Joint operations provide lifesaving humanitarian assistance to IDPs and vulnerable communities living in hard-to-reach areas.

In late March, South Sudan closed all its borders in an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19, sending a wave of uncertainty throughout the humanitarian community, especially as the start of the pandemic coincided with the lean season and beginning of the main planting season.

Delivering timely emergency assistance and livelihood support to the most vulnerable people in South Sudan became more crucial than ever.

The pandemic of COVID-19 comes at a critical time when many of the humanitarian achievements over the last thirty years in fighting hunger and malnutrition as well as alleviating poverty around the world are being reversed due to a rise in conflict and climate shocks.

In South Sudan, the virus has exposed the fragility of our agri-food systems and is threatening to push millions of people into hunger. This has rekindled our appreciation of food – which some around the world take for granted but many go without.

An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, a tool for improving food security analysis and decision-making, conducted in January 2020, estimated that 6.5 million South Sudanese would be severely food insecure from May to July and face varying degrees of difficulties in accessing food. In July, the projections already estimated that 7.5 million people—over 60 percent of the 11.7 million—living in South Sudan are in need of humanitarian assistance. Additionally, over 9 million are highly reliant on agricultural activities such as farming, fishing and herding, and therefore more prone to severe food insecurity when faced with shocks and stressors.

Triple burden

The unprecedented triple threat of desert locusts, flooding and COVID-19 colluded against the main planting season, causing significant supply shocks due to cross-border restrictions, interrupting access to grazing and watering points for livestock-rearing households and causing shortages of farm labour, especially for high-value crops and small-scale farmers. This increased the cost of doing business due to interrupted supply chains, resulting in the loss of household incomes and substantial disruption of livelihoods. In addition, agriculture extension and advisory services have also faced severe impacts from lockdown measures, reducing farmers’ access during critical growing periods.

COVID-19 disrupted the agriculture supply chain, meaning farmers who access inputs from markets were unable to acquire good quality seeds or farming tools. Movement restrictions also affected other productive sectors such as livestock and fisheries, limiting access to pastures, watering points and fishing grounds for those whose livelihoods depend on these activities.

In line with this year’s theme of World Food Day “Grow, Nourish, Sustain. Together,” as the world continues to battle the pandemic, we need to put in place collective measures and take action to re-grow, to nourish once again and to ensure our efforts are sustainable for future generations.

Building back together

It is fundamental that the humanitarian community collaborates with governments to treat food production, transport, marketing and distribution as essential services and ensure decent incomes for smallholder farmers and food chain workers. Agricultural activities must help to avert worsening food security, and livelihoods support needs to be maintained and scaled up so households cultivate and ideally expand productivity.

With compounding and intensifying vulnerabilities, social protection programmes including cash-based interventions and the provision of basic services must be a central policy response to COVID-19. The United Nations has adapted many of its programmes, modifying activities, scaling up some while reducing others to optimize their positive impact on livelihoods.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) – this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate –  have identified several critical pathways to building resilient livelihoods systems, seeking to protect, restore, and improve agricultural livelihoods and increase the resilience of households and communities to shocks and stressors that impact agriculture, nutrition and food security.

Through its resilience portfolio, WFP is providing livelihood support across the country to increase agricultural production and address productivity constraints while providing food assistance in the form of rations to meet short-term hunger gaps. WFP also offers to buy households’ surplus for use in WFP’s home-grown school feeding programme and enhances market opportunities to smallholder farmers who produce a surplus to generate supplementary income, connecting them to quality markets.

Through WFP’s resilience programming, the 2019-2020 harvesting season saw 40 000 hectares of farmland cultivated, 10 500 farmers trained and the distribution of 30 000 post-harvest loss reduction technologies.

 WFP’s Food Assistance for Assets (FFA) offers communities the ability to create assets that serve them.  In 2019, FFA activities supported the construction of 460 km of community access roads and helped households in cultivating 38 000 hectares of cropland and vegetable gardens.  

An ongoing Seed System Security Assessment conducted by FAO, reveals the potential availability of up to 2 000 metric tonnes of assorted crop seed from nine counties. Such potential availability will be utilized to fill the supply gap created by COVID-19, using distribution modalities such as voucher systems.

During the 2020 main planting season, FAO distributed 10 000 metric tonnes of seeds and tools to vulnerable populations in need also in most remote areas. Through cash voucher interventions, FAO is supporting almost 400 000 people and injecting almost USD 2 million in support of national seed traders, suppliers and producers while enabling farmers buy seed of their choice.  FAO also provided assorted crop and vegetable seed kits to support 4.6 million people during the 2020 agricultural season.

In urban areas, WFP and FAO are mitigating the impact of COVID-19 by boosting productive capacities of city dwellers to access healthy food and generate income. Through their satellite offices, exceptional logistical capacity and robust business continuity plans, the agencies were able to continue delivering support in the country.

Call to action

The humanitarian community at large has supported South Sudan since the country was born in 2011 and must now step up and respond to new challenges. Addressing the country’s deficiencies and minimizing both the short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 crisis requires action. This must be quick, sizeable, in line with national responses and systems, coordinated across sectors and agencies, and build on existing initiatives and networks, guided constantly by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Agricultural activities must continue to help avert worsening food security and livelihoods support needs to be maintained and scaled up so households cultivate and ideally expand productivity.

However, no action can aspire to be transformative if it fails to be collective or inclusive. Countries, the private sector and civil society, all of us, need to make sure that our food systems grow a variety of food to nourish a growing population and sustain the planet, together.