 Hello, Naval War College colleagues, and welcome to this lecture of opportunity on food security and COVID-19. My name is Commander Andrea Cameron, and I coordinate the Climate and Human Security Studies Group at the Naval War College. Information shared for this group is now available to those off-campus, so if you're interested in joining, please put your email in the chat, or you can email me directly at Andrea.cameron at usnwc.edu. Today we host Mr. Greg Collins, who is currently the Deputy Assistant Administrator in the USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. This office leads the US government's Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, Feed the Future. In this role, he oversees the strategic direction and implementation of Feed the Future programs in the field, the initiative's agriculture, research, and policy efforts, as well as the USAID Center for Resilience. He also serves as the agency's overall resilience coordinator. Greg Collins formally served as the Director of the USAID Center for Resilience, and he has recognized global thought leader on resilience and has played a lead role in developing and operationalizing a strategic vision for resilience at USAID. We are honored to have Mr. Collins here to share on this timely and relevant issue of food security around the world. For those watching, this presentation will be recorded, but we will stop recording at the end of the presentation and open the floor for questions from the audience. Mr. Collins, welcome to the Naval War College. Great, and thanks so much for having me. I always relish these opportunities to go outside the international development space and connect with broader groups who are connected to the issues I care about and that our agency talks about. And I think you'll see implicitly in this presentation the connection to national security. And I'll point out a few points among those veins, but great to be here, Andrea. Really look forward to the questions at the end. That's always the most fun, but I think you were gonna pull up a presentation. So overarching priorities for the agency. So averting the need for additional humanitarian assistance. I'll walk through the numbers here, but we've had an almost tectonic shift of people backsliding into hunger, poverty, malnutrition. And in addition to the numbers that have descended into poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, many that were already living in hunger, poverty, and malnutrition have backslid even further into crisis levels of hunger, which are a critical threat to life, livelihoods, human dignity. Also, a big concern about backsliding on decades worth of progress to feed the future in our efforts with partner country governments to make progress on reducing hunger, poverty, and malnutrition. And there has been significant progress over the years. Our initiative alone exceeded its target of reducing poverty in the countries in which we work by over 20% over a seven year period. But now we're seeing within one short year that decades worth of progress being wiped away. So a deep concern there. And then as I mentioned at the lead in preventing a food crisis, we used to say preventing a health crisis from becoming a food crisis. But we're now at the point where how do we prevent a food crisis from becoming even bigger and contributing to political unrest? And this isn't to suggest that food insecurity is always a direct cause of political unrest, but where tensions exist, it certainly can be an exacerbating factor. And we've seen this throughout history. Go ahead to the next slide, Andrea. So now COVID impact. The impact on hunger and poverty will persist long before 2021. I've actually got an update on the numbers that I have in this presentation. The numbers were updated by the World Bank on Monday. Not only does it show the numbers will last, but there's actually not projected to be a rebound in 2021. The numbers descending into poverty are just gonna continue to grow. And so at this point, it's really about how do we mitigate that to the best of our ability? And then in the wake of all this, how do we speed recovery? Because some of the trajectories I'll lay out for you are actually quite alarming in terms of accelerating some trends. Inequality will also increase. That means that poor are going to get poorer and this widening gap around inequality is again connected to political unrest, national security concerns, et cetera. And the number of malnourished children will increase. And that really puts a human face on it. When you look at the hundreds of thousands of kids that threat of dying from wasting or thinness, a simple acute food insecurity and acute hunger. Next slide. And this is really, really important because it's obvious, but I'm gonna state the obvious. It's not COVID-19 that's causing these impacts. It's the steps put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 that are disrupting food supply chains, a number of impact pathways I lay out here on this slide that are a threat to food insecurity. So it's actually the measures we're taking to stop the spread of disease that are really wreaking havoc on food systems and market systems. Some of those impact pathways reduce remittances. Initially, we thought this would be an even bigger impact as it's played out over the year. It's not quite as large as the 110 billion that was initially estimated by the World Bank, but it is significant. And what that means is that family outside of Mogadishu that relies on their uncle in Ottawa in times of need is an experience in time of need and not able to lean on that uncle in Ottawa because that uncle is also being impacted. And the big deal there is we talk in technical terms about different types of shocks. Some shocks impact individual households, idiosyncratic shocks. Other shocks like drought affect large swaths of a population. We call those covariate shocks. This is the ultimate covariate shock. There's not anywhere that's not being impacted and that really the way our food systems are connected is just in a ripple effect through the food system. Restriction on the movement of people and goods has also been significant constraint, particularly at border areas, reduced revenue and access for small and medium sized enterprises. So small and medium sized enterprises are the lifeblood of national economies in a lot of the countries in which USA works. If they fail, the whole food system begins to fail. We are seeing a real double hit here. Not earning as much revenue on the one hand and not able to access credit on the other. And so there's a double threat there. And then at the bottom really, really important to understand here that this is also the ultimate compound shock. So COVID-19 and its impacts are landing in East Africa on top of locus threats, on top of conflict, on top of a projected drought event. And so it's all these things but combining together. And one of the frames that I've been more recently framing our work on this about is the triple threat of COVID conflict and climate. And it's really, really playing out in very concerning ways in the Horn of Africa. And so we're seeing reduced quality and quantity of diet and food. We're looking at longer term impacts on food supply. Some of the initial concern we had about are farmers getting seeds in the ground? Are they able to access inputs to be able to plant so that we don't experience production problems down the line? Some of that's beginning to play out now. And so we are seeing, we didn't initially see big hits to food prices but now we actually are seeing, in a localized way, significant impacts to food prices. And when you're living very close to the margin, a minor shift in the cost of maize bill or basic commodities can have a major hit on your ability to acquire the food you need to maintain your wellbeing. