On Broker Exploitation and Violence: From Madalali to Cartel Bosses in the Food Aid Resale Economy of Tanzanian Refugee Camps

Clayton Boeyink

Development and Change, 2022, vol. 53, issue 5, 962-986

Abstract: It is a poorly kept humanitarian secret that wherever food aid is given, it is also sold, as recipients seek to vary their diets to include culturally desired food, start businesses, or deal with economic shocks. This holds true in Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania, the site of this research. While this article addresses the supply side of the World Food Programme resale system, its main focus is the demand side, providing one of the first in‐depth studies on what happens after the sale. Engaging with the political and development anthropology literature on brokers, the author introduces the intermediaries who make up this system, including low‐level madalali brokers and refugee and Tanzanian ‘bosses’. There is agreement within brokerage research of the moral ‘ambiguity’ or ‘ambivalence’ of these figures, a nebulous quality that is heightened by the seemingly innumerable different types of brokers. This article contends that a Marxian conceptualization of social class, beyond Bourdieu's widely applied social capital theory, is productive in understanding the threat of violence that a small cartel of bosses has set up in collusion with Tanzanian police to maintain the exploitative food aid resale pyramid. Members of this elite class are, in turn, ‘products and producers’ of a structurally violent encampment and aid system.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12697

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:devchg:v:53:y:2022:i:5:p:962-986

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0012-155X

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Development and Change from International Institute of Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().