The role of Food Defense

The role of Food Defense
23 February 2021

The coronavirus pandemic has devastating effects for all countries worldwide in terms of healthcare challenges and socio-economic stagnation. This crisis showed the importance of people’s health and similarly the availability and accessibility to food to have a stable living environment for the population in any country. Even though Pakistan hasn’t been impacted hugely negative for human health by the pandemic, however, the issue of the food supply has been the country’s number one issue.

The indirect effects of Covid-19 have raised more problems for Pakistan than direct ones. Because the government used the traditional tools in dealing with food supplies, including the administrative, monitoring and other arrangements, as well as the agricultural sector hasn’t been applying innovative and data-driven methods, the shortage of food was clearly experienced by the government, and as a consequence, by its population. Therefore, the Chinese partners started helping the Pakistani government to address these issues.

Amon the priority problems in agriculture to be solved are raising awareness of the agricultural sector among youth and their attraction to contribute to this area; dealing with capacity building of farmers in using new agro-technologies; decreasing the food waste and focusing on food safety regulations. All these areas are compounded in the food defence.

In this regard, food defence is crucial for achieving the economic access of food, proper information to the population on its dietary rules, particularly, for the health of children and infants; and awareness-raising among people on a healthy lifestyle with a major behavioural change.