The impact of Covid 19 household food security for remittance recipients as livelihood source of income in Lesotho

Abstract

Food Security has been a major concern globally mainly in the developing countries. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to achieve zero hunger nations. Recently, most countries experience food insecurity due to global warming and not only that but also income sources for different households. Some livelihood income sources are casual/ informal and are mostly affected by crisis in many countries. When livelihood sources are affected, people become food insecure because they lose their purchasing power and cannot financially access food in the markets. Food insecurity has been common in Lesotho for the past years and was intensively experienced by many households. One of the common income sources in Lesotho especially in the rural areas is remittances. When agricultural production declined in the country, household members migrated to the urban areas and to the neighbour country to seek employment and most of them remitted to their families. The remittances flows were affected in 2020 when COVID 19 evolved in the country. Lesotho has many migrant labours because of less job opportunities in the country and many people have indeed migrated. Those in the rural have migrated to the urban for domestic and textile factory jobs while some from both rural and urban have migrated outside the country. However the pandemic came with lockdown restrictions that affected migrant labours. The borders were closed, factories were closed, most migrant labours returned home and movement was restricted. All these restrictions affected many sources of income including remittances. Many households lost their purchasing power and became vulnerable to food insecurity in Lesotho as a result of the pandemic and many humanitarian interventions were made to curb the extreme food insecurity emergency. This study’s main objective is to investigate the impact of COVID 19 on food Security for households that depend on remittances as livelihood sources. This paper has examined how 2 COVID 19 has affected remittances and investigated the livelihood coping strategies applied by households as they experienced food insecurity. The researcher used mixed methodology to test and build theories in this research. The study reveals that indeed COVID 19 affected the remittances flows and the remittance recipient’s households experienced food shortages due to financial access. Prices were high while on the other hand people had no income to purchase food. The study intends to make a contribution in guiding the policy makers in formulating development policies on food security in light of pandemics and to provide a background information on how pandemics can affect people’s income sources and food security so that resilient programmes can be established to improve lives.