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Accepted Paper:

The Hungry State: Nutrition assessment, gender and imperial power in central Mozambique, ca.1800-present  
Heidi Gengenbach (University of Massachusetts Boston)

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores rural struggles around nutrition assessment technologies in central Mozambique, introduced through ongoing “Green Revolution” programs to reduce rural hunger, in the context of two centuries of Portuguese colonial and post-colonial state efforts to classify and control rural African diets.

Paper long abstract:

For the past decade, Mozambique has played a prominent role in the "New Green Revolution for Africa" (GR4A), a donor-funded initiative to enhance food security by commercializing smallholder agriculture. As a result, Mozambique has witnessed a burgeoning of national policies, bureaucratic machinery, scientific expertise, and "public-private partnerships" aimed at addressing its crisis levels of chronic and acute malnutrition. Yet because the GR4A paradigm conceptualizes hunger as not only a biomedical condition of nutritional want, but also a gendered social problem requiring unprecedented intervention in the lives of women farmers—"the agents instrumental to food security" (World Bank 2006)—its implementation has required a battery of new technologies for bodily and behavioural nutrition assessment, whose purpose is to legitimize ongoing efforts to "improve" agrifood systems historically managed by rural women. Preliminary research into the effectiveness of these donor-driven assessment technologies suggests that despite the profusion of data they have generated thus far, women's resistance to nutritionally couched interventions in rural foodways is significantly impeding both the state's "hunger knowledge" and GR4A progress to date.

This paper argues that ongoing struggles to measure hunger in Mozambique cannot be understood without reference to state efforts to classify and control African diets in the colonial past. In central Mozambique, Portuguese perceptions of local food systems as deficient date back to the 1600s, and fuelled intensifying farmer-state tensions from ca. 1800 on. Oral history and archival sources reveal this neglected nutritional terrain of colonial politics, memories of which inform farmer responses to GR4A interventions today.

Panel P10
Medical knowledge and transfer in the colonies
  Session 1