Doctoral Dissertation Research: Farmer Organizations and Development Actors in a Pandemic: Responses to COVID-19 and the Food-Water-Energy Nexus

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the agricultural sector, resulting in supply chain problems among many other challenges. Such problems are mitigated differently by independent farmers, farming collectives, and development organizations. How responses to the pandemic are organized across these different scales affects successes and failures. The pandemic environment thus offers a critical window into the reasons for success and failure in farming activities as the pandemic continues to evolve. This doctoral dissertation research investigates the responses of agricultural development actors and small-scale farmer organizations to the Covid-19 pandemic in multiple locations. In addition to contributing to training a U.S.-based doctoral student in scientific cultural anthropology, the research findings will be disseminated widely to academic and non-academic audiences. This project uses resilience theory to investigate the processes by which farmers at different levels of organization adapt to ongoing crises. The investigators focus on three research questions: 1) How has the pandemic affected the flow of capital and who controls the flow? 2) What are the vulnerabilities in food-energy-water systems exposed by the pandemic? 3) What can answers to these questions reveal about mechanisms to build resiliency? Through ethnographic interviews with development actors operating at different scales and locations, and online participant observation in virtual meeting spaces that have become more prevalent during the time of the pandemic, this study traces the flow of capital, project funding, and ideas between different agricultural development actors as the pandemic continues to unfold. This research contributes to contemporary anthropology by integrating approaches from disaster anthropology, development anthropology, and political ecology to better understand pandemic responses and shifts in development practice with far-reaching implications for local livelihoods on a global scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.