Climate Change, Covid-19 and Food Insecurity in Africa: A New Normal Approach

Abstract

Climate change has been receiving a series of attention since 1962 when Rachel Carlson wrote her seminar book “Silent Spring” where she discussed the negative impact of climate change. In trying to further the nexus between climate change, food security, and health challenges, Colin Butler in his edited book “Climate Change and Global Health” published in 2014 confirm the organic linkages of the three issues under consideration. Colin’s book examined how climate change is an obstacle to the health sector with a special chapter that interrogates zoonotic diseases in Africa. There is no doubt that the present challenges, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, that rocks the globe has some links with climate change and impacting on food security. Places that are facing heatwaves experiencing less COVID-19 impacts compared with the temperate and Mediterranean types of climate. Despite that assertion, the global lockdown affected access to quality food and quantity of food by consumers as farmers could not go to their farms for planting and harvesting. The negative implications of this development will be interrogated through complex interdependence and liberal embedded theories. Relying on secondary source of data, the paper concludes that the neoliberal approach to food security and solution to COVID-19 in the era of climate change will bring more hardship and eventually, political instability to the African continent. Against this, there is a need to internalize liberal thesis through the environmental concern of each state since the globalization of complex interdependence is here to stay.