Vulnerabilities, power, and gendered violence in food systems

Abstract

abstract Food systems present a complex web of interests and within this web exists different levels of vulnerabilities, inclusions, or exclusions, depending on the levels of power accessible to different interest groups. In addition, due to the global interconnections, more complexities have been added to local and national food systems. As national boundaries and rules enmesh into more powerful global trade rules, salient hierarchies based on race, class, nationality, and gender emerge with social and economic outcomes in food systems. There is consensus that women carry a disproportionately larger burden of productive and reproductive labour within food value chains, yet they are more likely to face greater distress and violence over scarce food and other life enhancing resources. This article is empirically informed by the life histories of 21 elderly women farmers as they navigated the different epochs in Zimbabwe’s political, economic, and agrarian reforms. An African feminist standpoint provided the lens through which the narratives and agency of elderly women farmers are framed as they negotiated with gendered structural biases and the violence coded into power asymmetries within food systems from production to consumption. Women’s acts of resistance are explored, including transnational collaboration through food justice social movements as acts of radical political resistance to forced assimilation into unsustainable modes of capitalist extraction. The voices of elderly women are centred in articulating alternative pathways to food sovereignty based on mutual reciprocity in a non-violent and ecologically sustainable food system.