THE HUNGER VIRUS

By Oscar Ochieng Ochieng

In most parts of Kenya's cities, people desperate to eat set off a stampede during a recent giveaway of flour and cooking oil, leaving scores injured and two people dead.

In other countries in Asia thousands of workers are lining up twice a day for bread and fried vegetables to keep hunger at bay.

And across the world, poor households are hanging red clothing and flags from their windows and balconies as a sign that they are hungry.

“We don’t have any money, and now we need to survive,” says patriotic citizens who lost their jobs due to this pandemic and now they have to provide for their kids and relatives back at home who always know that money is everywhere in the city “That means not eating much.”

The coronavirus pandemic has brought hunger to millions of people around the world. National lockdowns and social distancing measures are drying up work and incomes, and are likely to disrupt agricultural production and supply routes, leaving millions to worry how they will get enough to eat

Food access poses a problem. Most people access their food from local markets, but farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to grow and sell crops due to social distancing and containment measures. Globally, wrong-headed protectionist measures increase the price of food, compounded by exchange rate volatility for many African countries. 

Take a walk within the cities especially the slums and you will get to know how hunger is becoming more threat than this corona thing. Recently in one of the slums, there was a story of households selling the hand-washing sanitizers donated to them by the government just to at least get something to put on the table

This is just but one of such cases not only in the cities and towns but also in the rural settlements. When the president of Kenya his excellency Uhuru Kenyatta re-opened our roads and did away with the lockdown people flew from the city to rural settlements hoping to find some relief but to their surprise its even worse because they are seen as the COVID 19 spreaders.

Already, 135 million people have been facing acute food shortages and more could go hungry in 2020, said one of the chief economists at the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. Altogether, an estimated 265 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by year’s end. 

This is the time I think the so-called politicians should take their time and at least give back to society by finding a solution to this problem. If nothing is done then I fear that hunger is going to take advantage of this pandemic and wipe out the human race.

How to prevent a hunger epidemic

If governments and businesses take action now, we can prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from spilling over into a hunger epidemic. Here’s how:

• Expand and improve food assistance and social protection programs via governments to protect those most at risk.

• Reduce the costs of sending remittances.

• Enact a debt moratorium for 2020 and 2021 for private, bilateral, and multilateral debt.

• Create “grain corridors” to ensure the free flow of food supplies.

• Ensure active government efforts to create adequate food reserves.

• Avoid extreme protectionist measures on the import and export of food, such as limiting panic buying and hoarding.

• Establish countrywide monitoring and stabilizing of food plans.