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. Poverty and hunger projected to rise and persist. I already made this point, but actually when we look at what's happened in hunger and poverty, the situation is actually worse than projected. We originally thought there's about a hundred million dollar mark in terms of dissent, a hundred million people mark in terms of descents into poverty. And now it looks like the low bar of the estimate is about a hundred and fifteen million people descended in 2020, up to a higher estimate of about 124 million. So in essence, our upper bound of the old estimate is now the lower bound of the new estimate. And as I shared at the beginning, the even bigger concern is that what we had initially projected to rebound in 2021. In fact, we're looking at the opposite. We're looking at people, additional people descending into poverty. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. Okay, sustained impacts on chronic hunger. So something happened around 2015 to our progress on ending global hunger. It began to reverse course in 2015 for the first time in 15 years. Now, why is that combination of conflict and conflict and climate? So what COVID has done is accelerated that trend and that's really, really concerning in a lot of places in the world. But takeaway from this graph is we are experiencing a hit in Southern Asia, but you do see a rebound. That's the graph done, the viewers left, but on the right, Sub-Saharan Africa, what do you see? There's a hit to hunger in terms of accelerating, but it's accelerating a trend that the acceleration that trend continues and the impacts are looking to be projected out well beyond 2021 and up to 2030 at this point. And that's really just as far as we're looking. So the takeaway here is this isn't something that we're gonna rebound from quickly. It is a significant trend that we're gonna have to deal with and that we don't talk about post COVID. We're talking about a COVID altered world when we're talking about these issues. Next slide, Andrea. Okay, this is another simple point, but I like to make it just to be clear and in the policy space, I find myself having to remind people about this a lot. We look at countries where we're most concerned and these are lower income countries where this data are a little bit dated, but the projected deaths from COVID directly are quite small. I think some of those estimates are changing now, but the projected food insecurity increase is extremely large and the opposite is true where we see most of the COVID deaths projected, we actually see the smaller hits to food insecurity and that's simply because the tipping point is much shallower in many of the low income countries in which we're working. And so even if COVID-19 isn't having a huge health impact yet, the impacts on food security are already readily apparent. So it's an important thing to take away from this conversation. Next slide, I did want to talk just for a second about the impact on current humanitarian food needs. And so this is people living at crisis levels of hunger. We already had, as I said earlier, unprecedented need for humanitarian assistance before COVID because of a combination of drought events, conflict, et cetera. And conflict really plays a role in driving humanitarian assistance needs these days. 10, 15 years ago, predominantly natural disaster driven, now predominantly conflict driven. So that's an important takeaway here. But in addition to already substantial needs of, this is a fused net estimate from a few months ago, 113 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance, an additional 25% because of COVID-19. And that's really concerning because when you drop into crisis levels of hunger, the inability of the humanitarian system to respond at scale to these huge shifts in numbers really means this is a legitimate threat to life, if not livelihoods and other forms of wellbeing. Let's go to the next slide. Should be widespread impacts. And this is the point that we've talked about, to think about this in two ways or think about it like this. A whole bunch of people who weren't poor, and that's what this graph is showing are dropping into poverty or failing to escape poverty because of the impacts of COVID-19. A whole other set of people who were already poor and hungry have dropped into crisis levels of poverty and hunger. And that's the previous slide about humanitarian need. And so the takeaway there is what we're seeing right now in terms of increased humanitarian need is truly the tip of the iceberg on the issues here. And that's deeply concerning. And that's why we've got to do everything in our power to get ahead of this to prevent that further back sliding into humanitarian need. And that's what we're doing, pivoting with our partners, et cetera, around the globe. As I said, the World Bank just updated their estimates on this. There is a significant increase in both the 2020 year on projected descents into poverty, as well as just as concerning the fact that that number continues to grow upwards of 140 million in 2021. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. And this is my last slide actually. So we should have a significant time for conversation. This is what are we doing to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on food security? So we and our partners and our partner country governance colleagues that we work with do have a significant infrastructure in place around our work on food security. Yes, on the humanitarian side, although it's under strain, but even the longer term investments that the US government, other donors and governments themselves make in dealing with issues around chronic hunger, chronic poverty, et cetera, like that. And so one of the things that we're doing is working with partner governments to divert food supply chain breaks and make smart evidence-based trade and policy decisions really difficult policy space right now, looking at public health imperatives as well as economic imperatives. I think we're all familiar with the dilemma right here at home and imagine that happening in an even greater budget constrained environment. So trying to help governments make the best possible decisions and I'm not gonna use the word right