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The relationship among multiple successive shocks, declining fish stocks, impacts on food insecurity, and coastal precarity for a specific individual or group, resulting in the combination of outcome, context, and feedback double exposures.
Source publication
The succession of shocks—sudden social and environmental crises, whether they be episodic or erratic, such as extreme weather events, pandemics, and economic recessions—has dire consequences on the ability of people, especially the vulnerable and precarious, to secure safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods. While the scholarship on mult...
Citations
The COVID‐19 crisis in the Philippines significantly impacted the rural and urban poor, who were most dependent on daily livelihood activities for food. This paper examines the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the food security of urban‐based agrarians residing in Roxas City in the province of Capiz, the Philippines. It illustrates how the pandemic disrupted the mobilities and flows of people and materials within cities and across city borders, leaving most urban‐based agrarians to rely more heavily on subsistence food sources to assuage shortfalls in food security. Findings, however, do not reify subsistence production as a safeguard or solution to pandemic food insecurity. This paper argues that while the urban‐based agrarians' acute hunger was partly alleviated due to their continued access to subsistence food sources, they still needed to depend on credit, consequently accumulating more debt. As they struggle to recover from the pandemic, they are also at risk of encountering even more intense precarity associated with the lasting impacts of high inflation, declining fish stock, extreme weather events and threats of eviction. These findings provide more nuanced insights into the relationship among food insecurity, subsistence food sources, precarity and crises such as the pandemic, especially in the context of urban‐based agrarians living in provincial cities.
The global food system has been subject to a multitude of shocks in recent years, drawing renewed attention to food insecurity vulnerabilities. Extreme weather events, economic crises, a global pandemic and wars have caused significant disruptions, compromising food security for significant portions of the population. Shocks impacting upon food systems bear additional adverse outcomes where populations are already vulnerable to poverty and other social inequalities, and increasingly, shocks are affecting populations not previously considered food insecure. This paper, and the Symposium it introduces, articulates an emerging field of study that explores the dynamic interplay of food system shocks and food security through multiple disciplinary perspectives. The articles in this Symposium address the impacts of and responses to shocks such as weather events and the COVID-19 pandemic and consider these through the theoretical lenses of actor perspectives, governance, and transitions. This Symposium looks beyond the short-term acute event and contributes to a systemic understanding of ‘food shocks’ by reflecting on how enduring and persistent disruptions reverberate through multiple layers of food systems, how they are experienced and addressed across global and local scales, and how they may deeply transform food systems and impact people over time.
