This ethnographic case study examines how a meso-level food charity, specifically a centralized food aid terminal, attempts to legitimize restructured food aid, and how these changes shape food distribution practices at the micro level. The legitimation of new norms—allocation of aid, being free of charge, religious neutrality, equality of food parcels, accessibility, and openness—was aimed at improving moral quality of the provision of food aid. Data collected at the grass-root food provision sites and in interviews with the people in charge of restructuring shows a disparity between the aims set by the meso-level actors and everyday practices on the micro-level. At the micro-level, outcomes were often compromised due to the scarcity of available resources, especially food. Formal rules and informal but legitimized norms have harmonized and equalized food distribution practices, but changes have also made a share of donors and even food aid recipients drift away from the food waste terminal and its network of local food delivery sites. This study offers internationally relevant insight into how charitable food aid systems adapt their structures and forms of agency within austerity-shaped environments, using structuration theory to interpret the empirical findings.
Abstract Despite advances in understanding seed circulation in rural communities, little is known about the gendered and intersectional power relations that shape farmers’ access to seed. Based on a case study in a Bassari community of southeastern Senegal, we examine the roles of women and men in seed circulation and explore who maintains and who controls access to seed for six staple crops. Combining ethnographic data with social network analysis, we show that gender roles in seed circulation are dynamic: some crops traditionally managed by men are entering women’s hands, expanding women’s custodial role for subsistence crops, while some crops historically managed by women are increasingly mediated by external actors who redirect them toward men, potentially undermining women’s control and creating new dependencies. Our findings also show that gender alone does not explain farmers’ positions as seed access maintainers or controllers. Rather, gender intersects with age, wealth, marital status, and other forms of social difference to structure patterns of seed access maintenance and control. These dynamics vary across crops, revealing how crop’s local meanings, trajectories and political entanglements shape seed access. Drawing on feminist political ecology, we discuss how shifting gender roles create opportunities and exclusions for different groups of women and men. By tracing how seeds change hands, this study highlights the importance of intersectional and situated approaches for understanding seed access inequalities. Ensuring equitable access to locally adapted and culturally appropriate seeds is not only a matter of justice but also a means of safeguarding agrobiodiversity.
The ‘Northern Rivers’ region in the state of New South Wales (central east coast of Australia) has experienced recurrent food supply chain disruptions in recent years due to large-scale compounding disasters, including catastrophic flooding in 2022. The authors investigated barriers, enablers, and cross-cutting themes for organisations in this region to manage food security, spanning public, private and civic sectors. Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with food system leaders, decision-makers, managers and emergency food response coordinators from the region. Cross-cutting themes identified focused on developing integrative policy reform, building formal networks across sectors, enabling local resourcing for rapid disaster recovery and enabling systemic solutions for food redundancies. Findings revealed strengths in government leadership and collaborative disaster management in the agricultural sector. Alongside, post-disaster food provision relies heavily upon civic leadership and regional supply chains, enabled through informal networks of trust, however, hindered by ad hoc planning and deficits in public sector leadership and engagement. As civic food organisations are largely assuming responsibilities for post-disaster food access, pre-positioning organisations to manage this effectively is critical, especially mechanisms for collaborative preparedness and lesson learning. Capacity for joint action across sectors could be enabled through disaster food security planning having a broad, regional scope and inclusive participation of relevant local stakeholders. Insights from this research inform food security planning and policymaking that accounts for severe and compounding disasters and are broadly applicable to other coastal and regional settlements in Australia that are vulnerable to flooding.
This article examines how racialized divisions among workers emerge and operate within agricultural production in order to analyze the role of race and ethnicity in the labor process. Drawing on qualitative research with Latin American migrant farmworkers in Spain’s citrus industry, it argues that racialization operates not only through hiring practices but also through the (infra)structural organization of flexible labor. Seasonal mobility, piecework pay, and externalized recruitment generate what I call the cost of uncertainty, transferring production risks – weather, crop variability, and quotas – onto workers. These conditions intensify competition, which workers interpret through ethnoracial categories of difference. The article develops the concept of horizontal racialization to describe how such categories circulate among workers as everyday, embodied ways of explaining inequality and performance. It shows that this process is contingent and malleable: while it reinforces division, it can also be reconfigured through shared experiences. Drawing from literatures on infrastructure and embodiment, the article builds an analytical framework that reveals how the very systems that sustain global agricultural production also reproduce racial hierarchies from below, thus making racialized competition not a byproduct, but a necessary and injurious mechanism of agro-industrial production.
Peru’s gastronomic boom has been promoted as a national project linking chefs, producers, educational organizations, civil society, and public institutions. Yet the relational architecture underlying this transformation, and its implications for collaboration and governance, remain insufficiently understood. This article reconstructs the evolution of a collaboration network within Lima’s gastronomy-driven agri-food system between 1994 and 2025. Using an expanded egocentric design with partial snowball sampling, we combine complex network analysis with quantitative and qualitative evidence from 41 organizations. The results show a transition from a fragmented structure to a denser and more integrated network in which relational prominence became progressively distributed across several hubs. Collaboration relied mainly on knowledge, networking, human capital, and visibility rather than on monetary or material transfers. Non-formal producer communities were perceived as important sources of products, knowledge, innovation, and territorial legitimacy, although they were not among the most prominent organizational nodes captured by the study. Public institutions were also perceived as insufficiently connected to the collaborative infrastructure. The longitudinal patterns and qualitative evidence characterize this subsystem as a complex adaptive system and show how institutional entrepreneurship can generate durable relational infrastructure that persists and reorganizes over time.
