Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Latin America benefits from vast access to natural resources, however many people living in rural areas have limited access to locally produced food and rely heavily on imported goods. The fragilities in food supply chains were exacerbated by COVID-19, which left people at risk of not being able to meet their immediate food needs. Recovery and renewal provides an opportunity to support Latin Americas rural agricultural sector to renew its practices, promote community health and resilience, and contribute to achieving environmental sustainability. Consider the actions proposed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) for COVID-19 recovery and renewal:

Transform food production

• Finance and support the production of a diverse range of agricultural products. Invest in multi-crop programs together with small and medium producers
• Reduce food waste by providing access to locally produced food and resources
• Prioritise local consumption and distribution of agricultural products over exports
• Promote the adoption of healthy diets with local produce through voluntary information groups, labelling policies, eating healthy campaigns, and fiscal incentives to schools that purchase local produce

Rural development

• Provide quality education and skills-training to the rural agricultural sector
• Establish sustainable practices in the agricultural sector, that recognize the diversity of the ecosystem and the cultural and traditional practices or its habitants
• Increase the infrastructure for public services and connect with urban areas. This can help to reduce rural vulnerability and enables producers to access urban markets for their products

Sustainable agriculture

• Promote water conservation and soil maintenance practices
• Protect the ecosystem by delimiting conservation areas outside of agricultural practices
• Implement early warning systems and risk reduction programmes focused on local hazards

People with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed or not in education or training, which makes them more vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic, including increased risk of poverty. Recovery strategies to address the economic impacts of the pandemic should be disability-inclusive. Consider:

• Review/amend social protection systems to better protect people with disabilities during COVID-19:
  • Raise poverty thresholds to take disability-related additional costs into account
  • Revise the definition of disability in assessment procedures, to ensure they are functioning-based rather than impairment-based
  • Train volunteer community members to support the rapid identification of people with disabilities for social protection or other assistance: these community volunteers are sometimes called 'key informants' (KIs), are knowledgeable about the topic, the local area and the people who live there
• Ensure application procedures for social protection programmes and support services are accessible in the light of COVID-19 social distancing regimes:
  • Include disabled people's organisations when reviewing the accessibility of application processes and when disseminating information about support programmes
  • Adapt application and enrolment procedures to support the inclusion of people with disabilities
  • Provide disability training to programme staff and volunteers, e.g. disability awareness
  • Ensure programme information and application materials are available in a variety of accessible formats, e.g. Braille/videos/simplified text
  • Establish COVID-safe community-based registration services to bring services closer to people, and offer person/home-based assessment procedures for those with mobility limitations
• Ensure methods to deliver social protection services and welfare payments are accessible:
  • Allow welfare payments to be paid electronically or enable people with mobility difficulties to nominate a trusted individual to collect their
  • Ensure service points are physically accessible and within the person's local community
• Ensure employment schemes are adequate and accessible for people with disabilities during COVID-19:
  • Set up employment schemes to actively employ persons with disabilities, integrating such schemes into broader employment recovery schemes, e.g. green recovery
  • Make infrastructure accessible, e.g. buildings and workplaces
  • Introduce unemployment insurance to cover the informal sector, as people with disabilities, in particular women with disabilities, are more likely to be employed in the informal sector where there is an absence of job security, unemployment insurance and paid sick leave

Although home-based working has become the norm for a large percentage of the population, many workers have had to be physically present in their usual workplace. Many who have had to travel to workplaces during the pandemic have changed their mode of transport due to potential infection risks, delays and inconvenience due to cancelled or reduced public transport - i.e. they have changed their commute from public transport to private cars or bicycles. This has reduced their travel time, especially as traffic volumes are below pre-pandemic levels. Consider:

• That traffic congestion and the demand for parking space could increase dramatically as restrictions ease and more people opt for private transport, which may lead to increases in:
  • Infrastructure maintenance costs on roads and motorways
  • Negative environmental impacts, e.g. pollution
  • Road traffic accidents and increased risk to cyclists and pedestrians, plus loss of public space, which may reduce the number of people who choose to cycle or walk
  • Costs and challenges for freight and delivery services
• A travel awareness communication campaign, prior to an ease of restrictions:
  • Raise awareness of the benefits of sustainable travel for improving air quality and reducing pollution
  • Promote the health and well-being benefits of 'active transport' such as cycling
  • Communicate the stringent safety measures in place on public transport to increase confidence and encourage people to travel by bus/train
• Draw on learning from previous crises to predict likely behaviours and inform policies that are fit for purpose, e.g. following the 2008 economic crisis, increased traffic increased congestion (Madrid, Spain)
• Expand and improve cycling and walking space and infrastructure around workplaces
• In cities, reduce speed limits to allow pedestrians and cyclists to be more confident and allow for social distancing
• Promote and expand schemes such as 'Cycle2Work' by removing spending caps and allowing people to by bikes through the scheme that are appropriate and relevant for them (see TMB Issue 7):
  • Introduce a reimbursement scheme to reward cycling commuters, e.g. Netherlands offer 0.19 cent (euro) per kilometre cycled to work, or interest-free loans to purchase bikes
  • Trial an e-bike hire scheme in cities, e.g. Leicester (UK)
• Review congestions charge policies and assess if they are appropriate for post-COVID activity
• Introduce new policies, e.g. workplace parking levy, a charge on employers who provide workplace parking (Nottingham City Council, UK)