decision, the best possible decision and balancing those imperatives. Stabilizing local food supply and prices, that issue about making sure farmers get the seeds inputs they need so that we don't experience another hit in the next growing season. We're already experiencing the ramifications of that now in some places that's concerning, but we need to continue to make sure supply chains are flowing both for food to maintain prices but also for inputs, super important. Ensuring food markets are safe and continue to function. And this is important in the sense that not only is important for food access, but it's important for people's livelihoods because in Africa, 80% of people's livelihoods are tied to small and medium size enterprises in the food system. And so really critical on both sides of the equation that we ensure the extent possible of foods and markets are safe and continue to function. Keeping small and medium size businesses afloat, again, as at home, but in a much more resource constrained environment and then using all our platforms to disseminate COVID-19 control messaging. And that's well underway around the globe through USA programming generally, regardless of the sector in which we're working. So let me stop there and I'm encouraged that I didn't blather on too long as I often do because it means we get to talk more. So Andrea, back over to you. Thank you, Greg. You can stay camera on. So I will take the liberty to ask the first question. Before closing the presentation, these students are our future leaders. And I was wondering if you had any advice you could share with them regarding how they might be thinking about food security in their future positions? Yeah, I think we're at a really interesting moment because there's an event happening. Is it later this year? There's certainly lead up events later this year. Maybe next year the event's actually happening called the Global Food Systems Summit. And the Food Systems Summit was a very interesting idea about how we get beyond thinking small about even national and regional economies and really connect the dots and understanding how food systems work, how impacts in one part of the food system impact others. And it was a very interesting theoretical conversation. I mean, there was some evidence about how shots and stresses ripple through food systems. But wow, if you never needed a business case for why we should be talking about food systems, it was COVID-19 and the impacts it's had on food systems. And so I think when we talk about food security, when we talk about hunger, malnutrition, we always put a human face on it because it is a human reality. And to be frank with this group, putting a human face on it's important for a lot of stakeholder groups. But this isn't about giving people food. This isn't about making sure they get through this drought or this shock event. It's about equipping people, households, communities and food systems to be able to mitigate, adapt, and recover in the face of a range of shocks and stresses. And so a household sitting in Northern Kenya, a household in Niger or up in Northeastern Nigeria, they're not experiencing COVID-19 in a vacuum. They're experiencing it in a context of an array of shocks and stresses. They're a threat to their lives, livelihoods and wellbeing. And so the two takeaways there would be one, be thinking about the system level impacts and how parts of the system impact other parts of the system, both positively in the form of resilience, but also the way shocks ripple through systems. And then two, this idea of resilience. I've been driving the agenda on resilience at USA for 10 years now and we've made good progress on it. And we began to expand from our initial work, working in areas of a current crisis to say, we really need to be thinking about resilience more broadly than that in all contexts we work. And now we've got the, again, in the business case to say, look, we cannot simply build back to the prior state of vulnerability before COVID-19 hit. We need to be preparing for the shocks and stresses we know are sure to come, but also thinking about far off, how do we build this set of capacities we call resilience? How does this capacity at the level of country government, at the level of household, at the level of community? And we know resilience as a set of capacity actually operates at these different scales. It's not just a household being resilient. And I don't care whether you're in Kenya or you're in California, there is gonna be shocks and stresses that overwhelm your capacity to manage them on your own. So you need to be thinking up the line, not just households, communities, not just community systems, not the systems, countries, national governments, regional governments and sort of connecting the dots that way. So thinking at systems level, thinking about resilience. And for this group, critically important understanding at a fundamental level, that this has tied to national security, it has tied to political unrest and conflict in those threats, never an isolation, but this is a major strain on places where things are already strained. Thank you so much, Greg. Before we stop the recording, you mentioned FuseNet earlier and I was wondering if you would like the opportunity to explain what that system is to this audience. Sure, a terrible bureaucrat using his acronyms. FuseNet is the famine early warning system. It was a system that was created in the 1980s to be able to provide early warning that would allow not only the US government, but other donors and partner countries to better respond ahead of shock events so that we weren't scrambling after the fact to provide assistance. It has evolved over the years. They do a lot more analytic work beyond just the food assistance projections, but they are a really good resource and it's just fusenet.com and they've got regular updates and they provide a regular look at the forthcoming humanitarian need. We're also partnering with FuseNet to try and get creative around how we measure how well we've averted humanitarian assistance needs. So I started this presentation by saying one of the goals here is to avert humanitarian assistance need to prevent that backsliding in the crisis levels of hunger. And in fact, that is the initial purpose of the resilience agenda at USAID was to prevent that backsliding to avert humanitarian need in the face of shock events. And so we're also working with them doing some really creative analytic work and trying to project how well we've done that. And so it's something we partner with them as well but great source of information for regular updates if people are interested in the food security situation around the world. Thank you so much, Mr. Collins. I'm really impressed with the depth of the connections you made between the COVID pandemic and the food supply and security. On behalf of the whole Naval War College community, I'd like to thank you for sharing your expertise with us today and this will conclude the recorded portion of our presentation. Thank you.