In shutting down entire societies, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fundamental inequities and inadequacies of market-driven economies that prioritise profits over human welfare. Inequities show up in businesses that furlough employees while paying high salaries and bonuses to executives. They are also revealed by the dependence of food systems on poorly paid workers and cheap global supply chains. The COVID-19 crisis demonstrates how current food systems fail to protect populations from hunger and diet-influenced non-communicable diseases and why the poor, disenfranchised, discriminated against, and chronically ill are those most vulnerable to this disease.

In the USA, the pandemic has caused massive unemployment and impoverishment. But it has brought to public attention the plight of formerly invisible low-wage food workers, many of them migrants or immigrants, whose jobs on farms and in slaughterhouses, meat-packing plants, and grocery stores rarely provide sick leave or health-care benefits yet put them at risk of contagion. Their work is now deemed essential. Suddenly, the inadequacies of US policies on labour, immigration, health care, food assistance, and international trade are […]