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues on, people around the world have been utilising black markets to purchase negative COVID-19 test results to enable them to travel. False negative COVID test certificates have been sold for around $300 USD. Systems which email test results can be easily bypassed by downloading and doctoring documents e.g. changing the date of the test, name and test result. Consider how to manage and mitigate proliferation of false negative test results:

• In Hawaii, only results from approved testing partners will be accepted, and they must be transmitted digitally, rather than using emails
• Utilising apps that centralize health and lab data and test/vaccination results e.g. CommonPass, trialled by United Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways

The SDGs, represent the world's agreed economic, social, and environmental targets for 2030, and can act as a common scorecard to ensure there are objective standards for assessing progress. Localising the ambition of the SDGs to develop local economic development strategies can help integrate social and environmental standards within local economic agendas, reduce disparities between regions, generate local business opportunities and jobs, and aim to include all marginalized communities. Consider how the SDG framework can support inclusive and diversified economic growth:

• Integrate SDG targets into on-going budget reviews process, thereby improving resource allocation and performance evaluation
• Examine the link between ongoing public policies, the SDG targets and budget expenditures
• Analyse the official indicators related to budget-planning instruments
• Partner with the private sector to launch impact investment initiatives that address the SDGs, recovery and renewal from COVID-19 and sustainable economic renewal

COVID-19 has shed new light on the way in which countries respond to, and recover from emergencies. This includes COVID-19 specific advice and broader lessons about emergency preparedness and management. For example, previous guidance on volunteer management has traditionally assumed a point of convergence at a disaster site, while this still holds true for many emergencies e.g. floods, lessons from COVID-19 demonstrate that volunteer management may also be dispersed, large-scale and without face-to-face contact. Consider how lessons from COVID-19 may help to revise emergency plans:

• Conduct a 'stock take' of current emergency guidance, and consider what may be missing or no longer fit for purpose
• Implement debriefs, peer reviews and impact assessments, drawing on expertise from local government and emergency practitioners, to evaluate how well current guidance worked and where it needs revising
• Consider that emergency planning must remain relevant to specific types of emergencies, but that broader lessons from COVID-19 can help strengthen guidance e.g. issues of inclusion such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality; health and socio-economic disparities and vulnerabilities; volunteering capacity; supply chain stability; green agenda; and partnerships arrangements
• Draw on resources beyond government guidance from global networks e.g. Resilient Cities Network's revised toolkit which builds recovery from COVID-19 into a wider resilience agenda for a safe and equitable world, and resources from International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which is developing new recovery standards in light of COVID-19 lessons (ISO 22393)

Many smaller retailers have less digital capabilities, and it is these skills which can help smaller business survive the pandemic. The loss of smaller retailers will inhibit the economic recovery at the local and national level. Consider how to encourage partnerships between larger and smaller companies to help accelerate digital transformation for small business owners:

• Offer digital solutions to support infrastructure development of small business to establish brands via mobile apps and digital menu applications for consumers. Additionally, develop simple online supply platforms for small and medium-sized business e.g. Menu in Brazil and MiMercado in Mexico
• Encourage financial inclusion through affordable financial products and services. Consideration may be given to the development of local fintech services and partnerships that extend credit to small retailers to help save businesses and make them more competitive
• Encourage collaborative platforms to share knowledge between well-established, experienced companies and vulnerable business e.g. Movimento Nós in Brazil an initiative created by eight of the main food and beverage companies in the country (Coca-Cola, Heineken, Nestlé etc.) to help 300,000 small businesses employing one million people, to get through COVID-19 and guarantee their reopening when possible. This will support the recovery of smaller supply chains and encourage customers and suppliers, which in turn will continue to have a positive impact on global supply chain recovery