The double burden of COVID-19 and a major volcanic eruption on local food production and food security in a Small Island Developing State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Small Island Developing States have disproportionately high food insecurity rates, related to complex challenges and vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that within these settings, crises often overlap. We aimed to assess the impact of the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic and volcanic eruption on food production and security in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). Methods An interpretive mixed-methods study was conducted among a convenience sample of consenting adults ≥18 years from 100 households in SVG through a cross-sectional survey and participant interviews (10 households) between September 2021 and March 2022. Food insecurity prevalence over the past year was assessed using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES; Rasch modeling) and impacts to livelihoods from the pandemic and volcanic eruption was assessed using an adapted Caribbean COVID-19 Food Security and Livelihoods Impact Survey (Caribbean COVID-19 FS&L Survey). Data were analyzed using logistic regression. Results During the pandemic, 59% of the participants reported decreased income, 63% had no access to markets, 81% had no access to food aid; 34% of the participants had a change in food sources, and 81% reported that food production was negatively impacted by the volcanic eruptions, of which 68% reported decreased food production. The interviews highlighted that access to markets were restricted by fear of leaving home and contracting the COVID-19 virus, and participants who received food aid stated that the number of items were not sufficient for larger families. Almost half of the participants were severely food insecure [48% (95% C.I. 31.2,57.8)]; almost two thirds were moderately to severely food insecure [64% (95% C.I. 50.0, 74.2)]; mean FIES score 5.31 (95% C.I. 5.0,5.6). After adjusting for gender, age, education, and household size, moderate to severe food insecurity was associated with no access to food aid during the pandemic and post-eruptions (odds ratio 3.7; 95% confidence interval 1.5, 9.1; p = 0.004). Conclusion Food insecurity rates were high during the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by volcanic eruptions and insufficient access to food aid. Our results suggest the need for the development of strategies and interventions aimed at increasing the resilience of food systems to mitigate the effects of future disasters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".