Exploring sustainable urban food provisioning: The case of eggs in Dar es Salaam

Abstract

Global food supply is dominated by transnational corporations, which have great power and are widely critiqued for the negative environmental and social impacts of their operations. Many argue that this industrial food system is unsustainable, yet its expansion seems inevitable and alternatives are seen as incapable of feeding the world's growing and increasingly urban population. Since much of the world's future population growth is going to happen in the cities of the developing world, they have become the frontline for the expansion of the industrial food system, raising the serious challenge of ensuring food security for residents. This paper, based on a qualitative study of patterns of egg provisioning in Dar es Salaam, explores whether existing patterns of food supply in this rapidly growing city, of over four million people, provide workable alternatives. Eggs are an important source of nutrition and patterns of egg supply offer a lens through which to explore the sustainability of different modes of provisioning. A range of non-corporate provisioning patterns, based on small-scale enterprises, are found to have social, economic and environmental advantages, challenging assumptions that corporate food chains are necessary, or desirable, to feed cities sustainably. © 2014 by the authors.