Dear food: Yuca’s relational role in sustaining precarious populations in Ecuador

Introduction

While the 2022 inflation rates of Venezuela and Argentina – 213% and 92%, respectively – are extraordinary by any standards, Latin America’s deep-rooted and persistent inequality means that the 8% average inflation rate (Álvarez, 2022) in the rest of the region still implies increased struggles for its majority populations to maintain families and livelihoods. This is particularly the case as the Latin American region experienced the most drastic drop in employment globally in 2020 (International Labor Organization, 2021). Since then, employment has slowly been recovering, although mostly in informal or precarious work, with women and young people the least likely to find stable and decently paid employment (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticasy Censos (INEC), 2021). In Ecuador, for example, only a third of the economically active population holds a full-time job and earns the basic income of $450/month or more, in a country where basic consumer goods cost a family of four $763/month (INEC, 2023).

How do precarious populations experiencing unmet needs sustain themselves? How do they nourish themselves not only materially but also in social and meaningful terms, and what is the relationship between objective and subjective sustenance? In this article, we argue that communities’ relationships to food helps to shape their experiences of crises. The French term la vie chère – dear life – simultaneously invokes affective relations, collective valuations, and high prices, pointing to the importance of all these dimensions in understanding experiences and responses to rising costs of living. In this sense, we show that specific affective food ecologies (Baldwin, 2016) can influence people’s possibilities for material sustenance.

Our study compares the importance of yuca – a regional term for the tuber also known as cassava and manioc – in a coastal and in an Amazonian province of Ecuador, areas in which relationships to yuca have been shaped historically and by expert production of knowledge on the tuber. Through the study of yuca, we seek to shed light on trajectories of social reproduction in contexts of scarcity, by looking at the ways that one product is differentially incorporated into livelihood strategies. We show that key to these responses are histories of colonization and exploitation of land and people that shape social and human-nature relations, as well as specialist studies that define and reinforce yuca’s relational role in diverse ecologies.

To show how varied affective relations with yuca intensify or mitigate social responses to economic hardships, even transforming the experiences of the hardships themselves, we proceed in three parts. In the first section, we introduce the importance of yuca materially both in economic and embodied terms, identifying useful concepts for the study of its relational role from recent literature in affective food ecologies (Carolan, 2014; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008), which incorporates perspectives from feminist geography, political ecology, and affect theory. The second section looks at the productive importance of the tuber in Ecuador, particularly in the fertile coastal province of Manabí where agro-industrial initiatives have long characterized Manabí’s incorporation into the nation. We will see in this second section that agronomists, development researchers, and government institutions in Manabí have encouraged a particular productive relation to crops, increasing farmers’ dependence on volatile global markets.

Finally, the third section shows biological and anthropological studies of how Kichwa Amazonian populations in Napo maintain relations with yuca which has helped to sustain women’s distinct role in the production and reproduction of food. The conclusions highlight the ways that a focus on affective ecologies helps us to understand responses to the present context of contemporary economic and social hardships: On the coast, market dependence has increased gender-specific precarity and inequalities, while in the Amazon, bioeconomic perspectives provide ambivalent hopes for the commercialization of local practices and knowledge.

We are how we eat

Cultivated in tropical regions, yuca can grow in difficult and diverse conditions and requires limited capital and labor, yet it nevertheless efficiently produces energy, yielding more calories per hectare than rice, wheat, or corn (Mahanty and Milne, 2016). In Brazil, for example, most of the caloric intake of poor populations is through yuca consumption. World production of yuca has increased three-fold since the 1980s and now represents the highest crop production by volume in Nigeria (Emperaire and Peroni, 2007). International development organizations and national economic policies have increasingly focused on its potentials, particularly in West Africa and Southeast Asia, where countries seek to leverage yuca’s many uses – animal feed, starch for cardboard, biofuel, among others – to increase its export; Indonesia saw that the average growth of yuca export volume from 2011 to 2016 increased by 96.21% per year (Rozi et al., 2022).

