HCP partner Taiyang Zhong from Nanjing University coauthors a paper with Yajia Liang about community-level grassroots organizations on household food security during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. The paper published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction examined the relationship between community-level grassroots organizations and household food insecurity based on an online survey of household food insecurity in Wuhan in March 2020 funded by the Operating Grant of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC). The study found that community-level grassroots organizations played an important role in promoting food security including reducing worries about food supply and providing enough food intake, but did not ensure households had adequate food quality due to increasing food prices, fewer varieties of food and decreased food freshness. Compared to other grassroots organizations, the community committee had actually become an extension of the government to run administrative grassroots affairs before the epidemic, so its tight relationship with local government made it become the major grassroots power in ensuring household food security at the residential community level.
