COVID-19, Food (In)security and Migrant Wellbeing: A Comparative Study of Ecuador, South Africa, and Canada

This paper examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security among migrants and refugees in three cities across the Global North and South: Kitchener-Waterloo, Quito, and Cape Town. Drawing on household survey data, complemented by qualitative insights and policy analysis, it adopts a comparative mixed-methods approach to analyse how pandemic-related disruptions intersected with pre-existing inequalities in labour insertion, migration governance, and social protection systems to generate unequal food insecurity outcomes. We find that food insecurity was widespread across all three contexts, though its severity varied. While migrants in Quito and Cape Town experienced more acute deprivation due to high levels of informality and exclusion from social assistance, the Canadian case shows that stronger social protection systems do not fully shield migrants from precarity. Multivariate analyses for Ecuador and South Africa reveal patterns that complicate common assumptions about vulnerability, including the association between higher education and increased food insecurity, and uneven effects of pandemic-related employment and income shocks. We argue that migrant food insecurity during a crisis reflects structural constraints embedded within unequal socioeconomic structures, migration regimes, and social protection systems, highlighting the need for more nuanced data to understand these dynamics.