The cultivation of yuca in the Americas predates the arrival of Europeans by over 5000 years (Ribeiro, 1987). During the 16th century, merchants spread the tuber across Africa and Asia via colonial slave ships and later trade (Dufour, 1985), and it is currently produced and consumed widely in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, with most of its cultivation taking place by small-scale farmers in economically and ecologically marginal areas (Henry and Hershey, 2002; Hillocks et al., 2002). Despite its stigmatized stereotype as a ‘poor man’s crop’, yuca remains an essential source of energy for populations facing food insecurity in poor tropical soils (Dufour et al., 2016). With the intensification of climate and economic crises, yuca’s drought-resistance and ability to grow in marginal, infertile, and acidic soils promise to help feed burgeoning populations of the global south. It is now heralded as the ‘root crop of the century’ (Guillaume-Gentil, 2015).

For traditional Kichwa communities in the Amazon, yuca and its derivatives combined with fish have formed the core of their adaptive strategy, contributing to their resilience over time. The Makushi people, for example, ‘have relied on yuca as their staple food and its elaborate processing techniques have helped them withstand various challenges in transformations in their environment’ (Murrieta and Dufour, 2004). Yuca has a particularly central role in Amazonian indigenous people’s cosmology and in the biodiverse agroforestry spaces of Amazon chakras. These cultivations or chakras, planted as rotational crops among forest growth, do not depend on deforestation, are exclusively cultivated, and are cared for by women, nurturing systems of diverse flora and fauna that mimic the forest’s natural ecology. Yuca holds a special place in Amazonian chakras; it is of the few products that is considered kin and, more specifically, one’s own progeny (Guzmán, 1997). Women caring for yuca and their chakras constitute affective labor that is indissociable from caring for one’s own and collective well-being.

According to Zurita-Benavides (2017), the indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon ‘use and transform the forest in unique ways according to their own conceptions of the world’ (p. 496). Within the forests, there are countless edible crops, which occupy an important place in their worldviews. One of the main cultivated plants is yuca (Descola, 2005), which is thus central to both symbolic and social relationships among different Amazonian peoples. Not only is yuca a ‘fundamental dish of the Kichwas – the bread, the rice, with which they make food’ (Napo indigenous woman, 2022, interview) and ‘our main food, breakfast, lunch, and snack . . . as juice, as bread, as flour’ (Napo Kichwa farmer, 2022, interview) – but it also represents women’s traditional production that complements men’s hunting (Uzendoski, 2010).

Amazonian care for the yuca plant thus shapes and drives social relations: Achuar women take care of the yuca plants as if they were their own children and thus ensure the family’s food. From early ages, boys hunt, and girls cultivate; they build their relationships with hunting and agriculture as productive activities that establish connections between producer and product, which at the same time reinforces the cultural constructions of the concepts of person and gender. For María Antonieta Guzmán (1997),

A person’s gender may seem to be part of the core or essence of a person; however, qualities acquired by learning to grow yuca, to make pottery, to fish and to hunt – activities and products generated from extensive knowledge received from relatives – complete and realize this aspect of the core of a person (p. 19).

Contrasting Amazonian indigenous populations’ integration of the tuber into their biodiverse, affective, and spiritual relations to yuca’s productive and developmental importance on Ecuador’s coast helps to highlight two very different embodied experiences of the cultivation and consumption of yuca. As Michael Carolan (2011) suggests, a relational approach focused on the lived experience of food can help to bridge consumption-oriented food studies and production-oriented agricultural studies. In his own work, Carolan (2011) traces the historical development of representational knowledge of nature, which is the epistemological basis of ‘conventional agriculture with its emphasis upon highly transportable knowledge, such as feed charts for livestock and standardized [chemical] application rates’ (p. 17).

