Studying home gardens as if people mattered: Why don't food-insecure households in rural Myanmar cultivate home gardens?

ABSTRACT

Extensive research, mainly undertaken by nutrition scientists and economists, indicates that the presence of a home garden is positively associated with improved household nutrition in rural households of the global South. However, this literature is relatively silent on the contexts that influence home garden uptake. This is problematic given rapidly changing social and economic landscapes, which reshape the place and scope for home gardens within households’ livelihood and food provisioning arrangements. Original research from Myanmar reported here reveals that emergent socio-economic contexts for rural households are posing heightened challenges for home gardens to contribute to food and nutrition security.

KEYWORDS:

• Home gardens
• food and nutrition security
• rural development
• differentiation
• Myanmar

Notes on contributors

Bill Pritchard is a professor in human geography specialising in agriculture, food and rural places. He is interested in the ways that global and local processes are transforming places, industries and people's lives. His research has focused mainly on his home country of Australia, as well as India and South-east Asia. He is the author of Value chain struggles (Blackwell, 2009), co-authored with Jeff Neilson, which documented the social and environmental impacts of global restructuring of the Indian plantation industry, and Feeding India (Routledge, 2013), with Sekher, Parasuraman, Rammohan and Choithani, which applied a capability theory approach to the analysis of food security politics in India. Email: [email protected]

Mark Vicol is a postdoctoral research associate in human geography at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, and a New Generation Network scholar at the Australia India Institute. His research focuses on the intersections between rural livelihoods and processes of agrarian change, with a particular interest in India, Myanmar and Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

Anu Rammohan is a professor in economics at the University of Western Australia. The focus of her research has been on understanding household-level socio-economic factors that can influence maternal and child health outcomes, gender and food security issues in South and South-east Asia, particularly in India, Indonesia and, more recently, Myanmar. She is a co-author of Feeding India (Routledge, 2013), with Bill Pritchard. Email: [email protected]

Elen Welch is a research assistant at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Her current research interests include rural livelihoods, inequalities and feminist geography. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [Grant Number DP150102053].