How does COVID-19 interact with ongoing migrant farmworker vulnerabilities?

Keywords: Migration; Social-ecological change; Water; Water transfer project; Peru
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

Migrant farmworkers experience multiple vulnerabilities when compared to resident farmers, including increased water insecurity, social isolation, political marginalization, and economic precarity. In Majes, an irrigated, agricultural district in Arequipa, Peru, this vulnerability is exacerbated by Majes’ location in the basin of a large-scale water transfer project (LWTP). Particularly, the water that supplies the LWTP comes from a single source, the highlands of Peru, an area that is facing glacial melt due to climate and other social-ecological changes. Emerging scholarship discusses the ways existing vulnerabilities shape how people experience COVID-19; however, to date, very little scholarship documents how migrant farmworkers, especially those that live in places with high social-ecological risk, experience COVID-19 in relationship to other risks. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with men and women in Majes, this study documents and analyzes how migrant and seasonal farmworkers perceive various social-ecological risks and discusses how COVID-19 interacts with their ongoing experiences of water insecurity. We found that while COVID-19 did not necessarily impact migrant capacity to access water, it did create additional obstacles to adaptation. Moreover, interviewees described how water scarcity remained a bigger stressor than COVID-19, but sickness, economic stress, and uncertainty around COVID increased overall vulnerability. Results suggest that it is important to strengthen policies and programs that support the alleviation of ongoing vulnerabilities, like water security, to more adequately support vulnerable populations in the face of new and emerging crises like COVID-19, instead of dropping everything and only focusing on investing in COVID-19 policies and programs.