NARDI FUNDULEA, ROMANIA ROMANIAN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, NO. 38, 2021 www.incda-fundulea.ro Print ISSN 1222‒4227; Online ISSN 2067‒5720 ________________________________________ Received 26 October 2020; accepted 8 November 2020. First Online: November, 2020. DII 2067-5720 RAR 2021-52 COVID CRISIS AND THE NEED TO ENSURE FOOD SECURITY AND SAFETY IN THE E.U. Liviu Mărcuţă, Niculina Ioniţă, Valentina Tudor, Alina Mărcuţă, Victor Tiţa * Faculty of Management and Rural Development, University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest, 59 Mărăşti Blvd, District 1, Bucharest, Romania * Corresponding author. E-mail: victortita@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Food security is one of the main problems that humanity has faced throughout its existence, it is generally analyzed globally, although it is rather a major problem in national security, along with economic, financial or demographic security. It is defined as the ability of the state and society to ensure the availability of food for its entire population in sufficient quantity and quality to ensure an active and healthy life. On the other hand, food security, as defined by the FAO it refers to the access of people from all times to nutritious and safe foods, which should meet both their needs and food preferences in order to ensure an active and healthy life. In this paper we aim to analyze how the COVID-19 crisis has influenced food security and safety, but also to justify the need to ensure their local and regional level. The data underlying the study are part of statistics from FAO, Eurostat and the National Institute of Statistics. The indicators used were the self-sufficiency rate, for the main food categories, both for Romania and for the E.U. and share of non-regular and employed farm labor. Based on the study, conclusions were drawn regarding the risk due to of COVID-19 on food safety and security. Keywords: food safety, food security, agriculture, COVID-19. INTRODUCTION s early as 1789 Thomas Malthus states in his work entitled ”Essay on the Principles of Population” that ”the need of the population is much greater than the power of the earth to produce the means of subsistence for man” (Hofman, 2012), economic thinking, the issue of the emergence of a food crisis generated by the development of the modern world. Subsequently, these ideas were developed, discussed and became the basis of the concepts of Food Security and Food Safety (Alexandri and Luca, 2016). At present, food security is closely linked to the terms of globalization and sustainable development, being part of human security and referring primarily to national security, and then to regional security or world security (Mărcuţă et al., 2018). It refers both to direct risks related to the emergence of interstate conflicts, and to unconventional risks such as those related to population migration as a result of conflicts or economic problems, which result in economic migration that can destabilize a country's economy or a geographical area. At the level of the European Union, numerous measures have been taken over time that aim to reduce the ”food risk, danger that is generated at local, national, regional level, both politically and economically by various political, economic, financial actions, etc.”, but which is closely related to the “environmental risk” that is caused by human actions through intensive agriculture, industry development, deforestation, the use of polluting materials, but also natural causes (floods, drought, etc.) (E.U., 2017). In this context, it is increasingly foreshadowed that the field of agricultural production is an area of strategic importance, which together with the field of national security (Grodea, 2017), will be the one that will ensure the food power of a state or a region, it being defined as “the ability of a state to meet the food security needs of its people, but also to ensure strategic food surpluses in order to guarantee its dominance in food and grain markets, in relation to countries that do not have this surplus or they A