Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Security Among East and West African Pastoralists

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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented health crisis. Early in the pandemic high-income countries were disproportionately impacted, while lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) reported relatively lower morbidity and mortality rates. However, the true number of cases may be many more, as testing and tracing have been a challenge and many LMICs do not adequately collect mortality data. Recently, however, reported COVID-19 cases have been surging in LMICs. In early June 2021, cases and deaths were increasing by 20% and 15%, respectively, per week in Africa, with Uganda reporting their highest number of new weekly cases since the pandemic began.

The secondary impacts of the pandemic in LMICs due to quarantines, bans and movement restrictions are resulting in significant development and food security declines. Early in the pandemic, it was argued that more industrialized systems were more severely impacted by COVID-19. A recent study, however, found that in 11 of the poorest and most food-insecure countries, livestock-keepers were among the most severely affected by restrictions put in place to control the pandemic. This was due in part to difficulty in accessing production inputs or selling products and restricted access to pastures. This situation has resulted in what the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations describes as an “economic and food security crisis” among livestock-keepers in low-income countries.

This article focuses on the food security impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among pastoralists in East and West Africa. Pastoralism is a livelihood and a food production system found all over the world’s rangelands and seasonally on large areas of farmlands, covering more than 50% of the global land area. Primarily a herding system reliant on mobility to find pasture and water, pastoralism has a unique ability to convert non-human-edible fiber unpredictably distributed throughout highly variable ecosystems into meat, milk, livelihoods and income. For this reason, pastoralism can be described as a specialization to take advantage of environmental variability. According to the African Union, more than 268 million people rely on pastoralism as a livelihood in Africa. But the number of those who benefit from pastoralism is much larger, as these systems supply important value chains, provide critical ecosystem services and contribute to maintaining landscape functionality. The analysis also includes agropastoralists, who practice some amount of crop production in addition to livestock-rearing. However, among livestock-keepers in the arid and semi-arid lands of East and West Africa, livestock provides the main source of income and household financial capital, independent of crop production.

Among rural populations in East and West Africa, pastoralism is a particularly interesting case study for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Morbidity has mainly affected older people, who are repositories of traditional knowledge systems that pastoralists rely upon for basic livelihood elements such as rangeland and herd management. Pastoralist livelihoods tend to occur at the periphery of socioeconomic systems, which is particularly relevant in terms of the disconnection and disruption to extended social relationships that the pandemic has triggered. The disruption of markets is also important, given pastoralists' dependence on markets both for selling products and for buying food, particularly among poorer pastoralist households.

The article also analyzes the impacts of the pandemic through a gender lens, as there are important gender dynamics (e.g., ownership, responsibility, resource management, decision-making, norms and power) in pastoral systems that influence household food security. Pastoral women are key economic players in their communities and share household responsibilities with men. Small livestock production (goats, sheep and poultry), the collection and sale of milk, and the management of food and its consumption in the household are usually the responsibility of pastoral women. Men are more involved with large livestock production (e.g., herding and migration), although this is not uniform and depends on specific local factors. While women are often responsible for caring for livestock, in general, they cannot make decisions about livestock consumption, sales and exchange. Thus, the impact of COVID-19 restrictions can affect men and women pastoralists differently.

This article is by Evan F. Griffith, Shaina Craige, Pablo Manzano, Loupa Pius and Christine C. Jost.