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.
The restructuring of pig production in Vietnam exemplifies rapid agricultural modernization in developing economies, yet the mechanisms through which growth and smallholder exclusion unfold remain insufficiently understood. This study examines how external pressures, structural constraints, and institutional filters interact to shape pig-sector transformation in Central Vietnam, understood here as a differentiated process of structural reorganization rather than a uniform sectoral transition. Situated within contemporary debates on the Agrarian Question and agrarian differentiation, we employed a sequential five-stage qualitative research design in Quang Binh and Thua Thien Hue provinces (December 2024-August 2025): secondary analysis of policy documents and production statistics (1950–2025), expert interviews (n = 3), focus group discussions with 32 stakeholders (provincial livestock officers, veterinary managers, and experienced farmers across 4 sessions), in-depth interviews with farmers representing different producer positions within the restructuring process (n = 6) and policy experts (n = 2), and validation workshops (n = 40 participants). Deductive-inductive thematic analysis and multiple triangulation strategies were used to strengthen analytical rigor. The findings reveal a profound process of agrarian differentiation in which identical market incentives, technological opportunities, and disease shocks generated sharply uneven outcomes across producer groups. African Swine Fever (2018–2019) functioned as a structural rather than a temporary shock, accelerating consolidation by eliminating producers lacking the resources to meet rising biosecurity demands. The findings also point to uneven policy effects: formally universal interventions—environmental standards, zoning measures, and biosecurity requirements—imposed uneven compliance burdens across producer groups and therefore tended to reinforce existing inequalities. These findings contribute to debates on agricultural transformation by showing that modernization proceeds not through uniform sectoral progression, but through differentiated access to land, capital, compliance capacity, and institutional support. The study also shows that technological change reconfigured gendered labor relations and accelerated rural deagrarianization. Overall, the findings suggest the need for differentiated policy frameworks and transitional support that address structural disadvantage rather than assuming universal benefits from sectoral modernization.
