Keywords

What we Xai-Xai dwellers need now is a dish of xima meal on our households’ tables. ‘Food security’ is your matter. (Respondent in Xai-Xai during 2017 field work)

Introduction: The Practical and Symbolic Dimensions of Food Security

Despite the availability of food in the local markets of Xai-Xai, Mozambique, people who participated in the qualitative study that inspired this chapter agreed unanimously that what they need is a dish of xima (pronounced sheema). They encapsulated the experience of food insecurity and hunger by stating their desire for this ubiquitous staple dish. What does this seemingly ordinary statement indicates about the importance of xima in the Xai-Xai household diet and, more specifically, the ways in which people articulate their experiences of hunger and food insecurity?

At the most basic level, expressing a desire for xima may indicate that low-income households often find themselves without enough cash to buy adequate food, including the ingredients needed for a dietary staple such as xima. It is well documented that low-income households may go for days or months without adequate food, even while formal and informal markets and bazaars are fully stocked with foods that are not sold and eventually rot (Chikanda & Raimundo, 2017; McCordic, 2016; McCordic & Abrahamo, 2019).

Another possible explanation is that the desire for xima is a matter of food preference, meaning that xima has a cultural importance that trumps the availability and accessibility of other food items. This would not be altogether unexpected. Variations of xima are found across southern and eastern Africa, and prepared and consumed according to local customs. In Xai-Xai, maize, cassava, sorghum and millet are used to prepare the stiff porridge normally consumed with green leafy vegetables, fish or other seafood, or with meat. Maize has become the preferred ingredient for xima in Mozambique, as elsewhere in the region, because it is widely available, relatively easy to cook and its flavour is preferred (Ekpa et al., 2019; Lusambili et al., 2020).

A third way to understand the respondent’s statement is the possibility that Xai-Xai residents understand food security as the ability to cultivate the foods they need, including maize for xima, in a backyard garden. The disappearance of the backyard garden may be causally connected to a variety of factors, including increasing political and social pressures for urban-dwellers (whether established or newly arrived from rural areas) to conform to expectations of modern, “big city” norms, such as keeping gardens of flowers rather than fruits and vegetables, obtaining food exclusively from retail sources and eating a diet of processed foods purchased at chain grocery stores. Decades of increasing climate shocks, such as cyclones, floods, coastal erosion and droughts, have also devastated food production in Xai-Xai, including at the scale of the backyard garden.

Food security studies on secondary cities in Mozambique are scarce, which makes it difficult to accurately understand food access, availability and especially food stability in these geographical areas. In addition, the quantitative methodologies applied to understand food security in primary or capital cities such as Maputo do not allow us to understand the cultural experiences of food security in secondary cities. A review of case study evidence from Mozambique suggests an overreliance on quantitative methods and assessment tools. These methods and tools allow for a high-level view of food insecurity issues, resulting in comparative studies that can be delivered with time- and cost-effectiveness, but they may come at the expense of discovering the real-life experiences of hunger and food security in local communities and households.

For the Government of Mozambique, the goal of understanding food security is reducing poverty. To achieve this goal, various ministries compile data on food status. One of the main information tools is the Integrated Agricultural Survey (IAS), which collects and processes data on the value chain of agricultural activity, and food and nutrition security, including: the number and size of farms; the number and size of farming households; agricultural activity (livestock or agricultural production); the types of crops grown and yield per farm. When President Filipe Nyusi launched the IAS in 2020, he stated that the primary goal of the survey was to collect “reliable, good quality national statistics” to inform planning, implementation and assessment of development programmes (allAfrica, 2020). The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, together with the National Statistics Institute, are the main implementers of the IAS. Another source of government information is the Food and Nutrition Security survey conducted by the Technical Secretariat for Food and Nutrition Security (Secretariado Técnico de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional), under the direction of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (Ministério da Agricultura e Segurança Alimentar [MASA]). The latter publishes national- and provincial-level information, but excludes secondary cities and small administrative units. The MASA website provides information on nutrition, hunger and household income with a view to measuring chronic food and nutritional insecurity.

As two of the principal sources of government information on nutrition, food production and the value chain, these instruments and reports contain significant gaps regarding hunger and food insecurity experiences. The IAS does not gather data on vegetables and indigenous and/or locally cultivated food, which are the very foods that households typically consume and are most concerned about. Yanick Borel Kamga (2021, this volume) demonstrates the importance of indigenous foods in the diets of households in a secondary city in Cameroon, and his findings resonate with the experience of co-author Inês Raimundo in Xai-Xai. The official data gap in Mozambique is precipitated by the employment of and overreliance on quantitative methods.

