Abstract

Chapter
First Online: 04 May 2022
Part of the Local and Urban Governance book series (LUG)

Abstract

Urban centres and their surrounding rural hinterlands have been given prominence in recent rural studies. Emancipatory food networks have emerged in rural–urban space where alliances are forged between urban consumers and farmers who offered local/regional products through alternative distribution networks and so have acted as an environmental and social counter-force to intensive global food systems (Marsden and Smith, Geoforum 36:53–62, 2005; Goodman et al., Alternative food networks. Routledge, London, 2011; Marsden and Morely, Current food questions and their scholarly challenges. In: Marsden T, Morely A (eds) Sustainable food systems: building a new paradigm. Earthscan/Routledge, Milton Park, pp 1–29, 2014). The research, based on small-scale farming resilience at the rural–urban interface, has been conducted on the regional context of the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for over five years (Machado, Relational rural geographies, resilience, and narratives of small-scale fruit farming in the metropolitan countryside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. PhD thesis, University of Plymouth, 2020). Nevertheless, this chapter draws on a more recent investigation that approaches the challenges to regional farming systems in the globalised and urbanised context of Brazil and the alternative food alliances that have emerged, exploring their changing dynamics in the context of the COVID-19 heath pandemic, and highlighting future scenarios based on resilience theory. The key point is the importance of promoting resilience by establishing political priorities to support small-scale farming systems based around fundamentally different logics to intensive global and food systems, and which, over time, generate more sustainable and equitable power relation systems for the purpose of regional and local quality agricultural systems, small-scale farming strategies, and resilient scenarios in the context of COVID-19 crisis.

Cite this chapter
da Silva Machado, F. (2022). Small-Scale Farming and Alternative Food Alliances in the Context of COVID-19 Crisis in Brazil. In: Nunes Silva, C. (eds) Local Government and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Local and Urban Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91112-6_25

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