Abstract

For many years, researchers have debated whether urban and peri-urban Agriculture is a means to reach food security and alleviate poverty in the Global South. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and climate change impacts have fuelled optimism about the benefits of alternative food systems. Yet previous studies have shown that people who engage in alternative food systems often do it as part of a larger struggle and are not always seeking to solve food needs per se. Why are people in informal settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean engaging in alternative food systems and what is exactly their struggle? This study in low-income settlements in Colombia, Chile, Cuba, and Ecuador confirms that adult women and the elderly engage in alternative food systems for a variety reason that go beyond food. Common reasons include education, socialisation, environmental protection, leisure, crime reduction, maintaining cultural traditions, and dealing with psychological distress and isolation. The struggles within which these activities emerge take different forms and respond to specific local conditions. Involvement in food becomes a way of transforming space and expressing normative principles through collective action. But it is also a way of reifying values, (re)positioning individual identities and explore people's experiences. From a theoretical viewpoint, these results show that to fully grasp the benefits of alternative food systems it is necessary to understand their spatial component and the specific forms of struggle that exist conditions of informality. Several tensions must be resolved in urban planning and food system projects.