Economic Restructuring and Urban Food Access in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

The article describes how economic restructuring in the Dominican Republic during the 1980s and 1990s established the basis for urban food access challenges during the 2000s. Primarily based on research in Santiago, the second largest Dominican city, the article provides insights into how export‐oriented development strategies, expanding trade liberalization, domestic political struggles, and patriarchal relations influenced access to food for low‐income residents. During the early 2000s, many Santiago residents were engaged in an elaborate, androcentric exchange network that linked gendered income‐generating strategies to credit‐bearing food merchants who were, in turn, conjoined to a sequence of brokers all of whom were eventually linked to domestic and international producers by credit relations. Analysis of these findings illustrates how and why this exchange network existed, the importance of credit relations to its maintenance, and the ways in which government and U.S. food policies influenced urban provisioning patterns among the most economically and socially vulnerable population of Santiago. I argue that the rapidly changing social and spatial configurations of Latin American and Caribbean cities calls for innovative applied anthropological research into the processes that structure access to food resources by food insecure groups. By focusing on household food procurement in conjunction with exchange relations for a key staple, the article highlights practices and policies that enable and constrain food access for such groups. The article provides empirical data relevant to scholars and practitioners concerned with understanding the structural origins of the present‐day food crisis in developing countries.

“American rice is cleaner”: marketplace hybridity and the cultural transformation of food in the Dominican Republic

“…Between December 1999 and October 2000, I spent a considerable amount of time engaging in participant observation within peripheral Santiago neighborhoods and households. I formed relationships, watched people prepare meals and accompanied residents while they worked at export processing factories, construction sites, in domestic service and at the municipal garbage dump (Rosing, 2009). Whenever possible, I assisted in household work where I became accustomed to residents' daily routines including traveling with them as they procured food both in and outside the neighborhood.…”

“…Store owners, in turn, had a similar relationship with their suppliers who were mainly small- and medium-size intermediary brokers who themselves bought from larger brokers at Mercado Hospedaje. Credit (fiao), mostly informal, was at the heart of this distribution system given the increasingly wage-driven economy fueled by export industrialization (Rosing, 2009).…”

“…Indeed, residents throughout the neighborhoods claimed they had learned about the health dangers (e.g. gout) of eating the domestic red bean (Rosing, 2007, p. 272). Driven by such ideas and an increasing availability of the imported legume, Dominican red bean production continued to decline throughout the 1990s and by 2001 could not compete with imported pinto beans without significant government intervention (SEA, 2002a, b).…”

“…For most residents of Santiago, income level, weekly or biweekly wage payments, and unreliability of refrigeration resulted in daily purchases of food in small quantities with cash or on informal credit (Rosing, 2009). In cases where people were experiencing extreme income shortages, they purchased food by weight or unit by requesting that the colmado owner sell them an amount in pesos for staples such as chicken, rice, beans, cooking oil, etc.…”

“…Rice and pigeon peas, while retaining these deeper historical meanings in the Dominican Republic also reflects economic ambiguity. During the 1990s, rice was increasingly sourced by large brokers in Santo Domingo and Santiago from outside the country through brokers in Miami who sourced from rice-growing states in the southern US (Rosing, 2009). The economic hybridity of moro de guandules in some ways mirrors racialized notions deeply embed in the history of the dish.…”