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Paper short abstract:

Food systems are moral systems. Interventions which ignore this often get it wrong. Moral economy analysis provides useful tools for taking moral dimensions into account. Revisiting and revalorising classical moral economy literature and evidence from Bali shows us why/how.

Paper long abstract:

The provisioning of human societies is widely understood in terms of nutritional, technological, ecological, and economic processes. We all eat to live, farmers farm and traders trade to live. But food systems are also, albeit less widely, recognised as social and cultural processes, and even more rarely as a moral ones. This paper begins from the position that all food systems are deeply imbued with moral dimensions and that failure to recognise these often leads to development failures. Conversely these moral dimensions are essential to understanding both successes and failures of interventions into food systems.

The concept of moral economy that drew attention to the moral embedment of agrarian economies in the 1970s has faded from view in the analysis of radically changing agrarian landscapes, and the once obvious moral dimensions of traditional agrarian economies have progressively become obscured. This paper revisits this classic moral economy literature and illustrates it with ethnographic evidence from Bali, to revisit revalorise the concept of moral economy as a tool for analysis of food systems.