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The COVID-19 pandemic is jeopardizing human health and disrupting the food systems that are the foundations of health. Unless we take immediate action, we could face a global food emergency of severity and scale unseen for more than half a century.FAO is calling for USD 1.2 billion in initial investments to finance FAO’s COVID-19 Response and Recovery Programme that aims to provide an agile and coordinated global response to ensure nutritious food for all both during and after the pandemic.The COVID-19 Response and Recovery Programme enables donors to leverage the Organization’s convening power, real-time data, early warning systems and technical expertise to direct support where and when it is [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic has more than ever shown the changing risk environment, as well as the systemic and overlaying nature of risks that affect and threaten all sectors. It has reinforced the call for multi-sectoral, multi-hazard and preventive and anticipatory approaches that consistently integrate disaster, climate and crisis risk management for strengthening the resilience of people, their agricultural livelihoods and the ecosystems they depend on in a sustainable manner. In her opinion paper, FAO Natural Resources Officer Wirya Khim discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the agriculture and food systems through a disaster risk reduction lens and offers some key [...]

There are 476 million indigenous peoples around the world, constituting 6.2 percent of the global population and, according to different sources, representing more than 19 percent of the extreme poor. Indigenous peoples are not a homogenous group. They live in over 90 countries, in rural and urban areas, in forests, savannahs, mountains, and along the coasts, in low, middle- and high-income countries. However, they all share a history of discrimination and marginalization that in the context of COVID-19 – once again – challenges their existence. This document provides a series of recommendations to governments on how to face COVID-19 impacts [...]

The FAO Subregional Office for Eastern Africa is a technical hub which supports nine countries in Eastern Africa: Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan and Uganda. It has a core team of professionals with multidisciplinary expertise. It is responsible for developing, promoting, overseeing and implementing agreed strategies for addressing subregional food security, nutrition, agriculture and rural development priorities.COVID-19 hit the Eastern Africa subregion at a particularly critical time when the economies of a number of countries in the subregion were recovering from the impacts of recent droughts and severe flooding and dealing with the worst desert locust [...]

This situation report is a consolidation of information on food system disruptions in Africa due to COVID-19 for the period of 1–15 July 2020. As a collaboration between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the University of Minnesota – Strategic Partnerships and Research Collaborative, the information in this report is collected by scanning and analyzing public, open-source information. See the full list of policy briefs related to COVID-19

The anticipated transformation of the Kenyan livestock sector in the coming decades will result in increased public health risks. In order to well address these challenges, national and sub-national governments should adopt a One Health approach, which allows the mitigation of the negative effects of public health threats that originate at the interface between humans, animals and the different environments in which they operate. This paper provides an assessment on the extent to which the prevailing legislative framework facilitates the implementation of the One Health approach in Kenya, and opportunities for legislative reforms. We use a skeleton livestock value chain [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all parts of society and livelihoods around the globe. It is though worth recognizing that disadvantaged segments of populations like rural young women and men will be impacted harder, nevertheless, when proactively engaged, they have demonstrated to be innovators in their own sectors to surmount the pandemic impact. As governments and development partners take steps to address the economic and social effects of COVID-19, they should not allow a reversal of the rural youth progress achieved in recent years in terms of inclusion in food systems, access to education, vocational education and training, and access [...]

Recent forecasts by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have indicated a risk of locust invasion in West Africa from June 2020. From East Africa, some swarms could reach the eastern part of the Sahel and continue westwards from Chad to Mauritania. Surveillance and control teams will be mobilized across the region with a focus on Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and the Niger, and extended to Senegal. Countries such as Cameroon, the Gambia and Nigeria are also on watch in the event that desert locust spreads to these highly acute food-insecure countries. Since the region [...]

The desert locust crisis appeal for Southwest Asia details the funding needed by FAO to combat this destructive pest that is threatening countries across the region, and Islamic Republic of Iran and Pakistan in particular. The appeal outlines the control measures planned and taken so far, as well as the longer-term response planned for safeguarding the means of survival of millions of vulnerable people who could be affected, particularly with the compounding impact of COVID-19 and the restrictions this will likely incur for the Organization's humanitarian assistance.

The past few decades have seen dramatic improvements in the region in access to food, reduction in stunting rates, in premature death and disability caused by communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases. However, the gains in the fight against hunger and malnutrition have reversed in the wake of conflicts and violence that have spread in many parts of the region in the last decade. Today, nearly 55 million people in the Arab States, 13.2 percent of the population, are hungry and the situation is particularly worrying in countries affected by conflicts and violence: Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Displacements [...]