Food self sufficiency
According to some studies, it takes a minimum of 21 days to form a new habit and 2 months to create new, automatic behaviour. Some experts believe that many countries are yet to see the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on individual and collective behaviour around food. Ian Wright, the chief executive officer of the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), believes that the pandemic will have a permanent impact on the UK food and drink industry. According to him, this will have quite a big effect on people psychologically, and a lot of them will choose to stay and eat at home in the post-pandemic future as well. However, he is aware that some people will choose to go out and ‘party like it’s 1999’. Asian consumers have already formed new habits (takeaways and eating at home instead of dining out). For example, in China, the study shows that 86% of the poll respondents would prefer to eat at home more often than before the COVID-19 outbreak. This tendency to turn inward might evoke a shift in favour of healthy, local and sustainable food.
Creating new ways in which people produce, process, distribute, eat, recycle and appreciate food would have a huge long-term impact on the future food system. There are many valid reasons why one country would decrease its dependency on international trade (for example poor countries could minimize the risk around food price hikes). However, there is a debate around this topic since a lot of economists see food self-sufficiency as an inefficient system that could disrupt trade. The ‘’either, or’’ approach of this debate prevents countries from engaging in their domestic food production, and the focus should not be to produce 100% of the food on the domestic soil (many believe it couldn’t be achievable), but rather to have the increase in domestic capacity to produce food while still operating on imports and exports. The social distancing could create new ways in which the food industry will engage consumers (re-invention of the physical store: format, offering, service, etc.).
Food self-sufficiency will form production methods that depend less on external factors. There are already many innovative techniques such as vertical farming (producing food in vertically stacked layers) and aquaponics (a combination of fish and plant production using aquaculture and hydroponics systems). Consumers, industry actors, and policymakers have the opportunity to work together on creating a more decentralized food system that could handle global crises. The lockdown of many cities and countries has created a new issue of the pandemic: food waste. Many American farmers were forced to destroy and turn fresh vegetables into mulch. Even though people now eat nearly every meal at home, it is not enough to absorb the excess of food that was intended to go to restaurants, hotels, and schools. This is devastating news because in 2018 there were 822 million hungry people without access to enough food. The idea of food self-sufficiency is widely criticized by economists as a misguided approach focusing on political priorities rather the economic efficiency.