Similarly, academic research on food security in Mozambique continues to focus mainly on metropolitan areas and/or large cities and tends to employ quantitative as opposed to qualitative research methods. Two international urban food security research projects, the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) and the Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP), conducted multiple representative surveys on urban household food security and the urban food system, beginning in 2008. The survey instruments employed by both projects were the food security measurements designed by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Program, including the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), the Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning (MAHFP), the formula determining food poverty lines, and an income and expenditure survey (Battersby & Crush, 2016; McCordic, 2016; Raimundo et al., 2016; Riley & Caesar, 2017). These research projects continue to make valuable contributions to understanding, on a large scale, urban food security. They make it possible to measure numerous aspects of the urban food system in Mozambique, and in particular its major cities, such as Maputo and its suburbs. However, like the government information sources, the projects focus primarily on the major urban centres and use quantitative surveys as the dominant research method.

Methodologically, a mixed methods approach to complex or multi-faceted problems such as hunger and food security will yield a richer dataset than a single method. In light of the preponderance of quantitative research on the subject, this chapter aims to highlight the invaluable role of qualitative research methods, with a special emphasis on auto-ethnography. The goal is to adopt an approach, or approaches, that can deepen our understanding of hunger and urban food security at the scale of human experience. For example, qualitative research methods can answer the following questions:

  • What really matters to people with regard to food and food security?

  • What exactly does it mean for them to be food secure or insecure?

  • How do households remain food secure in the context of climate shocks?

  • How do cultural norms and historical relationships with food inform people’s understanding of hunger and food security?

This chapter is an attempt at critical engagement with the widely used concept of food security and how food security experiences are informed by climate shocks and by people’s cultural experiences of food. Additionally, and perhaps because of this context, we suggest qualitative as opposed to quantitative research methods would be more effective to achieve this goal. The dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative methods is not novel in feminist scholarship (Oakley, 1998; Westmarland, 2001); however, the dominance of the latter method has led us to conclude that the time has come to employ qualitative research methods to round out and expand our understanding of food security experiences in Mozambique and in its secondary cities in particular.

The chapter is informed by empirical research conducted by Inês Raimundo in Xai-Xai in 2017 and by her recollections of growing up in Mozambique. Dr. Raimundo was born and raised in Xai-Xai and spent many hours as a child listening to the stories told by her grandmother and mother about the history of Xai-Xai and about people’s daily lives. In addition, as an adult, she makes regular trips back to Xai-Xai to visit relatives and also as a scholar. She has witnessed significant transformations in food access, food availability and dietary changes, more often than not imposed by external forces.

The next section of the chapter begins with a discussion of the tools available to measure food security, focusing on the fact that the use of certain methods will yield a certain understanding of food security. This is followed by contextual information on Xai-Xai. The chapter then discusses the research evidence around hunger and food security experiences, as expressed by household members, and historical ways in which community members have navigated food insecurity. The final two sections consider the broader context that continues to impact food security and hunger: first, “planting cement,” instead of vegetable gardens, as a marker of urbanization and modernization; and second, contending with climate shocks.

Measuring Food Security: The Results Follow the Tools

One way of measuring food security is by employing quantitative research methods. These can be used to understand, for example, the extent of food security in a specified research location or multiple locations for comparative purposes, and to enumerate some of the reasons why households experience food insecurity. With quantitative methods, the notion of food security is predetermined and coded, with no room for explanation and subjectivity. When using qualitative research methods, the researcher allows the participant to articulate their food security experience in their own words and what emerges is a more nuanced understanding of food security.

Starting in 2008, researchers and graduate students associated with AFSUN and HCP conducted urban food security research. As the research project leader for Mozambique, Raimundo collaborated with a number of these national and international researchers to design research projects, facilitated fieldwork on urban food security studies and co-published a number of publications (Raimundo et al., 2014, 2018). As a result of this level of involvement in research projects, she became familiar with the technical language of food security employed by quantitative surveys such as the HFIAS, HDDS and the MAHFP. These measurements are not universal, but have become widely used indicators to measure the extent of household food (in)security. By employing these tools, the experiences of research participants are reduced to pre-coded answers of “yes,” “no,” “often,” “sometimes” and “I don’t know,” or other scales such as “often,” “randomly,” “sometimes” and “never.” In addition, translating descriptions such as “food secure,” “mildly food insecure,” “moderately food insecure” and “severely food insecure” into Mozambican national languages complicates the data collection due to the insignificant difference that exists between these categories.

