Extreme weather events can have devastating impacts on agricultural systems, and the livelihoods that depend on them. Tools for rapid, comprehensive and cost-effective assessment of impacts, especially if carried out remotely, can be of great value in planning systematic recovery of production, as well as assessing risks from future events. Here, we use openly available remote sensing data to quantify the impacts of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 on banana production area in the Dominican Republic — the world’s largest producer of organic bananas. Further, we assess the risk to current production area if a similar extreme event were to re-occur. Hurricane associated damage was mapped using a simple change detection algorithm applied to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data over the three main banana growing provinces of northern Dominican Republic, i.e. Monte Cristi, Valverde and Santiago. The map of hurricane affected area was overlaid with banana plantation distributions for 2017 and 2019 that were mapped (accuracy = 99.8%) using a random forest classifier, and a combination of SAR and multi-spectral satellite data. Our results show that 11.35% of banana plantation area was affected by hurricane damage in 2017. Between 2017 and 2019, there was a high turnover of plantation area, but with a net gain of 10.8%. However, over a quarter (26.9%) of new plantation area spatially overlapped with regions which had seen flooding or damage from hurricanes in 2017. Our results indicate that banana production systems in northern Dominican Republic saw extensive damage in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria. While production area has recovered since then, a substantial proportion of new plantations, and a greater fraction of production area in general, occur at locations at risk from future extreme events.
Extreme weather events have severe impacts on food systems, especially for smallholders in global food value chains (GFVCs). There is an urgent need to understand a) how climate shocks manifest in food systems, and b) what strategies can enhance food system resilience. Integrating satellite, household and trade data, we investigate the cascading impacts after two consecutive hurricanes on banana farmers in Dominican Republic, and determinants of their recovery. We found that farmers experienced an “all-or-nothing” pattern of damage, where 75% of flooded farmers lost >90% of production. Recovery of regional production indicators took ca. 450 days. However, farm-level recovery-times were highly variable, with both topographic and human capital factors determining recovery. Utilizing this globally representative example, we show that engaging in a GFVC impeded recovery via “double exposure” of production loss and losing market access. Our results suggest that solutions to enhance resilience in GFVCs should promote trader loyalty, facilitate basin-scale collaboration and expand risk-targeted training.
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