This paper applies an everyday political economy approach to examine the differentiated experiences of food insecurity and diet in a rural village in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone. Utilising a mixed-methods approach that incorporates food security and dietary diversity indexes, household interviews, and qualitative wealth rankings, our analysis shows that patterns of food insecurity and diet in this village emerge out of the conjuncture of everyday livelihood activities and political-economic relations between individuals and between social groups.
In this village, these patterns revolve around the changing role of agriculture and land ownership in shaping the dynamics of village life, as well as the growing importance of non-farm livelihood activities. Those who control the land of the village continue to enjoy a quantum of access to food and diet quality above landless or smaller landowning households. Yet, it is the increasing availability of non-farm activities that predominantly shapes a household’s wealth position and food security experience.
In the context of Myanmar’s rapidly changing economy, these expressions of everyday politics, livelihood activities and food can sometimes challenge but more often reproduce unequal patterns of wealth and hunger. The paper argues that the everyday political economy approach can augment analysis of socio-economic variables and food security indicators with the lived experience of hunger and diet and the political-economic dynamics of rural life.
Speaker
Mark Vicol is Assistant Professor of Agrarian Sociology in the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University. He is co-founder of the Contract Farming Initiative international research network, and co-coordinator of the Critical Agrarian Studies research cluster at Wageningen University. He is interested in questions about why certain livelihood pathways are possible for some and not others. His research interests include the political economy of food, markets, land and agriculture.
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