Covid-19 and Food Security Challenges in the MENA Region

Apart from being a health crisis in the first place, COVID-19 at its core is an economic as well as a food security potential crises. This paper assesses the link between the pandemic and food security status with special focus on the MENA region. It highlights the different channels through which the pandemic could impact the status of food security, with its different pillars including affordability, availability, and utilization. Globally as well as in the MENA region, COVID has mainly affected the affordability and utilization pillars of FS, and had negligible effects on the availability pillar, at least in the interim. To understand the link between food insecurity and the pandemic, the study employs two types of datasets and correspondingly two equations were estimated using two different indicators for measuring food security and two indicators to proxy the effect of the pandemic. The two approaches confirmed that the variability in food security status across all countries is significantly negatively related to the pandemic stringency on global and MENA region levels. The empirical assessment has drawn vivid attention to the relative importance of the role of institutional and demographic prerequisites, consecutively, needed to handle the pandemic in explaining the food insecurity variability across all countries, compared to the effect of the stringency of the pandemic as measured by the number of confirmed cases. Regression results have put the MENA region at a disadvantaged situation, compared to the rest of the world, regarding its coping capacity limitations as represented by the weak governance, high prevalence of corruption and fragile health systems in explaining countries’ variability in food security levels. COVID has thus the potential of being the catalyst that would intensify the urgency to undertake radical reforms in food systems and to revisit several directly and indirectly related structural and institutional rigidities that have affected accessibility and utilization pillars in MENA region.