B-7: Impact of COVID-19 on Food Security: Challenges for Women
- The government should ensure women’s equitable access to productive resources, inputs
and services for next production season (and beyond).
- Policy-makers should undertake special measures to support rural women’s economic
activities in agri-food value chains; and adopt programmatic and policy-oriented
measures to address gender-based violence.
- There is need to invest in women’s leadership and support their formal and informal
networks to contribute to the COVID-19 response.
- It is vital to ensure availability of sex- and age-disaggregated data and analysis
- Despite negative effects of COVID-19, the situation provides opportunities to find ways
to increase resilience across the food systems by identifying new market channels (for
example e-commerce), improving the storage facilities, decreasing losses from farm-to-
fork, increasing the quality of food products and increasing on farm biodiversity which
are critical for healthy food, income of farmers and protection from the climate hazards.
- There is a need of food system transformation from cereal/cash crop focused system to a
more diversified system which supports the production and affordability of nutritious
food for all the sections of population.
- There should be target oriented interventions which should be based on SDGs and policy
framework for achieving SDG-2. Pakistan’s country policy for food system
transformation and target settings need to be prioritized for the Food System Summit
2021.
- The food system transformation requires coordinated efforts by all the stakeholders
across multiple dimensions. The role public sector, private sector, donors and other
development organizations is critical for ambitious targets of SDG-2 by 2030.
- Nutrition-specific measures need to be taken by the government.
- Policy makers need to take into account both men and women to address specific needs.
- Policies need to be more focused on vulnerable individuals in order to eradicate food
insecurity.
- The government should design and implement gender-sensitive social protection
interventions in which women can participate and benefit from.
- There is a need of solid research on gender and intersectionality to correct stereotypes
and propose alternative practical and strategic solutions.
- Transforming gender relations requires approaches that address and promote equality and
equity between men and women.
