COVID-19 lockdowns disrupt remittances
critical to livelihoods

May 26, 2020 | By Bronwen More

Lockdowns have disrupted food supply chains and cross-border trade in foodstuffs, reduced access to income to purchase food and increased food insecurity among the vulnerable, SAMP director Jonathan Crush said.

University Research Professor at Wilfrid Laurier, Dr Crush called for greater support to be given to civil society in the Global South who are mobilizing food support where it’s needed and are pointing out human rights violations in lockdowns.

Prof Crush took part in the webinar on COVID-19 and the Global South as part of the Global Insights Series at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He commented on the impact of the pandemic on remittances and food security, the consequences for the informal sector of lockdowns, the response of civil society organizations to the pandemic, and the likely effects of reductions in official development assistance on food and nutrition security.

On remittances, he noted that more than half of the over 250 million migrants in the world are located in Europe and North America. With COVID-19, mass unemployment is having a direct impact on the earning capacity of migrants and therefore on remittances, which are critical to livelihoods, food security, and to access to health and education in many parts of the Global South.

More research and policy dialogue about the importance of informality in the Global South is urgently needed, he said. Governments in African countries have traditionally taken a dim view of the informal sector and the initial response of many was to shut down the sector, citing fears of easy transmission of the coronavirus. In most cases this was reversed very quickly as it became evident that the informal sector, particularly the food sector, is essential to the food security of poorer communities.

SAMP sister project – the Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) – has been doing research in Wuhan and Nanjing and this has shown that even in cities with a high degree of pre-existing food security, households under lockdown experience significant increases in food insecurity, said Prof Crush, who also heads up the HCP.

Food insecurity under COVID-19 is indeed a crisis within a crisis as it has been labelled by the FAO, he said, noting that the WFP has warned that an additional 130 million people globally could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of the year.

While in early May there were fewer COVID-19 cases and related deaths in the whole of Africa than in Canada, it is “just a matter of testing and timing” before the disease ravages the Global South, Prof Crush said.

Some have speculated that the South is immune, pointing to youthful populations and mass BCG innoculation. “I think this position is the equivalent of standing in Times Square in mid-March and wondering what it was about the US that gave it immunity from the pandemic that was ravaging Europe. And we all know how that turned out…”

WATCH the webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5jdxpqYZd0&t=1630s