Mr Kaustubh Devale presented FAO’s experiences in Afghanistan working on anticipating the impacts of COVID-19 beyond the public health sector. As Afghanistan is faced with a variety of intertwined hazards and risks, amongst which are floods, drought, landslides as well as plant and animal diseases in addition to climate change, conflicts and food insecurity, Mr Devale explained how the Covid-19 crisis entered this diverse setup of risks and how the existing risk factors evolved during the pandemic.
Afghanistan is considered one of the countries with the highest impacts on food security as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. FAO is part of the food security cluster – an inter-agency mechanism in Afghanistan, which helped to work along with other development partners beyond the health-related humanitarian actors. In operational terms, their vulnerability analysis helped to understand and anticipate how the crisis and what impacts can be expected.
Among the anticipatory actions that were conducted are safety guidelines for live animal markets during COVID-19, contingency planning to ensure continuity of markets and unconditional cash transfers for female-headed households.
The COVID-19 crisis, the food security situation and the conflict context are worsening. Mr Devale presented a climate outlook and noted that FAO is now analysing and trying to predict the changing impacts caused by these interlinking factors.