Strategies to mitigate the public health impacts of COVID-19 have led to a secondary pandemic of global food insecurity. Our project will ‘scale up’ our First Round CIHR Grant on the negative impacts of COVID-19 on household food security in Wuhan and Nanjing, China to three additional cities: Quito (Ecuador), Cape Town (South Africa) and Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W) (Canada). This CIHR-funded project will have a particular focus on the food insecurity experience of marginalized immigrant and refugee populations during the pandemic and how to build greater resilience post-pandemic. We will undertake a comparative study of the food security and related health impacts of COVID-19 on immigrants and refugees who have settled in these three cities and who come from countries experiencing political and economic crises or natural disasters: in Quito, migrants from Venezuela and Haiti; in Cape Town, migrants from the DRC, Somalia and Zimbabwe; and in K-W, refugees from Afghanistan, Somali and Syria.
The project will be implemented collaboratively by a team of Canadian, South African and Ecuadorian researchers and has the following objectives: (1) to examine the impact of public health containment and mitigation responses to COVID-19 on the food security of marginalized refugee and immigrant groups in urban areas; (2) to assess the similarities and differences between the three sites in terms of access to government, business, and community food security and social protection mechanisms; (3) to provide critical decision-making and pandemic response data to local stakeholders to inform food policy responses; and (4) to strengthen the capacity of Canadian and LMIC researchers and research institutions to respond rapidly to ongoing and future food security shocks.