COVID-19 Containment and Food Security in the Global South

Governments in the Global South have responded to the looming threat of COVID-19 with a range of containment, economic, and public health strategies. The Oxford Coronavirus Government Tracker (OxCGRT) identifies 18 separate government measures, and classifies eight of them as “containment and closure” strategies (Table 1). We have added another eight common measures observed in the South to the OxCGRT list. As Hale et al (2020) note, government responses to COVID-19 within each of these general categories exhibit “significant nuance and heterogeneity.” For example, C7 measures range from complete and prolonged quarantine and residential lockdowns, as in Chinese cities and migrant-worker hostels in Qatar and Singapore at one extreme, to general exhortations by politicians with little or no enforcement at the other.