Hunger and Pandemic: Wild Edibles as Future of Food

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pre-existing social divisions and the emerging crisis in the economy, particularly rural economy. It has also been forewarned, consequently, that there will be rising hunger. The sudden lockdown across the country due to COVID19 not only threw everything out of keel, but many communities were cut from the supply chain of food. There were anecdotes of people resorting to local grown produce and foraging for wild edibles, especially in the remote hilly regions of India. Yet again, this dependency on the market reveals to us that the present models of agro-economic practices have eroded the sustainable and self-reliant practices around food. The pandemic will impact global food security both directly and indirectly. As the Committee on World Food Security’s High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition explained recently, the crisis is ‘already affecting food systems, in terms of demand and supply, decrease in purchasing power, the capacity to produce and distribute food. All of which will strongly affect the poor and vulnerable’.1