Trinidad and Tobago rural household food security more vulnerable to climate change

By Adelle Roopchand

Food security is the most significant factor moderating the relationship between climate change and rural household vulnerability in Trinidad and Tobago.

“Rural household food security is not only, negatively impacted by climate change and extreme weather events induced, but additionally, that it also plays an important, if not the most important moderating role in determining household vulnerability,” says Dr Kalim Shah, professor at the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware.

Shah explained that the more food secure rural households are, the more resilient they are to climate change impacts.

The recent study of more than 140 homes in the Nariva and Caroni Wetlands communities looked at household level food security as a determinant of resilience and adaptability in defense of climatic change. The study considered social demographics, livelihood strategies, social networks, extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, access to local emergency infrastructure hummer and social networking capacity.

“These rural area households are highly dependent on home and local garden production, hunting, fishing and community bartering. Notably, this is much different from households in Trinidad and Tobago’s suburban and city areas where food security derives largely from imported produce,” Shah says.

He added that the assessment results were correlated with official data from the Meteorological Office on locale-specific weather and climate data including flooding and drought events.

The study takes the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conceptualisation of climate vulnerability being the product of adaptive capacity and climate sensitivity and applies it to rural households in the Nariva and Caroni wetlands situated communities.

Google Earth Image: Caroni, Trinidad.

The assessment report indicates that on looking further into the rural communities, ‘almost half of the households were headed by females as men were fully absent or away for extended time periods.’  Shah says, “This dynamic allowed for a unique analysis based on the socio-demographic and cultural reality presented and the study found that three factors come into play regarding household vulnerability from the gender perspective.”

He outlined these perspectives, “firstly, female-headed households are less food secure; secondly, they are more likely to have stronger social networks in the community which mitigates some vulnerability; and finally, the role of caregiver, either to elderly or children in the household dictates adaptability.”

The study revealed that while the higher vulnerability of female-headed households stood out higher as being less food secure, it was not statistically significant from headed male households. “The result reveals that finer-grained social and cultural factors are at play that changes the dynamics of vulnerability and should be investigated further,” says Shah.

He offered some clarity, “If female-headed households are more food insecure for reasons including not being able to travel outside of the community to town for groceries; have less capacity to maintain larger arable plots; and time management between caregiving and farming or roadside selling of produce, thus the vulnerability increases.”  The report indicates that ‘community-ties’ mitigated some of the vulnerability as neighbours more often inquired to the welfare of households where male partners were more or less absent.

In discussing this new research, Shah pointed out how the study advances how climate change and food security in island communities are seen and thought about.  He says, “while we have done a lot of research on the impacts of climate change on crops and food production, this is one of the first studies to link rural household-level food security with the realities of household-level climate-induced impacts.”

Dr Hari Dulal, at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and co-author of the report says, “it is also one of the first studies that drill the empirical analysis down to gendered differentials of how household food security influences how rural households prepare for climate change impacts.”

According to Dr Tessa Barry, Extension and Gender Lecturer, the University of the West Indies, it is crucial when looking at household level food security to look at the dynamics as it relates to who are the heads of the households, “one would be able to observe the gender dimensions as it relates to climate change, therefore gaining an understanding of how each gender is affected by the effects of climate change.”

Barry emphasised that there is need for more regional investigation into whether women are more affected than men; and whether they are affected differently. She added, “the research Dr Shah and team provided adds value to gender studies and for the building of climate resilience in the Caribbean.”

On a very practical level, the study identifies household-level food security as one of, if not the most important aspect of building household-level resilience and adaptability in defense of climatic change.

Some key recommendations coming out of the study for action are: (i)strengthening food security at a household level and build resilience to climate change; (ii) they point out that how social linkages with local government and extension offices provide lines of communications, information, early warning and rural community resource flows; (iii) rural food banks, (iv) climate-smart practices and less labour intensive community farm practices; (v) access to supplemental food supplies and having multiple options for food and nutrient acquisition.

The innovative household vulnerability assessment first piloted by Shah and colleagues in Trinidad and Tobago has now been used and cited in other coastal and wetland island jurisdictions, the Mekong Delta countries, the Philippines and elsewhere.