Los Agachaditos: Street Food Vendors, Popular Networks and Food Security in El Alto, Bolivia

Abstract

Street food vendors are highly prolific in El Alto, Bolivia, a city susceptible to gaps in State service provision due to rapid expansion, and historical processes of exclusion of the indigenous peoples who make up the majority of the population. Street food vendors operate on a largely informal basis, outside the realm of formal regulation and within a decentralised structure of networks of popular actors. Past research on street food suggests that it may make a valuable contribution to urban food security in terms of economic and physical access, yet concerns about hygiene and nutritional quality are often seen as a barrier to such a contribution. Through a combination approach of the ethnographic methods of participant observation and unstructured interviews, and a consumer survey, the research explores and explains the contribution of street food vendors'networks to food security in El Alto. It is found that street food plays a highly important role in the daily lives of the population of El Alto and that the street food vendors in the study use their networks strategically in a number of ways that have the end result of contributing to the food security of the urban consumer: networks lower transaction costs for the vendor, thus lowering the price of food for the consumer; they link countryside to city and contribute to effective supply systems between the two; they are flexible and can adapt to changing availability and price of food, ensuring a stable food supply to the urban consumer; and they are rooted in informal institutions that mean social responsibility is inherent in the system, and that drive vendors to control the hygiene of their food