“Informal” food traders and food security: experiences from the Covid-19 response in South Africa

Wegerif, Marc

doi:10.1007/s12571-020-01078-z

Cited by 93 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…'The Street is Ours", as one trader once remarked in an interview in Harare, is an essential characteristic of the new geography of resistance, in which street-induced informality is one of the cornerstones. Wegerif and Hebinck (2016) and Wegerif (2020) coined the relationships between and amongst street traders as symbiotic and not necessarily as competitive. The symbiotic nature of their relationships provides actors with the means to defend their operations and their ordering of their vending sites.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The street is ours”. A comparative analysis of street trading, Covid-19 and new street geographies in Harare, Zimbabwe and Kisumu, Kenya

et al. 2021

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This collaborative and comparative paper deals with the impact of Covid-19 on the use and governance of public space and street trade in particular in two major African cities. The importance of street trading for urban food security and urban-based livelihoods is beyond dispute. Trading on the streets does, however, not occur in neutral or abstract spaces, but rather in lived-in and contested spaces, governed by what is referred to as ‘street geographies’, evoking outbreaks of violence and repression. Vendors are subjected to the politics of municipalities and the state to modernize the socio-spatial ordering of the city and the urban food economy through restructuring, regulating, and restricting street vending. Street vendors are harassed, streets are swept clean, and hygiene standards imposed. We argue here that the everyday struggle for the street has intensified since and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility and the use of urban space either being restricted by the city-state or being defended and opened up by street traders, is common to the situation in Harare and Kisumu. Covid-19, we pose, redefines, and creates ‘new’ street geographies. These geographies pivot on agency and creativity employed by street trade actors while navigating the lockdown measures imposed by state actors. Traders navigate the space or room for manoeuvre they create for themselves, but this space unfolds only temporarily, opens for a few only and closes for most of the street traders who become more uncertain and vulnerable than ever before, irrespective of whether they are licensed, paying rents for vending stalls to the city, or ‘illegally’ vending on the street.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The street is ours”. A comparative analysis of street trading, Covid-19 and new street geographies in Harare, Zimbabwe and Kisumu, Kenya

et al. 2021

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“…First, close monitoring of price movements and the factors contributing to those movements is paramount, especially during this crisis period. Changes in consumer prices are often claimed to be linked to predatory behavior among traders, motivating government intervention to curb trading activity, as has already been witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic (Resnick 2020;Wegerif 2020;Gebreamlak 2020). However, the earlier evidence on such predatory behavior is limited (Sitko andJayne 2014, Minten et al 2017) and the findings reported here indicate that the price changes during this pandemic have not been driven by large increases in marketing margins.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food marketing margins during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from vegetables in Ethiopia

Hirvonen¹,

Mohammed²,

Minten³

et al. 2020

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It is widely feared that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to a significant worsening of the food security situation in low and middle-income countries. One reason for this is the disruption of food marketing systems and subsequent changes in farm and consumer prices. Based on primary data in Ethiopia collected just before the start and a few months into the pandemic, we assess changes in farm and consumer prices of four major vegetables and the contribution of different segments of the rural-urban value chain in urban retail price formation. We find large, but heterogeneous, price changes for different vegetables with relatively larger changes seen at the farm level, compared to the consumer level, leading to winners and losers among local vegetable farmers due to pandemicrelated trade disruptions. We further note that despite substantial hurdles in domestic trade reported by most value chain agents, increases in marketing -and especially transportation -costs have not been the major contributor to overall changes in retail prices. Marketing margins even declined for half of the vegetables studied. The relatively small changes in marketing margins overall indicate the resilience of these domestic value chains during the pandemic in Ethiopia.

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“…One recurring theme was that lockdown measures made it more difficult for small-scale farmers to sell their produce, undermining rural livelihoods and raising concerns that families might be forced into distress land transactions. In South Africa, the closure of street trading, later reversed, was reported to have primarily affected small-scale farmers, who largely rely on informal markets ( Wegerif, 2020 , PLAAS, 2020 ); while reports from Nepal indicated that farmers were having to sell produce at lower prices set by the traders ( Deuja, 2020 ). Meanwhile, urban-to-rural migration by unemployed urban workers in search for new livelihoods in rural areas was expected to increase pressures on agricultural land, potentially displacing tenant farmers and sharecroppers (Choudhury, Ghosh & Sindhi, 2020, on India; Deuja, 2020 , on Nepal).…”

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confidence: 99%

Towards a political economy of the COVID-19 crisis: Reflections on an agenda for research and action

Cotula

2021

World Development

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The spread of COVID-19 has raised difficult questions that interrogate the pandemic as a public health emergency, an economic crisis and a disruptor of consolidated governance forms. While addressing the public health emergency must be the main priority, we also need to track the ways in which the crisis is reconfiguring economic and political ordering and diverse actors are renegotiating relations in the exceptional circumstances the pandemic has created. These dimensions can have far-reaching implications in wide-ranging policy areas, both as the crisis unfolds and in the longer term. Based on a review of developments concerning land governance, this Viewpoint discusses continuities with longstanding patterns as well as ruptures and distinctive features that outline the initial contours of an agenda for research and action.

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“Informal” food traders and food security: experiences from the Covid-19 response in South Africa

Cited by 93 publications

References 5 publications

“The street is ours”. A comparative analysis of street trading, Covid-19 and new street geographies in Harare, Zimbabwe and Kisumu, Kenya

“The street is ours”. A comparative analysis of street trading, Covid-19 and new street geographies in Harare, Zimbabwe and Kisumu, Kenya

Food marketing margins during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from vegetables in Ethiopia

Towards a political economy of the COVID-19 crisis: Reflections on an agenda for research and action

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