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The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on households' income, jobs, and food security have continued despite perceptible reductions in transmission and lifting of restrictive policy measures in several countries. To assess these effects on Nigerian households, we collected household data in the initial three months after the outbreak of the pandemic (July 2020). To track the changes since the first survey, we conducted a follow-up phone survey with the same households a year later (July 2021). We undertook a comparative analysis between the two surveys focusing on key variables such as income loss, job loss, food security, and dietary diversity. The study also investigated how changes in income, wealth/endowments, social capital, safety net programs, and recurrent conflicts affected the severity of food insecurity amid the pandemic. We found that both income and jobs have rebounded significantly (by 50 percentage points) compared to the baseline results. In terms of food insecurity, households with "severely food insecure" situations dropped from 73 percent in the first survey to 65 percent in the follow-up survey. We also found a 5-percentage point improvement in the household dietary diversity scale in the follow-up survey. However, households reported an increase of more than 70 percent in conflicts or insecurity threats amid the pandemic. This affected farm investment decisions in 44 percent of smallholder farmers surveyed. While income loss significantly worsened households' food insecurity; livestock ownership and social capital cushioned households from falling into a more severe food insecurity situation. However, safety net programs provided by the government and NGOs did not significantly protect households from falling into severe food insecurity amid the pandemic. We suggest four policy propositions: prioritize investment in job creation to curb income loss; enable households to build their wealth base (e.g., land tenure security or livestock) to enhance resilience to shocks; revisit targeting approaches of safety net programs to enhance effectiveness of such programs; and finally, devise and implement conflict resolutions to induce investment and enhance productivity. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2; Feed the Future Nigeria Agricultural Policy Project; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance; Capacity Strengthening; NSSP ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all the countries in the world, transforming lives and economies. Many governments imposed containment measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Those measures included various forms of restrictions on the movement of people, closures of businesses, and curtailment of public and private services. The virus containment measures lowered infection rates and pressure on health systems but also affected economic activity worldwide. ; PR ; IFPRI4; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; Feed the Future Initiative; ReSAKSS ; AFR

As the world counts down to the 2025 World Health Assembly nutrition targets and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, millions of women, children, and adolescents worldwide remain undernourished (underweight, stunted, and deficient in micronutrients), despite evidence on effective interventions and increasing political commitment to, and financial investment in, nutrition. The COVID-19 pandemic has crippled health systems, exacerbated household food insecurity, and reversed economic growth, which together could set back improvements in undernutrition across low-income and middle-income countries. This paper highlights how the evidence base for nutrition, health, food systems, social protection, and water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions has evolved since the 2013 Lancet Series on maternal and child nutrition and identifies the priority actions needed to regain and accelerate progress within the next decade. Policies and interventions targeting the first 1000 days of life, including some newly identified since 2013, require renewed commitment, implementation research, and increased funding from both domestic and global actors. A new body of evidence from national and state-level success stories in stunting reduction reinforces the crucial importance of multisectoral actions to address the underlying determinants of undernutrition and identifies key features of enabling political environments. To support these actions, well-resourced nutrition data and information systems are essential. The paper concludes with a call to action for the 2021 Nutrition for Growth Summit to unite global and national nutrition stakeholders around common priorities to tackle a large, unfinished undernutrition agenda—now amplified by the COVID-19 crisis. ; PR ; IFPRI3; ISI; CRP4; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; POSHAN; Transform Nutrition West Africa ; PHND; SAR; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

As most countries in the world Guatemala has been affected by COVID-19. In January 2020 the country decreed travel bans from China, which were later expanded to other countries. Still, Guatemala had the first confirmed COVID case in March 13 and the first death in March 15. Some days before that, on March 5, the government had declared the "state of calamity" (Declaración del Estado de Calamidad Pública - Decreto Gubernativo Número 5-2020), which allowed the government to limit different rights, and to take different actions to protect the health and safety of all persons in Guatemala. This brief note covers the following topics until the time of this report. First, it shows the evolution of the pandemic, using different indicators. Second, it summarizes the main policy responses and costs and financing. Third, it shows some actual impacts with available data up to the time of this writing. Fourth, the modeling framework for the simulations is briefly presented. Fifth, the document pre ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance; COVID-19 Measuring Impacts and Prioritizing Policies for Recovery ; LAC; MTID

