Food Crisis and Related Risk Factors

By Kalle Hirvonen, Gashaw Tadesse Abate, and Alan de Brauw

This piece originally appeared on IFPRI.org

Across Africa, countries have imposed emergency border restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19. These have delayed a continental free trade agreement, are contributing to fears of a new food crisis, and disrupted cross-border trade. In this post, Antoine Bouët and David Laborde review the border measures and their impacts and provide recommendations on how to make health and trade policies more coherent in a complex environment.— Johan Swinnen , series co-editor and IFPRI Director General.

An estimated 73 million people in Africa faced acute levels of hunger and food insecurity in 2019, according to the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises, released this week. The continent accounted for 54 percent of the global total of severely food-insecure people. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread around the world, developing countries in the region will likely see even further disruptions to food access. These disruptions will compound existing food crises and potentially create new ones.

This post originally appeared on IFPRI.org .

By: Tsitsi Makombe and Julie Kurtz

Since mid-2018, conflict in the Liptako-Gourma region, the border connecting western Niger, northern and eastern Burkina Faso, and central and northeastern Mali, has displaced almost 700,000 people and caused massive disruptions to market functioning and livelihoods, according to a recent alert from FEWS Net . These disruptions are expected to continue to drive urgent humanitarian needs through the rest of 2020.