This NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences* funded study uses a livelihoods perspective to examine both food and water security within an entitlement and capabilities framework. The interdisciplinary research team includes faculty from Santa Clara University, Nicaraguan community members, and undergraduate students in a participatory process. The team uses focus groups, interviews, and community-based water resource monitoring to develop household-level survey tools for an integrated assessment of food and water access, vulnerability and response to hazards. Team members also downscale climate change models, map historic precipitation patterns, and analyze the future predicted hydro-climatic changes. These methods are integrated and shared through an iterative participatory action research process as well as through the use of statistical, qualitative and geo-spatial data analysis strategies.
- Goal 1: Develop an integrated assessment of vulnerability to food and water insecurity among rural smallholders navigating multiple hazards, and identify responses likely to enhance resilience.
- Goal 2: Analyze how different institutions (e.g., cooperatives, common property norms, community water committees, and government ministries), hydro-climatic variability and change, and livelihood strategies relate to household food and water insecurity as farmers navigate the coffee leaf rust outbreak, drought, and price fluctuations in northern Nicaragua’s highlands.
- Goal 3: Train undergraduate students, a postdoctoral researcher, and staff from partner organizations in the use of interdisciplinary and participatory research methods that contribute to goals one and two.
Overview
Farmers must navigate crop pathogens, hurricanes, commodity price fluctuations, El Niño events, and drought which threaten household food and water security, leaving more than 1 billion people managing small-scale farms vulnerable to global change. Despite conserving agro-biodiversity and producing food for a substantial segment of the population, rural smallholder families in the Global South comprise more than 50% of the global food-insecure population . In Central America, smallholders suffer seasonal hunger and the convergence of a coffee leaf rust outbreak, high prices for several staple foods, and a drought has aggravated the situation. Risk from climate change is anticipated to increase as extreme hydro-climatic events become more likely, precipitation patterns shift, and while global many agricultural markets remain volatile. The resulting conditions in rural Central America have created a timely if potentially tragic laboratory for examining household food and water security in the context multiple hazards.
The livelihoods of billions of impoverished rural residents are interconnected with hydro-climatic variability, crop failures, and fluctuating international commodity prices. Sensitivity to abrupt hazards (such as hurricanes or commodity price spikes) and slower onset stressors (such as El Nino events and drought) can overwhelm the adaptive capacity of smallholder households and communities, exacerbating their food and water insecurity. The convergence of a rapidly spreading coffee pathogen, a drought in 2014, and recent sharp increases in food prices for several staples could provoke the largest humanitarian response since Hurricane Mitch.
In this research project, we will develop methods to measure identify, analyze, and evaluate household and institutional responses, in the specific context of Nicaraguan smallholder coffee farming. This research builds upon a recently completed household survey, qualitative studies, and ongoing biophysical analysis in the study region, asking: (1) What are the relationships linking farmer food insecurity and water insecurity to vulnerability and livelihood resilience in the context of multiple hazards? (2) What are the relationships connecting hydro-climatic variability and the roya outbreak with household food and water security? And, (3) Who is more vulnerable and why? Which adaptations, food systems, and local institutions are more likely to advance smallholders’ livelihood resilience?