For these reasons, this chapter argues in favour of interviews and life histories to complete the map of food insecurity. These methods are the only way for the researcher to gain insight into the food production and food security situation over the last three decades, a time period used by meteorologists to calculate significant changes in patterns. Statistical analyses and mathematical predictive models do not bring to light what is going on in reality, nor do they deliver a full representation of food insecurity. To what extent can the data produced by these methods respond to the statement: “We don’t have xima on our plates, therefore we are not food secure”? How can one be food secure if accessing food depends on having hard currency? What happened to the backyard fruit and vegetable production that once formed the foundation of food security for city dwellers? The interviews conducted in Xai-Xai in 2017 and the auto-ethnographic methods employed by Raimundo come much closer to understanding the subjective experience of hunger and food insecurity.

Understanding Xai-Xai Through Interviews and Auto-Ethnography

This chapter relies on qualitative research conducted by Raimundo during a 2017 African Urban Research Initiative (AURI) research project entitled “Understanding Informal Systems in a Medium Sized City: A case study of Xai-Xai.” The project was part of a larger research agenda entitled “Fostering a Comparative Research Agenda in African Cities: Urban Spatial Inequalities and the New Urban Agenda,” which was sponsored by the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and the Ford Foundation.

Raimundo’s project investigated the impact of rapid urbanization in small and medium-sized cities, which has been a concern in Mozambique. These cities have shown faster growth since the late 1980s (INE, 1980, 1999, 2009, 2019). This rapid growth reflects the effects of political instability (a civil war that lasted 16 years), the post-war reconstruction period following the signing of the General Peace Agreement in 1992, and the many floods and drought that have hit the country over the past four decades (Muanamoha & Raimundo, 2018a, 2018b; Raimundo, 2020). Having the right to live where one chooses (such as in a city), along with political reforms, natural disasters and the impact of Structural Adjustment Programs, have had profound impacts on migration patterns and fertility rates, which have, in turn, made small and medium-sized cities unsustainable to live in. Urbanization brings challenges to all who must permanently deal with the phenomenon. However, social cohesion cannot exist while large sections of a country’s population are deprived of basic needs and live under permanent stress due to the vulnerabilities inherent in an informal economy, a shortage of land for new building, and environmental problems (such as major storms leading to massive coastal erosion) that pose threats to human security and food security.

Xai-Xai represents challenges that city dwellers face on a medium scale. Xai-Xai has been an official autarchy within Mozambique since 1997, but the management system is still centralized and participatory processes are not visible. Clearly, the various priorities of city dwellers, city managers and civil society are not aligned. Medium-sized cities are neglected in various studies on Mozambique, since they are not seen to produce significant wealth through either economic activity or taxation. They are seen as less essential than larger centres, thus their invisibility to policymakers. In this context, the study looked at how city dwellers cope with living in a coastal city that experiences yearly cyclones and floods, dangerous levels of coastal erosion and a high level of informality in terms of settlement and the economy. It also looked at how residents of Xai-Xai cooperate with city managers in the process of city management.

The research was developed using qualitative tools such as interviews and focus group discussions. Raimundo interviewed those who expressed interest in the study, and sought out key informants who could provide information about the city, including municipal authorities (an urban councillor and the councillor for education and housing), and in the neighbourhoods she interviewed the heads and secretaries of the wards. Interviewees were organized into the following groups: councillors and bureaucrats from the municipal council; local administrative leaders, including the head of the administrative post, the secretary of the wards and the chiefs of the quateiroes; city dwellers in their respective wards; and traders. The interviews took place from October 5 to 10, 2017.

In addition to the interviews, the tools of auto-ethnography were used to shape the recollections of Raimundo, of food and hunger in Xai-Xai when she was a child. Auto-ethnography, first employed in 1979, is “an approach to research that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis et al., 2011). It is particularly appropriate in this case because it is an approach to research that “challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act” (Ellis et al., 2011). Given the climate disasters that plague Mozambique, the south in particular, reducing respondents’ experiences of food security to predetermined quantitative measurements, a method that has come to dominate food security research, fails to uncover the cultural and personal meaning of food and thus the entirety of the food security experience.

