Jordan shares the celebration of International Youth Day on Thursday, which takes place on 12 August each year. This year slogan is” Transforming Food Systems: Youth Innovations for Human and planet Health” To highlight the solutions developed by young innovators to meet the challenges facing our food systems and the need for young people to make informed decisions about the food choices available, particularly during and after the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
With the United Nations predicting a 2 billion increase in the world's population in the next 30 years, 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 representing 16% of the world's population, the number of young Jordanians this year is about (2.6 million), expected to reach about (2.9 million people) in 2030 and about 3 million in 2040, all of whom will need adequate food, which is why youth must participate in decisions that will affect their future and that the next generation of agricultural producers be empowered.
The Secretary-General of the Higher Population Council, Dr. Abla Omawi, confirmed in a press release that Jordan is a middle-income country, with a population of about 10,961,607 million, including 2.9 million non-citizens, including refugees. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Food Security Modernization Study of Jordan-Fallout 1999 in July and August 2020, Jordan suffers from food shortages, limited agricultural land, limited energy resources, and scarce water supply, and has almost minimal levels of cereal self-sufficiency. 53% of Jordanians are suffering from Food insecurity, 3% of Jordanians are vulnerable to food insecurity, showing that more than 15.7% of the population lives below the poverty line, and one-third of the population is considered poor. In addition, unemployment was 25% during the first quarter of 2021 - 5.7% higher than the first quarter of 2020 while male unemployment during the first quarter of 2021 reached (24.2%) compared to (28.5%) for females, according to the General Statistics Service (GSS) data, unemployment rates during the Coronavirus pandemic were exacerbated by the poor market capacity to find new jobs, job losses and the closure and bankruptcy of small and medium-sized enterprises, because many sectors ceased to operate, reflecting the ability to provide basic needs, including food and quality food.
Amawi stated that Jordan is weighing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of hosting 650,000 Syrians and 90,000 refugees of other nationalities registered with UNHCR, since 21% of families reported that they did not have enough food to eat during the reported period, 67% of refugees were vulnerable to lack of food, and only 12% were food secure. The rapid multisectoral needs assessment of vulnerable Jordanians and refugees (Syrians and other nationalities) for 2020 conducted by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UNICEF, and the World Food Programme (WFP) found that lack of money (83%), lack of food stocks (36%) and movement restrictions (17%) following the Government's measures to combat the COVID-19 are the main reasons why families suffer from food shortages, noting that this is in line with the results of the ILO Quick Impact Assessment of COVID-19, which found that 95% of Syrian refugee families reported a decline in household income, compared with 90% of Jordanian households moreover, the State of Food Security and Nutrition stated in the 2021 World Report, the number of undernourished people in Jordan reached 300 between 2004-2006 and 1 million between 2018-2020.The number of children (under 5 years of age) affected by dwarfism 100,000 in 2020 Obese 100,000 in 2020, adult population (18 years and over) obese people (1.5 million in 2012 and 2 million in 2016)The number of women of reproductive age (15-49 years) with anemia (600 thousand in 2012 and 1 million in 2019).
She pointed out that young people in Jordan, in particular, faced many challenges that prevented them from contributing to development, principal among those are high rates of youth unemployment, child marriage, inequality in education and gender-based violence, child labor, lack of appropriate sexual and reproductive care services for girls, poor infrastructure for persons with disabilities and poor attention to professional and technical paths, indicating that despite national efforts to promote women and achieve gender equality there is still the Achilles’ heel of growing inequality especially at the economic and political levels, although the female education rate is high 53% in universities compared to the male education rate of 47%, their participation in the labor market is 14%, which is far lower than the male participation of 54.8%.
Omawi indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed additional challenges to females in Jordan, where about 56.8% of individual enterprises working from home are women, and about 25.6% of women workers work in primary occupations with limited income and are difficult to implement remotely, threatening the viability of female workers and losing their source of income along with the fact that about 14% families in Jordan are headed by women with an average annual income of about 9 thousand and 574 dinars, of whom about 30% are illiterate. This group is affected by crises and emergencies, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which doubles their material responsibilities, impeding their access to food and quality due to low incomes or loss of income.
Amawi indicated that underage marriage will reflect in the quality of life that these girls live after marriage, as it leads to depriving them of education and work, which leads to a decrease in their income and reduces their chances of obtaining their needs, including good food, which may cause malnutrition given that female under the age 19 marriage contracts reached 10.7% of total contracts in 2019 and 2020 they rose to 11.6%, according to reports of the Department of the Chief Justice, also marriage rates of girls under 18 years of age among Syrian refugee women are high. According to the results of the study on child marriage in Jordan prepared by the Higher Population Council in 2017, 4 out of 10 Syrian women are minors when they get married as families used child marriage to protect girls because of asylum conditions especially since 78% of Syrian refugees in Jordan live below the poverty line.
The Higher Population Council noted the importance of developing long-term, medium- and short-term policies to address epidemiological priorities, alleviate the COVID-19 pandemic, increase development investments in the agricultural sector as one of the most important sectors in these circumstances, scale up temporary social protection programmes and strengthen safety net programmes by distributing food in a safe manner, especially to vulnerable groups of refugees, older persons and persons with disabilities, accompanied by guidance on nutrition, social dimension and hygiene, , granting interest-free loans to farmers for agricultural projects, especially for young men and women farmers, upgrading the skills of women, especially in rural communities, to produce household food, organic agriculture and water harvesting to provide food security, and promoting and ensuring access to comprehensive services by age, gender and disability that contribute to the protection, health care, development and participation of young people and youth, support local youth-led initiatives and organizations in their responses, especially those targeting marginalized youth, including refugee youth, and increase funding for programmes that directly and indirectly address young people suffering from the effects of the COVID-19.
The Council added that, despite the challenges faced by youth during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of study, work, and social communication, youth in Jordan had moved forward to bring positive changes in their communities, starting from addressing the spread of misguided news to reaching families and marginalized areas and wrapping food packages to ensure that they had access to food during the global ban imposed by the pandemic.
