Crop resistance and household resilience – The case of cassava and sweetpotato during super-typhoon Ompong in the Philippines

In this paper, the authors explore how crop resistance contribute to household resilience in extreme weather events. Extreme weather events can have devastating effects on agricultural production. As rural households in developing countries largely depend on agriculture, climatic shocks have the potential to undermine food security. As case study, the authors used cassava and sweetpotato, two root and tuber crops (RTCs), in the context of super-typhoon Ompong that wreaked havoc in the northern parts of the Philippines in 2018. 

The findings suggest that RTCs can contribute to households' resilience capacity due to their resistance to climatic shocks being underground crops. In addition, RTCs appear to be important in influencing the households’ responses to typhoon. The findings suggest that RTC cultivation reduces the need to resort to negative coping strategies, such as using household savings and requesting assistance from neighbors and friends, and that higher consumption of sweetpotato is linked to longer spells of reduced mobility. Furthermore, in the case of super-typhoon Ompong, affected households exploited the short production cycle of sweetpotato and cassava and planted them in the typhoon aftermath, a strategy that helped to gain faster access to food.