But even more than monetary assistance, U.S. leadership is needed to discourage other countries from erecting trade barriers to agricultural exports and to keep global supply lines running, these groups told CQ Roll Call.
“We desperately and urgently need a systemic response to keep pace with and eventually outpace either the virus or the economic collapse and food insecurity,” said Gayle Smith, who led the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama administration and is now the president of the anti-poverty focused ONE Campaign. “The problem with food supply is less that food is not being produced and more that markets are being disrupted. So part of the response has to be a market response.”
Global hunger was at one of its highest points in years even before COVID-19 caused governments worldwide to temporarily shutter large swaths of their economies. In 2019, roughly 135 million people experienced acute hunger across 55 countries, particularly in Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan and Venezuela, according to the annual Global Report on Food Crises, which was released last month by a coalition of national and multilateral agencies including USAID and the U.N. World Food
Program.
The World Food Program estimates that the global recession caused by COVID19 could nearly double, to 265 million, the number of people facing severe food shortages before the year is over, and a famine could occur in some three dozen countries.
“I don’t even like to think about what could be happening in developing countries even if they are not hit hard by the pandemic,” said Kim Elliott, a visiting fellow with the nonpartisan Center for Global Development, who specializes in food security and trade policy. “The degree of the economic crisis that we’re seeing is just going to have terrible impacts, not just on the people that are already poor in these countries but the people who may have just gotten over the line of not being poor. Millions of them are likely to fall back into poverty.”
Another concern is the collapse of crude oil prices and other commodities, which many developing countries rely on for national income. Crude oil prices have suffered the most dramatic declines, though coal, natural gas and metals have also experienced severe price downturns, according to an April World Bank report on commodity prices.