Food sovereignty across borders: Fishing among Myanmar refugees in Upstate New York

This paper explores the role of fishing among Myanmar refugees in the United States through the lens of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty emphasizes the rights of people and communities to healthy, culturally meaningful, and ecologically sound food systems, particularly through exercising control over the production, distribution, procurement, and consumption of food (Patel, 2009, Edelman et al., 2014, Grey and Patel, 2015, Sachs and Patel-Campillo, 2014). Using semi-structured interviews and oral histories, we examine the role of fishing among ethnically diverse refugees from Myanmar residing in three cities in Upstate New York. From providing food amid war in rural Myanmar to enabling emotional healing in spaces of resettlement, our paper shows that the material and affective dimensions of food sovereign practices are shaped by the political economies through which migrants travel. We find that incorporation into neoliberal food systems upon resettlement increases reliance on formal markets and limits refugees’ time for harvesting food from the environment. However, by illustrating the continuity of fishing as a source of joy and social connection, we argue that access to public environmental resources is important for migrants’ ability to exercise meaningful, autonomous relations to food and environment. Additionally, our paper highlights key issues faced by Myanmar refugees in fishing after resettlement to the US, including communication barriers, vulnerability to complex regulations, racial profiling, and cultural differences in fishing and consumptive practices. We argue that these tensions highlight the ways that minority fishers are marginalized in Western resource management systems, which has implications for food sovereignty particularly among those from migrant, and Global South backgrounds.