Abstract

This paper proposes conceptually rethinking the study of urban food market systems in the Global South, offering an approach that better fits the characteristics of these cities. Urban low-income households in the Global South gain access to food, assemble food plates and make substitutions via food systems that are organised domestically, not fully industrialised, and constituted of actors across the formal-informal spectrum who face infrastructural, institutional and space-related constraints and displacement pressures. Yet, what could be written off as a sub-optimal system makes food available at multiple prices, which is inclusive of low-income household needs. The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP) charts a pathway for transforming urban food systems. Achieving this vision requires good understanding of how urban food market systems actually work, which has been overshadowed in past research framed in terms of transactional commodity chains, industrial food products, infrastructure grids and centralised logistics. We contend that to avoid maladaptive policy-making, a conceptual reorientation is needed, shifting the gaze towards ‘meso-level’ market dynamics and social networks that shape how food reaches marginalised communities, via networks that are not fully centralised and which incorporate informality. Our paper sets out this approach, applying it to the analysis of wholesale markets that provision low-income settlements in two South Asian cities: Bengaluru and Colombo. We find a pattern of urban multi-nodality anchoring food provisioning, with practices that enable household access to an affordable and diverse plate of foods, even during systemic crises such as Covid-19. The contribution of this paper is thus both the detailed account of urban food systems in Bengaluru and Colombo, and an expanded conceptual approach which can be applied to the study of other urban food market systems. While rooted in experiences from the Global South, the questions it raises have global resonance.