Affective ecological approaches, in contrast to such knowledge, incorporate feminist geography’s emphasis on corporeal experiences (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013) and affect theorists’ relational ontologies (Ngai, 2015; Probyn, 2005), to help identify specific embodied connections between humans, crops, and foods. In this perspective, human coexistence with the non-human is a ‘belonging to the land’ (MacGill, 2014) that also entails a ‘belonging of a body to a world of encounters; or a world belonging to a body of encounters’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 2). Examining contemporary transformations in agrodiversity and food systems as the result of interactions between humans and non-humans, we seek to challenge the developmental notion of ‘food insecurity’ by underscoring its basis in political ecologies that frame our ontological relationship to crops and cultivation (Carney, 2014).

If we take embodied food politics seriously, ‘food security’ is not only bound up with what we eat but also with how we care for what we grow and eat. Care, in this sense is what

we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40).

Following Frazier (2018), the term ‘food ecologies’ seeks to ‘capture the interrelationships – economic, cultural, and political – among human communities, non-human organisms, foodways, and agro-environments’ (p. 19). It is a political ecology insofar as it highlights the politics of nature necessary to ‘re-embed food’s materiality, agency and meaning in place’ (Moragues-Faus and Marsden, 2017: 281). As we will see in the following sections, such perspectives help us to contrast situated and embodied knowledges of cultivation with the representational, transportable knowledge of agriculture that frames responses to food crises as technical problems (Nichols and Del Casino, 2021). We may thus examine the consequences of each of these forms of knowing and being for marginal cultivators’ ability to sustain their cultivations and their families.

Securing food on the Ecuadorian coast ¹

The mid-20th century’s Green Revolution was driven by hopes for feeding the world’s growing populations while increasing US political and economic influence in postcolonial states. US researchers successfully increased wheat production in Mexico through the development of high-yield grain varieties and carefully directed the use of fertilizers and irrigation, leading to the establishment of the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in 1963. In 1971, the Center was one of the first implementing centers of the World Bank-led Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), along with three other agricultural research centers established to improve the productivity of staple crops in the 1960s – the International Rice Research Institute based in the Philippines, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture of Nigeria, and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) established in Colombia. The CGIAR, funded in large part by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, has since grown to include 15 international agricultural research centers.

The CIAT in Colombia began working with Ecuador's National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIAP) in the 1980s to study the possibilities of yuca production to contribute to alleviating hunger and poverty and supporting local and national development. In this context, the Ecuador yuca project began to take shape in the mid-1980s with the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, INIAP, and CIAT. With material and technical support from CIAT, INIAP’s agricultural scientists worked to increase productivity in its cultivation, while government and development institutions coordinated with CIAT to encourage micro-entrepreneurial ventures to process and commercialize yuca products.

These initiatives found fertile ground, literally, in the coastal province of Manabí, where one of INIAP’s Experimental Stations is located. With access to both the sea and arable valleys, the region has been characterized since the colonial period by its agricultural and commercial importance. Land in Manabí, consequently, has long been held by dominant classes – first colonial powers, later Republican criollos, and more recently powerful economic families – and its use has been driven by the agro-industrial export crops of coffee, cocoa, and bananas, leading to profound social and land distribution inequalities. Agricultural development projects sought to exploit yuca’s potential to mitigate these inequalities, particularly in the face of persistent lack of stable employment.

Yuca production was not only aimed at consumption – although yuca remains a central ingredient in everyday dishes throughout Ecuador – but also, importantly, as feed for the growing shrimp industry. By the end of the 1980s, Ecuador had become the largest shrimp exporter in the world, and the yuca’s starch hovered in the water, neither sinking to the ocean floor nor floating to the surface, making it an ideal basis for shrimp feed. As an INIAP researcher who worked with the yuca project from its beginning explained, the ‘élite material’ from the varieties were introduced from CIAT in Colombia, which were selected, tested, and developed in the Ecuadorian experimental station. According to this researcher, thanks to CIAT’s efforts, ‘several countries that previously had no yuca program at all, or very minor efforts, developed national plans for yuca and established research teams to carry them out’ (INIAP researcher, 2023, interview).