Raimundo was born and raised in Xai-Xai and spent hours listening to her grandmother talk about the past and her mother talk about the present. This is how she came to learn the history of Xai-Xai and heard descriptions of people’s daily lives. Even after leaving Xai-Xai to study, get married and work in Maputo, she remained connected to this city, as the family still maintains the house of their late parents and regularly visits. In addition to these family ties, Raimundo has come to view Xai-Xai through the eyes of a scholar and has witnessed significant transformations in food access (including changes in backyard production), food availability and diets, and the impact of external factors such as climate shocks.

Xai-Xai: A Place Made Food Insecure by Climate Shocks

Xai-Xai, the capital city of Gaza Province, is located in the south of Mozambique and borders on Chibuto and Mandlakaze Districts to the north, Chokwe District to the west, Limpopo and Bilene Districts to the south and the Indian Ocean to the east. The city has four administrative areas, covering about 132 square kilometres at an average altitude of 9 m above sea level. The main economic activity in Xai-Xai is agriculture (Mazuze, 2019; Xavier, 2019).

The city is divided into a lower zone and an upper zone by the Nguluzangue River, which flows towards the Indian Ocean where it meets the Limpopo River. The city is situated in a zone that is prone to cyclones and floods, below the Limpopo River and about 50 kms from the mouth of the Indian Ocean. Table 13.1 shows that the population of this secondary city doubled between 1980 and 1997; from 1980 to 2017, it grew faster than both the provincial and the national population. However, the growth rate slowed down between 2007 and 2017 as a result of a decline in fertility rates, according to local demographers (Arnaldo, 2013; Arnaldo & Muanamoha, 2013).

Table 13.1 Population Growth of Xai-Xai, Gaza Province and Mozambique between 1980 and 2017
Full size table

Climate Shocks and Food Security: The Floods of 2000 and 2013

Any understanding of food security and any programmes aimed at improving household food security should take into account the impact of climate shocks, especially the devastating effect on urban agriculture and, more generally, food production and supply. The impact of climate shocks on Xai-Xai is evident in massive destruction of infrastructure and death. In 2000, heavy rainfall lasted five weeks and caused the Limpopo River to overflow, flooding villages and cities. Cyclone Leon-Eline caused further flash floods. A total of 700 people died and more than 500,000 lost their homes, becoming internally displaced (UNICEF, 2000). In addition to the loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, large stretches of fertile farmland and crops were destroyed: about 12% of cultivated land and 90% of irrigated land in five provinces, with the largest impact on Gaza Province (USAID, 2002). The affected crops included maize, beans, rice, sweet potatoes and peanuts, and more than 50,000 head of cattle died (UNICEF, 2000). The economic impact was marked by a loss of US$600 million, which caused the gross domestic product to drop from 7.5% growth in 1999 to 1.6% in 2000 (República de Moçambique, Conselho de Ministros, 2017).

Xai-Xai households lost the ability to achieve and/or maintain food security at least two decades ago, and households throughout the country have struggled to recover from the 2000 floods and cyclone. In a city that was transformed by a massive climate shock, Xai-Xai residents now consider themselves food secure only when they have an escudo (the Portuguese colonial currency in use until 1980) to buy a bag of maize or they have a dish of xima to consume. In the past, Limpopo Valley was considered the granary of the country, with communities producing surpluses of crops; now the same communities are dependent on food aid (Mazuze, 2019; Raimundo, 2019). It has become a struggle to cultivate crops for household, local and national consumption between waves of water on the one hand, and droughts and cyclones on the other. The Mozambique Master Plan for Disaster Risk Reduction 2017–2030 indicates that from 1980 to 2016, the country was ravaged by floods, droughts, tropical cyclones and epidemics (Table 13.2). These events disrupted the economy, eliminated any economic growth that had been forecast, and caused infrastructure damage that extends from household assets to state assets.

Table 13.2 Natural Disasters and Epidemics between 1980 and 2016
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Gaining a Cultural Understanding of Hunger and Food Security

Food, food and food is part of our life, but which food? Are you telling me that mayonnaise, pallone (bologna), Boerewors (sausage), hamburgers, fried chicken, is food? (Interview, October 7, 2017, Patrice Lumumba Neighbourhood, Xai-Xai)

Raimundo’s siblings and herself grew up in a suburb of Xai-Xai where their parents’ backyard garden had papaw trees, lemon trees, chimunhamunwane (a small, black, chewy wild fruit), blackberries, mangoes, cocoa and matsawo (pumpkin leaves). As a matter of fact, blackberries, chimunhamunwane and papaws constituted their fence. At that time, her mom sometimes used to go to the bazaar to buy fresh fish or dried prawns to prepare mathapa (smashed cassava/manioc leaves, cooked with coconuts, groundnuts and fresh or dried prawns) or to buy butter beans for soup. The bean soup was considered a luxury as it contained olive oil, some beef bones and cabbage, and it was only served for Sunday lunch. During this period of her childhood, her mom sourced most of their fresh seafood from a lady who lived by the sea, while fruit and vegetables were grown in the backyard. They could seldom eat apples, grapes, peaches and kiwis, as her parents could not afford to buy these Portuguese fruits and because they had blackberries, chimunhamunwane and papaws in their yard. The only fruits that her parents could afford to buy were tangerines, oranges and bananas.