According to the definition of EFSA (EFSA,2.2002) emerging/potential biological risks are risks from new identified biological agents (parasites, bacteria or viruses) or by new serological or genetically changed variants or well known biological agents which appeared and caused diseases in animals and humans. Emerging virus diseases are a major threat to human and veterinary public health. With new examples occurring approximately one each year, the majority are viruses originating from an animal host. Of the many factors responsible, changes to local ecosystems that perturb the balance between pathogen and principal host species is one of the major drivers, together with increasing urbanization of mankind and changes in human behavior. Many emerging viruses have RNA genomes and as such are capable of rapid mutation and selection of new variants in the face of environmental changes in host numbers and available target species. This review summarizes recent work on aspects of virus emergence and the current understanding of the molecular and immunological basis whereby viruses may cross between species and become established in new ecological niches. ; BG; bg; EFSAfocalpoint@mzh.government.bg

The objective of this contribution is to report the initial impacts of measures taken to contain the COVID-19 pandemic on Myanmar's agri-food system. Myanmar is one of several late-transforming low-income countries in Southeast Asia where agriculture still plays a large role in rural livelihoods, and where food prices are a key factor affecting nutrition security for poor urban and rural households. Whereas the economic impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on tourism and manufacturing were obvious to policymakers, the impacts on the agri-food system were less evident and often more indirect. This resulted in the rural sector being allocated only a very small share of the government's initial fiscal response to mitigate the economic impacts of COVID-19. To correct this information gap, a suite of phone surveys covering a wide spectrum of actors in the agri-food system were deployed, including farm input suppliers, mechanization service providers, farmers, commodity traders, millers, food re ; PR ; IFPRI3; ISI; CRP2; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; MyanmarSSP; IFPRIOA; UNFSS ; DSGD; PHND; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

COVID-19-related trade disruptions hit several sectors in Myanmar as early as January 2020, but it was the appearance of the country's first cases in March 2020 and the subsequent lockdown in April that really hurt the economy. Nonessential businesses shut down, workers and traders could not leave home, and demand for labor dried up. The initial COVID-19 prevention measures worked well — resulting in only a few hundred infections in a country of over 50 million by June — but led to a sharp spike in poverty rates followed by a modest economic recovery in mid-2020. However, by September 2020, the country had faced a second, far worse phase of the crisis, with another wave of infections emerging in Rakhine in August 2020 and quickly spreading out of control to Yangon and other regions. Myanmar went from a few hundred confirmed cases in early August to more than 80,000 by late November (though this was surely a large underestimate, given low testing rates), despite widespread lockdown measures starting in mid-September. Then, just as the economy was showing signs of recovery in early 2021, the military took control of the government on February 1, 2021, sparking wide-scale protests and strikes, withdrawal of major foreign investments, crippling financial instability, and a collapse of economic confidence. To make matters worse, mid-2021 saw the Delta wave sweep through Myanmar, producing even higher rates of infection. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4; CRP2; MAPSA; MyanmarSSP ; DSGD; PIM; DGO; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

Following the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Hubei Province in late 2019, starting in late January 2020 the Chinese government imposed draconian lockdown measures across the country to control the spread of the disease (Fang, Wang, and Yang 2020). Most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) suspended operations. Then, as the pandemic eased in April, China began lifting the restrictions. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies ; DSGD; DGO; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

