Al Jazeera produced a video on YouTube on the cost of food & other services prices. It’s normal for the cost of goods and services to rise steadily over time.
But many countries are reporting major increases in the prices of food, housing, and fuel, in what’s being called a ‘cost of living’ crisis. Kalyani Raghunathan, a research fellow in New Delhi said the rising cost of living is having a large impact on nutrition and food security in the developing world. The problem with India is we don’t have enough data. The food insecurity situation is really poor. More than eighty percent of people have at least one form of food insecurity. People are worried about having enough food, having enough nutritious foods, and if there are social safety nets for people to get nutritious food. There are gender impacts dealing with these crises, too. “Women eat last and eat least, so it is the woman who gets the smallest portion of nutritious food. We have been seeing the women in the labor force are withdrawing from the work world or going part-time. When there is one crisis after another, resilience becomes harder.” India’s response to COVID at the start of the pandemic was confusing, with contradictory information on lockdowns, food moving across state lines, etc. A lot of the data that looks at food prices and COVID show that things stabilized in a matter of months. What is crucial to note is that social safety nets are extremely important.