Agronomy researchers based at INIAP – with technical assistance and support from CIAT – evaluated genetic diversity and developed varieties for productivity and adaptability. A yuca variety with high yield for starch was developed and distributed, not only to feed shrimp but also for other uses including industrial uses such as cosmetics, glue, paper, and carton and in textile finishings. Another yuca variety developed by INIAP produced more flour, while the most recent variety named El Rendidor – the ‘highly productive’ one – was developed to yield more yuca for consumption. Through the late 1990s, many farmers in districts that incorporated INIAP-developed yuca varieties or benefited from INIAP and CIAT-supported Associations of Yuca Producers and Processors were able to sustain their entire farm with yuca production.

The relationship that Manabí farmers maintain with the INIAP-developed yuca varieties is ambivalent, as they often pin their economic hopes on its productivity yet recognize their preference for traditional varieties. As one Manabí farmer admitted, pointing to yuca growing near his house, ‘That’s a native variety, we have it for our family to eat . . . we farmers live with this one, you make it into tortillas to eat . . . It produces less but tastes much better’ (Manabí farmer, 2023, interview).

Not only is the productive variety less desirable, but it also degrades more quickly. An INIAP researcher explained:

When the farmer begins, because it’s new material, cultivation produces more than 400 quintals, more than 300 quintals. But as time passes, the material begins to degrade . . . these varieties are from the 90s. So, in 2004 or 2005 there was a biological improvement of the material. Not a molecular improvement, but a cleaning. Once the yuca starts to grow, you take out the meristems [embryonic tissue which are growing, actively dividing cells] and clean them, make sure there are no diseases. So, the material is cleaned, and you have refreshed material . . .. We don’t do that here in [Manabí], that must be done in Quito (INIAP researcher, 2023, interview).

This reflects farmers’ complicated experiences with high-yield varieties more generally, such as hybrid corn which can only be planted once; the second time when it is planted, it grows poorly, with ‘not all stalks producing cobs, and not all cobs full of grains’ (Manabí farmer, 2023, interview).

High-yield varieties are not only accompanied with specific control instructions but are sold as ‘kits’, with an entire ‘technological packet’ sold to the farmer for cultivation. For example, if urea is not used as a fertilizer for specific products, the crops will not produce as expected, since the variety was produced precisely for specific conditions of care. The price of urea has risen in the last decade from $12–$15 to $38–$40. Farmers are clear that the ‘agro-service’ technological packets ‘make us dependent. Because it’s pure technology transfer, external, foreign chemicals which poison our soil, our water, our children’ (Rural organization leader, 2023, interview). Furthermore, the development and incorporation of new variants of yuca has led to a decrease in the diversity of local varieties.

This dependence is increased by loans by the Banco Fomento (Promotion Bank), which continually adjusts its loans depending on market projections: ‘And the next year they decided to have loans for cattle . . . and one of the requirements is financial information provided by the agro-service’ (Manabí farmer, 2023, interview). Interviewees repeatedly pointed to the land and with a sweeping gesture indicated, ‘All this was cultivated with coffee’, or with cocoa, with banana, with castor beans, with pastures, with corn, with passion fruit. Now, fields and fields are filled with dragon-fruit cultivation. As one farmer mentioned ‘The problem is going to be in 5 or 6 years, when everyone is going to stop growing dragon-fruit because there is over-production of dragon-fruit and not enough market’ (Manabí farmer, 2023, interview).

These successive agricultural ‘booms’ depend on speculative agro-services and banks that tell farmers what profitable products they will provide seeds for, will buy, or will provide loans for, based on the shifting winds of global demands. One farmer told us that ‘There is a good project now to grow balsa wood . . . There will be huge exportation of balsa wood to China, that’s what they told us. And they’re giving out loans to plant that balsa’. The same farmer noted, ‘China is sweeping up everything that is grown here in Manabí’ (Manabí farmer, 2023, interview).

