Protecting the Right to Food in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond

On the sixteenth of March, 2020, I headed to Woolworths for my weekly grocery shopping. Unlike any other time I had experienced, what awaited me was not a store full of fresh and tasty food products. Instead, it was a horrific scene one often sees in apocalypse movies: hundreds of anxious shoppers were racing through the grocery aisles, loading all the food items they could find on the shelves into their shopping carts. As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was quickly spreading throughout Australia, it was expected that panic buying would eventually come to Armidale, a college town in rural New South Wales, Australia, where I live and work. It was apparent that this day had come earlier than expected. Over the following two weeks, the situation did not improve; grocery stores across Australia still struggled to keep up with the dramatically increased consumer demand. Meat, particularly ground beef, sold out immediately. Dry foods, such as rice and pasta, disappeared within minutes. Many shoppers had to visit several stores on a hunt for some of the most basic food items necessary to prepare a single meal.