With the outbreak of COVID-19, governments attempted to contain the spread of the virus by limiting the movement and interaction of people through a variety of measures, including restrictions on domestic and international travel, social distancing, and "lockdowns" that temporarily shut down non-essential businesses (IFPRI 2020). While governments had control over these domestic measures, they could do little to shield economies from disruptions to global trade or declines in foreign investment and tourism. Amid uncertainty about how the pandemic would unfold, IFPRI worked with local partners during 2020 to develop economywide models to analyze the impacts of COVID-19 measures on economic growth, food systems, and livelihoods in approximately 30 countries (Pauw, Smart, and Thurlow 2021). Initially, social accounting matrix (SAM) multiplier models were used to trace quarterly and annual shocks during the 2020 calendar year. The real-time analysis provided by these results could potentially be used by policymakers to inform the design of COVID-19 restrictions (for example, in terms of sector targeting or duration) and remedial measures (such as targeted cash transfers or firm subsidies). ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4; CRP2 ; DSGD; DGO; A4NH; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH); CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government imposed a stringent national lockdown from March 24 to May 31, 2020, which caused severe disruptions across agrifood supply chains from "farm to fork." The government was consistently one step behind in terms of preventing these problems (Narayanan and Saha 2020b). ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4 ; SAR; DGO; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

Due to the global pandemic generated by COVID-19 the government of Honduras declared a "state of emergency" in February ("Estado de Emergencia en el Territorio Nacional a través del Decreto Ejecu-tivo Número PCM- 005-2020, 10 de febrero 2020). The country suffered the first confirmed COVID-19 case on March 12th, 2020. The first death was registered on March 26, 2020. This document updates a previous report (Díaz Bonilla, Laborde, and Piñeiro, 2021) on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems in Honduras. First, it brings up to date the evolution of the pandemic, using different indicators. Second, it summarizes the main policy responses, costs, and fi-nancing. Third, it updates the evolution of key variables up to the time of this writing (June 2021). Fourth, there is a more detailed analysis of the evolution of some food value chains that are central for food consumption in Honduras. Fifth, main results for 2021 and 2022 of previous modeling work are briefly presented. A final section discusses policy considerations in light of the updated analysis. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance; COVID-19 Measuring Impacts and Prioritizing Policies for Recovery ; LAC; MTID; PHND

This chapter summarizes the findings from analyses conducted by AKADEMIYA2063 on local staple food market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. With the outbreak of the highly contagious virus in Africa in March 2020, various measures were implemented by African governments to contain its spread. These measures included bans on public gatherings and markets; restrictions on movement within and between countries; closures of schools, restaurants, and hotels; and curfews. All these measures were likely to cause market disruptions and revenue losses for vulnerable groups by disrupting supply and demand of agricultural staples, either directly or indirectly. The objective of these analytical studies is therefore to generate evidence on how the various COVID-19 response measures have affected food supply and demand patterns in Africa, taking into account the locational characteristics (that is, whether an area is urban or rural, has a surplus or deficit of the commodity in question, and is in a coastal or landlocked country) and whether the commodity is perishable or nonperishable. Such evidence can then be used to inform efforts to anticipate and respond to food crises arising from infectious disease outbreaks and the measures implemented to limit their spread. ; PR ; IFPRI4; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; Feed the Future Initiative; ReSAKSS ; AFR

Pre-pandemic, 3 billion people could not afford a healthy diet; that number could rise by 267.6 million due to the pandemic. Food system transformation must support healthy diets and tackle all forms of malnutrition. KEY MESSAGES - Evidence from phone surveys in low- and middle-income countries shows widespread job and income losses and rapid rises in food insecurity due to government measures to contain the pandemic; poorer households, women, and other vulnerable groups are most affected. - Across the globe, the quality of diets deteriorated due to disruptions in supply of fresh, healthy foods, drops in demand for these foods due to unaffordability and perishability, and increased consumption of cheaper sources of calories including starchy staples and ultra-processed foods. - Deteriorations in diet quality could have devastating consequences for the health and nutrition of vulnerable women and children and could increase all forms of malnutrition in the short term and cause lifelong, irreversible development, health, and nutrition damage, reversing decades of progress made so far. - Food system transformation must support healthy diets and by doing so, serve as double duty actions that simultaneously tackle all forms of malnutrition. ; PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all ; PHND; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)