Myanmar confirmed its first COVID-19 case on March 24th, and as of April 11th there have been an additional 27 cases confirmed. However, the true extent of the virus is potentially much higher given limited testing within the country. As a result, the Government of Myanmar has taken steps to curtail the virus’s spread, including quarantining infected and exposed individuals, encouraging social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and restricting migration with partial lockdowns over the Thingyan holiday.
Though these measures seem to be limiting the spread of COVID-19 thus far, Myanmar development experts have cautioned that stringent lockdowns may aggravate basic food and nutrition security. Already, the Myanmar economy is suffering from the recent global economic downturn, including large-scale job losses in Myanmar’s garment and tourism industries, reductions in overseas remittances and foreign exchange earnings, and declines in domestic services industries (e.g. restaurants, retail).
A key policy question is therefore how best to prevent deterioration of food and nutrition security due to the spread of COVID-19 and prolonged economic crisis.
Recently, India became one of the first developing economies to impose a stringent 21-day lockdown in the face of COVID 19. In brief, the law stated that individuals could only leave their homes to purchase food and pharmaceutical goods. The law also prohibited any restrictions on trade in “essential” commodities.
This restriction created several adverse impacts on food security. The first being a mass exodus of informal workers from major cities. Faced with the threat of a complete loss of earnings, informal workers opted to return to their rural homes where they could at least be guaranteed some basic level of food and housing security. These mass movements increased the risk of COVID-19 contagion through crowding on roads and bus stops, but also resulted in severe and immediate food and water insecurity.
In addition, severe problems arose on the agri-food system such as closures of formal wholesale markets, extortion and/or harassment of traders and consumers by local authorities, disruption to private e-commerce and micro-delivery firms distribution systems, and rising uncertainty about food availability resulting in volatile prices.
Since India’s was the first major developing country to impose such a prolonged and strict lockdown, the impacts of this measure on food and nutrition security provides an early illustration of the many challenges that this kind of anti-COVID intervention can pose in other settings where the labor force is mostly informally employed with poor job security and low wages, and where the agri-food systems are similarly informal with widespread use of open-air markets.
Myanmar has such a setting and the Government of Myanmar can learn from the mistakes made in India in managing COVID-19, while ensuring that basic food and nutrition security is maintained through this complex health and socioeconomic crisis.
India’s chastening experience with food security during its lockdown suggests the following actions would be imperative for maintaining food security in Myanmar:
- Allow the free movement of all goods. A stable and reliable agri-food system requires free movement of a wide range of food products (including micronutrient-rich fruits, vegetables and animal-sourced foods) as well as essential non-food goods.
- Monitor food markets and agricultural value chains as closely as possible to address problems when they do arise.
- Reduce risk of COVID‑19 contagion by improving hygiene in Myanmar’s food markets.
- Issue clear directives to police, military, and local authorities not to impede the movement of goods.
The COVID 19 crisis is no ordinary crisis, with loss of economic output (GDP) likely to go into double digits in the short to medium term. While it is critically important to stem widespread contagion of the disease through some degree of social distancing and lockdowns, there is a serious risk that mismanaged efforts to stem contagion through a full-scale lockdown could dramatically increase food and nutrition insecurity in Myanmar, and even adversely affect political security when the poor have no recourse to alternative livelihoods. Currently, however, there is still a window of opportunity for the Government of Myanmar to learn from the mistakes made in India and other developing countries.
You can read the full paper here, in English and Burmese.
မြန်မာဘာသာဖြင့်ရေးသားထားသော စာတမ်းအပြည့်အစုံကို ဤနေရာတွင် ဖတ်ရှုနိုင်ပါသည်။
This work was undertaken through funding support provided by the the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) under the Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA). This blog was prepared by Michael Wang, Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).