sustainability Article The Compounded Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic and Desert Locust Outbreak on Food Security and Food Supply Chain Zhitao Xu 1 , Adel Elomri 1, *, Abdelfatteh El Omri 2 , Laoucine Kerbache 1,3 and Hui Liu 4   Citation: Xu, Z.; Elomri, A.; El Omri, A.; Kerbache, L.; Liu, H. The Compounded Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic and Desert Locust Outbreak on Food Security and Food Supply Chain. Sustainability 2021, 13, 1063. https://doi.org/10.3390/su 13031063 Academic Editor: Marc A. Rosen Received: 19 November 2020 Accepted: 18 January 2021 Published: 20 January 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha 5825, Qatar; ZXu@hbku.edu.qa (Z.X.); lakerbache@hbku.edu.qa (L.K.) 2 Hamad Medical Corporation, Doha 3050, Qatar; omriabdel@gmail.com 3 HEC Paris, 78350 Jouy-en-Josas, France 4 College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China; huiliu0603@163.com * Correspondence: aelomri@hbku.edu.qa Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic and locust swarm outbreaks pose a significant threat to global food systems, causing severe disruptions in both local and international food supplies from farm to fork. The main objective of this study is to understand and identify the disruptions during the crises and create a map of how resilience can be established to recover and sustain the food supply chain (FSC) functions as well as food security. The detrimental impacts of the compound crises on the FSC are explored and the effects of the affected areas are estimated under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. As a response to the disruption caused by the crisis in FSCs, reactive and proactive solutions are proposed to develop resilience at the food sector level. In the short term, the reactive solutions, consisting of smoothing the food demand, supply and delivery, and food production and processing, can be borrowed. In the long term, the proactive solutions can be conducted by developing multi-level short intertwined FSCs. Our comprehensive investigation of the resilience elements in diverse operations and potential strategies should contribute to the improvement of FSC resilience in the face of ongoing and growing threats. Keywords: food security; food supply chains; COVID-19 pandemic; locust swarm; resilience of agri-food supply chains 1. Introduction The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has caused the worst recession since the Second World War [1]. Among these, the food industry is one of the most vulnerable sectors, and the populations living in food crisis contexts are particularly exposed to the effects of the pandemic. Food systems incorporate all the stages of food production, from agriculture to household consumption [2,3]. Since the food supply chain (FSC) is becoming increasingly complex and multi-tiered, the accessibility of market factors, such as labor force and logistic resources, is vital for FSC functioning in the global environment. However, the COVID-19 outbreak, accompanied by mitigations, has exerted a synchronous negative impact on the FSCs. COVID-19 is not the only threat to FSCs. Since October 2019, the biggest locust invasion in almost three decades has broken out across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and South America and threatened more than three billion people’s food insecurity [4]. COVID-19 and locust outbreaks, coupled with mitigation strategies adopted by coun- tries, have posed multiple and synchronous effects on food production and logistics as well as food demands due to panic buying. As the crisis continues, the full impact on food security is difficult to predict and assess. To avoid exacerbating the food crisis, it is therefore essential to analyze the specific set of risks posed by COVID-19 and the locust crisis and provide insights and response strategies with a supply chain perspective. However, the overlapping effects of crises of FSCs have remained scantily explored in the literature. In Sustainability 2021, 13, 1063. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031063 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability