Looking at Puerto Rican Farmers’ Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation Through the Eye of Hurricane Maria

Abstract:

Puerto Rico’s frail food security was exposed by 2017’s category 4 Hurricane Maria. The hurricane decimated farms across the US territory, resulting in $2 billion in total losses. Given expected stronger storms, higher temperatures, and other climate change-related effects that threaten food access and availability, coupled with Puerto Rico’s sociopolitical context, climate change adaptation across scales is crucial. Puerto Rican farmers are key agents in safeguarding local food security, as well as those that work the land, the sea, and in the food supply chains in island food systems. Given that farmers are at the forefront of climate change’s impacts, and have an essential role in producing food, what are the challenges and areas of opportunity to strengthen their adaptive capacity? Here we share results from a collaborative work with the University of Puerto Rico' Extension Service after Hurricane Maria, which involved 405 farmers (87% response rate). Forty-two percent of farmers reported total loss of their farms across Puerto Rico, and 70% reported at least one month of food insecurity following the hurricane. Three months after the landfall of Maria in September 2017, 31% were still struggling to access food. We find some evidence that farmer’s adopted new adaptation practices after Maria, including integrated disease management (24%), crop rotation (21%), and crop diversification (20%), while crop diversification (78.2%), integrated disease management (75%), and acquiring new or improving current insurance plans (67%) were the most intended practices moving forward. We find that overall, the vast majority of farmers believe the global climate is changing by humans and that Puerto Rico and farms will be affected. Nevertheless, this belief and damage impacts from Maria were not related to their motivation to adapt to climate change, suggesting that larger scale structural adaptation supports beyond individual farmer behavior changes are necessary to assist farmers with climate adaptation. Our study creates a baseline to further explore how farmers’ disaster recovery processes reflect broader structures that hinder adaptation and food security outcomes at different scales in the food system.