FOOD SECURITY ISSUES IN COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND ITS PARTICULARITIES IN GEORGIA

Insurance stable food security was and remains, one of the most significant issues faced by human society. Food security is an important socioeconomic and political issue at the individual, national, and global levels. In the conditions of global cataclysms like the COVID-19 pandemic, the problem of food security becomes even more difficult. As mentioned at the opening of the Joint Technical Symposium held on December 16th, 2022, “There is no certainty when the next pandemic will strike us, but there is the absolute certainty that it will happen again”. In such conditions, rethinking the gained experience obtained through the COVID-19 pandemic becomes particularly important. The article distinguished two aspects of food security – the food quantity problem and the food quality problem and considers the impact of COVID-19 on food security at the levels of countries, human groups, and economic sectors. On the country level, the paper discusses countries that experienced food problems in the past, food-import-dependent countries, and food-export-dependent countries. On the human groups level, the article distinguishes communities and groups of people who already experienced hunger, socially unprotected populations, and the so-called "new poor". On the economic level, the paper defines sectors of the economy that were highly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It also analyses the food security issues in Georgia and the effects of COVID-19 on the domestic production of main groups of products, the ratio of import and export by groups of products, and the self-sufficiency ratio according to some groups of products.