This is the city where she was raised about 50 years ago. She recalls the 1978 floods, but never heard about cyclones or drought in this region. Nowadays, the landscape of the city has changed dramatically. The population has grown rapidly and together with certain notions of modernization and urban development, the chimunhamunwane, mango trees, papaws and blackberries have been replaced by bricks. Xai-Xai has become a place where people “plant cement” instead of fruits and vegetables. In addition, heavy rains, floods and cyclones have become commonplace events in the twenty-first century:

Floods, cyclones and hailstorms never seem to let up. We are busy trying to fix the roof tiles broken by hailstorms or that were thrown away by cyclones or washed away by floods. Look over there at the lower areas. They are permanently flooded as the Nguluzangue River is no longer taking its water to the mouth. People have blocked the river with new construction. There are some people who settled here during the Matsanga WarFootnote 1 as displaced persons. They occupied the entire valley and obstructed the way out of the river. (Interview, October 5, 2017, Patrice Lumumba Neighbourhood, Xai-Xai)

The first time she saw her mom going to a bazaar to buy some vegetables was during the 1980s because, firstly, the FRELIMO-led, post-independence government’s discourse regarding urbanization and modernization dictated that people living in the city were not meant to grow any vegetables. This was also the time when she witnessed her parents cutting down the chimunhamunwane and blackberries and replacing them with a backyard fence made of reed. Secondly, the country was in the midst of a devastating civil war that severely interrupted food production and supply. Their Portuguese pastor said that the country was so cursed that even a chicken could not lay an egg.

Through the stories told by her grandmother, usually around the fire, she learnt about hunger in remote areas of Mozambique. Some of these tales remained with her throughout her childhood and shaped her views on how food matters and how different phases of food insecurity can drive people to do silly things.

The Man Who Stole Food from His Wife and Children’s Pot

One story that her grandmother told was about a married man who, at the time of hunger in the remote districts of Chibuto-Manjacaze and Panda in Gaza and Inhambane provinces, respectively, was summoned by the chief of the village to be part of the gazelle hunt. After the hunt, the chief distributed the meat to each family and also slaughtered some cows to distribute among his vassals. That man was concerned about high rates of hunger, so he did not inform his wife and children about the meat distributed by the chief. Rather, he told them that the chief advised them to store food because they would face hunger sometime in the future. The man further advised his wife and children to take care of cacana, a local name for the plant Momordica balsamica, of which the fruit and leaves are edible; he told them to dry matsawo or nhemba beans or whatever food items they managed to collect. He told them they were not to hunt animals or kill any cattle for consumption. The wife survived because she fed her children cacana. This man, however, hid in the bushes and stole food that the wife prepared for herself and the children. Later on, his family discovered that he had deceived them. As she was taught to be an obedient and good wife, she pardoned her husband and even prepared cacana for him as part of the family.

The Son-In-Law Who Stole the Chicken Leg

Another story the grandmother told her was of a son-in-law who visited his wife’s family for the first time and learned that one should not show hunger in that family. If he was served chicken, the only piece that he should eat was the gizzard (the muscular, walled part of the stomach) However, this man liked the leg so he made a plan to steal the chicken leg during the night. When he was caught, he hid the drumstick in his hut, but the groundnut curry sauce that the chicken had been cooked in was flowing down his face. He argued that it was a kind of sweat characteristic in his homeland.

The Man Who Hid the Bread Under His Armpit

At one point her mom hired a man to paint their house. This gentleman, who was their neighbour, was very greedy. Her mom went to his house early one morning while he was eating a sandwich made of fresh bread and sardines. When he heard her mom asking to enter, he hid the bread under his armpit. Her mom saw it and she was embarrassed because she had learned from her parents that food was meant to be shared. However, she also understood that this man had very little food and feared he would starve if he shared the bread with her mom.