The agricultural and technological expertise that backs these projections are founded on knowledge abstracted from local and tangible conditions. As Carolan (2011) notes, the abstraction of this knowledge allows it to ‘travel well’ (p. 17) and provides justification for the changing cash crops and commercial ventures which are the domain of men in farming families. Women are traditionally in charge of the sustenance crops for the family, which always include native yuca plants, which feed not only the family but also the small animals that women care for.

During the Manabí yuca project in the 1980s and 1990s, the Ministry of Agriculture in collaboration with CIAT and INIAP helped to establish Associations of Yuca Producers and Processors to improve farmers’ gains from the increased regional production and national market demand. Like agricultural scientists’ hybrid high-yield varieties, development experts proposed these associations with the objective of commercialization, agro-industrial efficiency, technological diffusion, and the productive organization of farmers.

Although these associations were mostly made up of men, gender and development ‘best practices’ also encouraged the establishment of a women’s yuca association in which women could work and generate income. A technician who worked on this project noted that because the project did not consider everyday gender-specific cultivation and family practices, the project did not necessarily lead to greater independence and autonomy for women, but rather more conflicts within their families, increased work burdens, and the formalization of submissive activities that are part of women’s work with yuca (Caballero et al., 2018). The transformation of women’s roles through rural productive projects reflects a broader tendency of gendered and unequal incorporation into market dynamics. As dependence on global agricultural markets increases, so does vulnerability to its volatility.

Furthermore, as is the case throughout the developed and developing world, rural to urban migration has shifted possibilities for sustainability in rural communities. As a consultant to the Manabí yuca project maintains,

The sale of yuca was so successful that the partners began to have money and began to send their children to the city to study. Once they sent their children to the city to study, they became professionals, they stayed in the city to work and did not return to the country. The fact that they did not return weakened the [yuca production] organizations because the people got older, the organizations were abandoned and today not even one of them exists (Yuca project researcher, 2023, interview).

At the same time, investment in yuca production, not only in Ecuador but throughout Latin America, has not been adequate to keep it competitive in the agricultural and commercial worlds. As a crop traditionally grown and utilized by the poor, yuca in development perspectives has been defined most readily by its potential as a vehicle for linking the rural poor to growth markets, in response to the complex, interacting effects related to urbanization, rising prices, evolving trade policy, and trends in other food crops, including subsidized US wheat exports to Latin American countries.

The agricultural production of yuca on the Ecuadorian coast reflects the way that ‘technological innovations and competing scientific knowledge claims are becoming central elements in food system dynamics’ as well as their governance (Moragues-Faus and Marsden, 2017: 282). The epistemological character of yuca cultivation research in Manabí relegates embodied yuca cultivation practices that constitute women’s caring for subsistence crops as unimportant. In the context of Manabita’s economic dependence on changeable cash crops and labor markets, this has led both to their lands’ increased biophysical dependence on agricultural inputs, as well as to a parallel increased vulnerability for its rural populations, that is, ‘a broader loss of control over their life and their livelihood’ (Nichols, 2023: 13).

The biologist, the anthropologist, their subject, and her beloved ²

In contrast to yuca’s developmental role in the coastal province of Manabí, yuca in the Amazon has had a very different place in the food, cultures, and gender relations of indigenous groups since its domestication in the Amazon basin over 3000 years ago. Knowledge of yuca in the Amazon context is largely produced by anthropologists studying its centrality in indigenous cosmologies and by biologists seeking to understand its role in the biodiverse agroforestry spaces of Amazon chakras.

In our case, we are interested in further exploring the ways in which the Kichwa populations of Napo, particularly women, relate to the chakra and crops such as yuca. For Coq-Huelva et al. (2017), “Kichwa chakras are specific agroforestry systems that cannot be understood without considering ecological and social embeddedness. From an ecological point of view, chakras can be considered as an evolution of the humid Amazonian forest. In fact, forest areas are still present in most farms and represent more than 40% of their overall surface. From a social perspective, chakras are the result of the embodiment of a set of values fundamental to the Kichwa worldview. Chakras thus provide Kichwa families with strategic food resources for confronting the dramatically changing socio-economic context of the Ecuadorian Amazonian Region” (Coq-Huelva et al., 2017: 15).

