Changing fish trade practices in Myanmar’s rapidly transforming food system

Abstract

Wholesale markets, wholesalers, and processors play critical but underappreciated roles in shaping food systems. Most conventional research on food provisioning analyzes value chains in terms of their structure, conduct, and performance. We contend that a practices lens can illuminate how food systems are produced and reproduced through the emergence of new wholesale practices relating to quality, trust, and risk, and provide more nuanced understandings of how markets and trading shape and are shaped by food system transformations. Applying a practices lens to the analysis of these changes can help identify new ways of steering food systems toward more sustainable outcomes.

Abstract (Burmese)

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©2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor&Francis Group, LLC

Keywords:

• fish
• food systems
• Myanmar
• social practices
• wholesale markets

Acknowledgments

This paper is an output of the CGIAR Initiative on Securing the Food Systems of Asian Mega‐Deltas for Climate and Livelihood Resilience (INIT-18), which is carried out with support from funders through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund. For details please visit: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/. The paper also draws in research supported by the USAID funded “Food Security Policy Project” (Associate Award No. AID-482-LA-14-00003), and the Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT) Grant Support Agreement Number: R1.4/029/2014 for the project “Agrifood Value Chain Development in Myanmar.” The contents of the paper are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CGIAR, USAID, nor LIFT.

Ethics statement

This study did not require ethics approval as no dilemna was identified by the Wageningen School of Social Sciences (WASS) committee who approved this research. We, authors, declare that we do not have any conflict of interest of any sort in publishing this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The reform period came to an abrupt and tragic end in 2021 when the democratically elected government was ousted in a bloody military coup.