Food security and its management at household level by hill farm women during covid-19

COVID-19, declared as an medical emergency during 2020 by World Health Organization has impacted the lives of people all over the world. Restriction for not moving out of the homes has brought different types of stresses to people. The most important stress perceived and shown in people’s behavior is related to management of basic human need i.e. food. The people all over the world became panic about the uncertainty of the medical emergency resulting towards shutting up of all the activities. The present study was conducted on 100 women of Baijnath Block of District Kangra of Himachal Pradesh with the objective to identify the food security at village level during COVID-19 in terms of food availability which includes shopping behavior, physical and financial access to food and consumption of quality food, cooking habits followed and food wastage. It was depicted in the study that majority of the women (75%) had stocked the food items for 2-3 months as soon as they heard about COVID-19 lockdown. It has also been reported by 52 percent of the women that frequency of basic food items like rice, sugar etc. has increased during COVID-19 resulting to increased expenditure on food during COVID-19. It has also been reported by women that special care has been taken by them to avoid food wastage due to unpredictability of the duration of pandemic resulting towards sustainability of food availability and economic losses due to pandemic. Effect of COVID-19 was also observed in the quality of food consumed by the study group. All the respondents reported that before lockdown they use to consume food items from all the food groups but various changes have been reported by the respondents regarding food consumption due to uncertainty regarding duration of lockdown.