Paper short abstract:

A study of processes of household formation, livelihoods diversification and household food practices through the lens of rural-rural and rural-urban dynamics, in northern Mozambique.

Paper long abstract:

While universally-appicable questions to assess household food security and dietary diversity are widely used, researching household food prcatices is a much more extensive and complex exercise, both theoretically and methodologically, as food habits are intimately interconnected with power relations developing along the lines of class, gender and age. A comprehensive understanding and assessment of diets and household food strategies should place domestic units or households at the centre of analysis: households should be looked at internally - to uncover the ways in which responsibilities in food production, acquisition and preparation are shaped by intra-household relations of power - and through their external interrelations - to expose how across-space linkages contribute to the formation of specific household food strategies. Field research conducted in one urban, one peri-urban and one rural area in the province of Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, revealed that mobility of people, goods (especially agricultural produce and processed foods), and money is central in the definition of household survival and food acquisition strategies. Yet, are these strategies determined by choice or socially embedded? This paper discusses the significance of rural-rural and rural-urban dynamics in shaping processes of household formation, livelihoods diversification and social differentiation, which are in turn considered to be strongly associated with the construction of household food practices. Rural-urban dynamics shall then be used as a lens through which sheding light on the major sources of food vulnerability, on the one hand, and as a way to overcome some of these vulnerabilities, on the other hand.