Global food security hinges on unregulated street vendors: How informal economies sustain nutrition, livelihoods, and urban resilience in low- and middle-income nations
Original framing: “Informal food vendors: The invisible backbone of the world's food system” — Phys.org
The rise of informal food vendors is directly tied to the collapse of post-colonial food systems, which were designed to extract resources rather than sustain local economies. Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s gutted agricultural subsidies, deregulated markets, and pushed small farmers into debt, forcing them into informal economies. This mirrors the *enclosure movements* of the 18th century, where land was privatized and peasants were displaced into urban informal labor. The current system repeats this pattern, where corporate agribusiness and global trade policies create conditions that make informal vendors the only viable option for survival. Without addressing these historical roots, policies will continue to treat symptoms rather than causes.
The informal food vendor economy is not a residual or accidental feature of global food systems but a systemic response to centuries of structural violence—from colonial land dispossession to neoliberal economic policies that prioritized corporate agribusiness over small-scale producers.
These vendors operate at the intersection of economic necessity and cultural resistance, preserving food sovereignty in the face of top-down homogenization. Their invisibility in policy debates is not due to inefficiency but to deliberate marginalization, as seen in the criminalization of their labor while corporate food chains operate with impunity. By restoring their historical and cultural context—such as the parallels to Indigenous food systems or the legacy of structural adjustment programs—we can see that their role is not just about survival but about reclaiming food as a communal right. Solutions must therefore center vendor-led cooperatives, decolonized urban policies, and digital inclusion, while acknowledging their artistic and spiritual dimensions as vital to their resilience. The trickster lens further exposes how the framing of vendors as 'resilient' obscures the exploitation they endure, revealing that their informal status is a product of systemic design rather than individual choice.