Southeast Asian societies are bound to experience extreme and more frequent weather events in the future, which can have serious implications on the food security of rural and urban populations in the region. This project examines climate change impacts on food and agriculture and the ways people’s access to and utilization of food have adapted to climatic changes over time. It also explores how climate change potentially instigates new agri-food practices and foodways that may in turn have enduring changes on social and ecological landscapes. My collaborators and I are currently focusing on Capiz, a largely agrarian province in the Western Visayan region of the Philippines. Capiz is known for seafoods and a few other agricultural products, and is frequently hit by typhoons on a yearly basis.
This project is funded by the Humanities and Social Science Seed Grant of the National University of Singapore. I am collaborating with an environmental historian (Dr. Anthony Medrano) at Yale-NUS College and two environmental scientists and an agronomist at the University of the Philippines Los Banos for this project.
Marvin Montefrio 