Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the reverberations of the coronavirus continue to take toll on people’s livelihoods, income and food security in the English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean as food costs rise, hunger deepens and tourism, a major economic driver, continues to suffer.
“People are buying cheaper foods, purchasing in smaller quantities, drawing on savings and reducing other critical expenditures on health and education to make ends meet,” a newly released report by the United Nations World Food Program and the 15-member Caribbean Community known as Caricom concludes. “On top of these unsustainable measures, they report skipping meals, going to bed hungry and being worried about feeding their families.”
The Caribbean COVID-19 Food Security and Livelihoods Impact Survey is being released Tuesday. It was launched soon after the start of the pandemic to gather data on people’s livelihoods, access to markets and food security and provide snapshots of these impacts over time. This latest installment is the fourth and respondents were surveyed from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8 of this year. The survey was circulated via social media, media outlets, SMS and emails.
The World Food Program’s multi-country office covers 22 nations and territories in the Caribbean. The survey was administered in each of the countries, but those with fewer than 100 responses were not included in detail in the report. Those whose surveys were are: the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago. Haiti, which has its own WFP office, was not part of the survey, but economists, entrepreneurs and analysts taking part in a three-day International Finance Summit that began Monday in Port-au-Prince have been sounding the alarm on the country’s 25.3% inflation, economic collapse and record government deficit that last year exceeded $449.1 million.
Since the pandemic, governments in the English-speaking Caribbean have turned to a range of measures to support people affected by COVID-19’s downturn in the economy and to help promote recovery. In many cases, it has resulted in increasing national debt.
The report’s authors conclude that the ability to sustain this support is under threat, and requires innovative financing solutions to navigate the compounded impacts of the pandemic, the climate crisis, economic hardship, and most recently, reverberating global impacts of the war in Ukraine.
“The Caribbean is at a tipping point for food security. The continued economic impacts of COVID-19 risk widening existing inequalities, and supply chain disruptions will be compounded by the global reverberations of the Ukraine crisis,” the report said.
Food systems and food security, the survey found, must be a strategic recovery priority.
Among its recommendations, Caribbean governments need to renew their push on food security by, among other things, increasing investments in food systems, regional food production and trade, and developing and expanding initiatives to increase demand for local foods.
Looking ahead, the survey concludes that even as Caribbean countries struggle to bounce back from COVID-19 by revising virus-related protocols to make it easier for visitors, the ongoing war in Ukraine, which is already affecting global prices of energy and commodities such as grains, will continue to be felt.
Promoting recovery and food security will be paramount, the report said, noting that increasing international prices for food staples, resulting from the Ukraine-Russia conflict, will especially hurt import-dependent countries.
“While the full range of implications remains uncertain, repercussions are expected to be felt widely, including in the Caribbean,” the report notes. “Heavy import dependency among most Caribbean economies on fuel, food products and agricultural inputs means that global changes in oil, shipping and commodity prices will further drive inflationary trends. This will particularly affect people living in poverty and in vulnerable households, who are still reeling from the effects.
The survey found that the region suffered its highest COVID-19 infections in February of this year, and after the emergence of the omicron variant late last year, the region experienced a surge in new cases, with the average infection rate increasing more than five-fold between December 2021 and January 2022. Though vaccination rates continue to go up — they are still lower than in Europe and other regions — many in the countries surveyed were still pessimistic about the future.
The report found that only 9% of those who responded expected little or no impact from the virus in the future. Most continue to expect the pandemic will negatively affect their livelihoods. Those with the lowest levels of income were the most worried, the survey found.
“Caribbean states are highly exposed to global and regional shocks, and COVID-19 has joined a long list of shocks that have had profound implications on people’s lives — including the 2008 global financial crisis and numerous hurricanes and other disasters,” the report said.
Among the other findings:
— Negative impacts on income remain widespread, with 57% of respondents reporting that their household has experienced job loss or reduced income since the start of the pandemic, which is a higher share compared to April 2020 (48%).
— Getting sick was the biggest concern of those who responded (49%), followed by concerns about unemployment (37%) and meeting their essential needs (35%), with lowest-income respondents most worried about food needs.
— Food prices are increasing, with 93% of respondents reporting higher-than-usual food prices, an observation that is more widespread compared to February 2021.
— While a large majority of respondents identified an increase in food prices across all surveyed countries in the Caribbean, this was most widely observed (98%) in Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.
— Food consumption and diets continue to be impacted by the pandemic, with 30% of respondents skipping meals or eating less than usual, 25% eating less preferred foods and 5% going an entire day without eating in the week leading up to the survey.
— Seven percent of survey respondents identified as Spanish speakers. Of these 92% reside in Trinidad and Tobago. Nearly 21,000 refugees and asylum-seekers, most of them Venezuelans (86%), were registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the country as of December 2021. The Spanish-speaking respondents from Trinidad and Tobago are mainly Venezuelans and they have the most negative metrics across a variety of measures related to well-being and impact such as inability to fulfill food needs and inability to access services.