These stories demonstrate the significance of food, not merely to people who are hungry but to the community. For example, it highlights some of the strategies that people have used to avoid hunger in order to guarantee food security. It is also these accounts of hunger and food security that question the value of a purely technical understanding of food security.

According to MASA (2016), the country recorded higher rates of acute food insecurity in 2005 and 2016 due to drought in the central and southern regions, which means that for thousands of households, food was and remains a luxury. The commercialization of the entire food system has only made the situation worse for residents in Xai-Xai.

Nowadays you are no longer authorized to enter into someone else’s machamba (land) and take some manioc or any fruit without being accused of theft. You have to buy. These are some changes that we are facing here. In the past it was accepted that someone could enter any machamba and take a piece of whatever he or she found to kill hunger. (Interview, October 5, 2017, Neighbourhood of Coca-Missava, Xai-Xai)

Nowadays, in this city where Raimundo was born, the fruits and vegetables that she had access to have been replaced by imported apples, grapes, peaches and kiwis—some of the very same fruit that her mother found unaffordable. One is barely able to find fish, mussels, clams or prawns. These have been replaced by pallone (bologna), Boerewors (sausage) and “plastic” chicken brought by mukheristas (cross-border traders) and sold at supermarkets and informal markets.

Yet the question remains whether food security and hunger as experienced by communities and households are the same concepts measured by researchers and governments, or are they two faces of the same coin? More important is the cumulative effect of a changing food system—the dominance of food retail; the disappearance of the backyard garden and, with it, affordable, locally produced maize; increased access to previously unaffordable food items, which are still unaffordable; and climate shocks—submitting local households and Xai-Xai residents to the mercy of market forces and disrupting cultural attachments to specific food items? Since consuming food goes beyond filling an empty stomach, for Xai-Xai residents and households, food security and hunger consist of more than accessing any food or adapting diets to eat food items available at local markets.

In recent decades, multiple stresses, including climate shocks, have severely impacted food security in Xai-Xai. Members of the Xai-Xai community are forced to bear the cost of these changes on food access and diet. Whereas Raimundo’s family and nearby neighbours managed to eat maize and rice daily, and chicken or beef on Sundays or special holidays such as Christmas, Easter or New Year’s Eve, on ordinary days they would eat matsawo and cacana. These vegetables were not purchased, as they grew in their backyards.

Conclusion

It is clear that food security in Mozambique poses a considerable challenge, made worse by climate shocks. It is imperative that we in the academy develop a clear understanding of hunger and food security within households and communities. Fieldwork done through the AFSUN and HCP research networks has generated information regarding the status of food security in Maputo and Matola, the largest cities of Mozambique. The Food, Urbanization, Environment and Livelihoods (FUEL) project is the first AFSUN project and HCP-associated project that focuses specifically on food security and hunger in secondary cities. Using their 2017 research done under the auspices of AURI, the authors took the opportunity provided by FUEL to revisit their findings from Xai-Xai, which sought to understand food security in secondary cities by employing qualitative methodologies.

The current analysis goes beyond the dominant traditional indicators used to analyze food security, such as the HFIAS, HDDS, MAHFP and scales of measurement that include “often,” “randomly,” “sometimes” and “never” in relation to eating food. The inspiration to adopt a set of qualitative research tools arose when some of the participants in the 2017 focus group discussions in Patrice Lumumba and Coca-Missava neighbourhoods opined that food security is your matter, that is, a researcher’s matter or the government’s matter, because Xai-Xai dwellers only need a dish of xima meal for their households. This statement was rooted in the respondents’ experience of hunger and starvation, and their acknowledgement that they no longer know how to access food outside the markets as they would have done in the past. Many Xai-Xai residents experience hunger and consider themselves food insecure despite the fact that the markets are stocked with diverse types of food ranging from vegetables, meat, cereals, tubers and all types of fruits. While it is true that hunger and poverty are part of the food security experience, it should also be true that city dwellers of Xai-Xai (and elsewhere) have the right to define their food security status for themselves. While the use of quantitative tools and assessments can be very useful for large-scale studies of food security, this chapter is an attempt to challenge scholars to broaden the concept of food security and expand the methodological tools employed.

To conclude, in Xai-Xai, measuring food security has to do with understanding the importance of xima, cacana and matsawo in the household diet and not necessarily asking about food items such as beef, bread, cooking oil or household income and expenditure. The changes in the Xai-Xai diet were also influenced by the city’s vulnerability to what have become commonplace climate shocks and by misguided notions of modernization and urban development where households “plant cement” instead of backyard gardens.