USAID Provides Food Assistance to Help Mitigate COVID-19 Impacts
This week, Secretary Pompeo announced more than $162 million in additional assistance to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing the total U.S. commitment to more than a billion dollars. This new funding includes critical food assistance that will help the world’s most vulnerable stave off hunger and disease.
At USAID, we know from experience that pandemics can have far-reaching impacts on food security and nutrition. We saw this in the West Africa Ebola outbreak, and we are starting to see it on a much larger scale with COVID-19.
Across the world, from Ecuador to Ethiopia to Bangladesh, closed businesses and service providers and restrictions on movement — while essential to fight COVID-19 — are preventing people from working, disrupting markets, and limiting farmers’ and herders’ ability to sell crops or livestock or to buy seeds for the upcoming planting seasons. On top of that, in many places, livestock prices are down while food prices have gone up.
That’s why this week, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced more than $162 million in additional humanitarian assistance to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, it includes funding to support food security. The United States has now committed more than a billion dollars to help people around the world while we continue to fight COVID-19 here at home.
The new funding will expand our focus to include an essential resource for staying healthy: food. In addition, it will support case management and keep essential health services operating, provide safe water and hygiene items, and support COVID-19 risk communication and community engagement programs.
People who are hungry and malnourished are more likely to succumb to disease, and in the long-term, hunger leaves behind stunted children and other terrible legacies, such as families backsliding into poverty, that can take years or decades to overcome. That is why the United States is prioritizing food security and nutrition assistance as part of our COVID-19 response.
We will focus emergency resources on countries that are likely to face the largest increase in “crisis hunger,” and on people who are at greatest risk — like the urban poor, displaced people, and refugees. Meanwhile, existing USAID programs in the field that address the root causes of poverty and hunger are adapting to help keep food flowing and markets functioning safely to mitigate widespread spikes in hunger and malnutrition.
By helping people afford food and utilizing creative delivery systems such as door-to-door distributions or electronic cash transfers, the food assistance we will provide will also reduce the need for people to leave their homes, enabling them to follow shelter-in-place orders and helping communities flatten the disease curve.
This new funding complements $8 million in supplemental funding USAID previously received to expand some of its efforts to combat hunger, poverty and malnutrition through the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative. New efforts made possible with this funding will generate data and analysis to help governments make smart choices about stopping the spread of COVID-19 without wiping out food markets, get messaging about how to safely continue to grow and sell food to farming communities, and help food and agribusinesses stay afloat with new finance.
Crisis on Top of Crises
From the beginning of this pandemic, USAID has been closely tracking the impact on hunger and food insecurity. Factoring in COVID-19, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) estimates that 113 million people in the 46 most food-insecure countries will face crisis levels of hunger and require emergency food assistance this year.
What’s more, the International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that the pandemic and responses by governments to it could increase extreme poverty by 20% worldwide, or 148 million additional people. Most of this increase would be concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This would inevitably lead to even greater hunger and malnutrition.
The impacts of COVID-19 are being piled on top of the everyday crisis of chronic hunger experienced by more than 800 million people, as well as existing humanitarian crises in dozens of countries. Some of the worst of these crises stem from conflict; others from natural disasters like drought, floods, storms and, in the case of East Africa, a massive outbreak of desert locusts.
USAID was responding to these crises before COVID-19, providing tens of millions of people with aid, including emergency food assistance. We are working with our partners to adapt these existing programs to improve our current programming and COVID-19 readiness and response efforts around the world.
Rising to the Challenge
For more than a half century, the United States has been one of the largest contributors to global food security and nutrition efforts. Food purchased from American farmers and, in more recent years, from farmers living close to a crisis has sustained millions. Last year alone, USAID provided nearly $3.85 billion in emergency food assistance in more than 50 countries, reaching 70 million people.
When food prices spiked in 2007–2008, pushing millions to the brink of poverty and contributing to waves of unrest worldwide, global leaders recognized more needed to be done to end hunger for good. Since then, USAID, through its leadership of Feed the Future, has brought partners together to improve global agriculture, resilience and nutrition, helping 23.4 million people in some of the world’s most vulnerable areas rise above the poverty line and 5.2 million families lift themselves out of hunger.
By helping partner countries to develop strong markets, private sectors and food systems, even amid crises like COVID-19, Feed the Future is equipping them to feed and nourish their own people.
Today’s contribution of food assistance, coupled with efforts to end global hunger for good, will help the world’s most vulnerable stay healthy, prevent the spread of disease, and support local livelihoods, markets and agriculture so we can all recover from this pandemic more quickly.
Learn more about USAID’s COVID-19 response and USAID’s food security efforts. Follow USAID’s humanitarian efforts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
