Local and sub-national governments worldwide are taking various actions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, but these actions go often unnoticed and are not sufficiently supported.

In line with the Urban Food Agenda objectives, FAO wants to raise the profile of actions taken by city administrations and local governments to provide support to them, aiming to identify the local governments’ needs and challenges for further research and support.
Those actions may support the implementation of existing national strategies or are either additional or complementary to them. Several of the actions affect the local food system and are aiming at protecting livelihoods and mitigating the pandemic’s impact on food security, nutrition and food safety for urban and peri-urban populations. They also aim at preventing the food system from becoming a source of propagation of the disease. However, these local governments’ actions go often unnoticed and are not sufficiently supported. 

Therefore, FAO invited local governments to fill out a short questionnaire (available in 7 languages) aiming at mapping the actions taken, identifying challenges that governments face, and giving them the opportunity to make recommendations on how the response could be better managed.

Submissions for the questionnaire were closed on Sunday 10 May 2020. In a short while, we will share new materials from the processed results in order to:

i) showcase the role that local governments play in leveraging urban and peri-urban food systems and food environments actions to mitigate the effects of the virus; 
ii) map local and sub-national government responses to the COVID-19 emergency;
iii) identify challenges and gaps to be resolved; 
iv) cataloguing successes and good practices; 
v) identify actions taken by other stakeholders such as national governments and private sector etc. to better support sub-national and local government efforts and propose areas for strengthening the coordination among them. 

-- If you are representing a local government and you are willing to share details (videos, photos, documents, hyperlinks) about the measures undertaken by your municipality to face the effects of the COVID-19 emergency on the food system, please do so by sending an email with the following subject line “FAO COVID19 INFORMATION -[YOURCITY]” to the following email address: [email protected]