The impact of COVID 19 on Poverty and Food Security: Global Perspectives and Lessons from China

In September 2015, world leaders adopted the ambitious Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. The agenda was to be accomplished through the achievement of 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030: eradicating poverty, ending hunger, addressing climate change – just to name a few. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 suddenly disrupted the world’s advancement towards meeting this goal. It is estimated that COVID-19 has pushed an additional 88 to 115 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, bring back the total number of poor in the world to the level of 2014-2015. According to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 report, the pandemic may have added between 83 and 132 million people to the total number of undernourished in the world in 2020. It is as if COVID-19 had suddenly brought the world back to 2005, eroding in a few months 15 years of progress in food security.

This lecture will discuss the impact of COVID-19 on poverty and food security, looking in particular at the impact on the most vulnerable groups – rural communities, smallholder farmers, women, etc. – who were the most affected by the effects of the pandemic. The lecture will offer an overview of the impact of the pandemic globally, but it will then focus more in detail on the case of China. As one of the early countries that was affected by COVID-19, China provides a good example of a country that has successfully implemented measures that contained the spread of the COVID-19. To further mitigate additional harms on the economy, especially the poor in rural society, China took on in addition measures for economy recovery with an agenda of poverty reduction, which are worth analysing.

The lecture will stimulate a discussion, through an interactive Q&A, on what lessons can be learnt from the case of China, and the extent by which these lessons can adopted in other countries – trying to reflect the different perspectives of policy makers, international organizations, the private sector, and citizens.