Fruit, artisanal, edible, medicinal, and ornamental timber species are produced in the Kichwa chakra, as are endemic and domestic fanua for community and commercial family consumption (Vélez, 2017). For Toledo (2021), this agroecological system has been transformed in recent decades: ‘After the boom of organic markets, the chakra became a space for the interrelation of knowledge, in which ancestral knowledge is combined with technical and scientific practices’ (p. 16). In this context, the Kichwa chakra generates food for subsistence, such as yuca, as well as cultivations for commercialization, such as fine aroma cocoa.

Without the socio-economic centrality of commercial crops that developed historically on the Ecuadorian coast, the kichwa cultivation of yuca in the Amazon – identified with women and nurtured by their care – remain principal products of kichwa Amazonian chakras. Amazonian anthropologist Michael Uzendoski, in dialogue with Descola (2005), comments on the kin relation that exists with yuca in Kichwa communities of Napo:

Amazonians conceptualize yuca from perspective of consanguinity. Yuca is a substantially a blood relation. So yuca is the essence of kinship in that sense. Animals are understood through the model of marriage. . . For example, when you go to hunt an animal it’s because your in-laws in the spiritual world give you that animal. That is called affinity. The relationships of consanguinity versus affinity. Yuca in particular represents the former relationship (Amazonian anthropologist, 2023, interview).

In this sense, yuca in the Amazon can be understood as a source of resistance and identity. James Scott (1990), whose Domination and the Arts of Resistance was originally published in 1990, has developed the notion of tubers as subaltern crops, as they grow under the ground and are difficult to regulate. They thus cannot be easily taxed or monitored, nor do they have seeds, which is a main way that crops are incorporated into market dynamics. Guerrillas and underground organizations have used the tubers as their food base. Unlike other crops, yuca does not spoil if it is left unharvested once it is matured. Uzendoski continues: ‘You can go to the jungle, plant a yuca, and you can’t see it at all. And you come back in eight months, and you can eat’ (Amazonian anthropologist, 2023, interview).

It is no surprise, then, that given indigenous organizations’ historically contentious relationship with extractive interventions – from rubber extraction in the Amazon in the early 20th century, through internal settler colonialism in the mid-20th century to contemporary petroleum and mineral extraction – these populations and organizations continue to value the production of yuca. The Federation of Indigenous Organizations of Napo has made the production of yuca a main axis of its work; contemporary colonialism through market incorporation can be resisted if people go back to their chakras, grow yucca, and feed their families (Female indigenous leader, 2023, interview).

Amazonian indigenous organizations in Ecuador developed a now widely recognized ‘living forest’ (Kawsak Sacha in Kichwa) ³ proposal, which identifies the material and spiritual relationship indigenous people establish with the living forest and the beings that inhabit it. Key in the definition of this proposal has been collaboration between indigenous intellectuals and other academics and anthropologists. The vision of the ‘living forest’ declares that indigenous people’s resistance to extraction emerges from their material and spiritual relationship with their environment and the beings that inhabit it. Such recognition seeks to protect biodiverse cultivation and communities from the deforestation and degradation that centuries of colonization and resource extraction have implied for Amazon territories and peoples.

Kichwa women’s cultivation of yuca embodies the ‘living forest’ proposal’s cosmological, relational, and affective understanding of sustainability. Yuca’s reproductive role as part of a non-extractive assemblage contrasts with the food’s economic or productive role in development projects. If such projects only attend to yuca’s economic potentials, they finally increase market dependence and the extractive gendered logic of capitalist relations.

Although the Kawsak Sacha ‘living forest’ proposal seeks the ideal coexistence of socio-spatial reproduction and commons beyod the human, we understand that its relational ontology nevertheless exists alongside capitalist logics that subalternize nature and turn it into a fundamental part of the real subsumption of capital. Coba and Bayón (2020), for example, suggest that the ‘living forest’ proposal is managed ‘in complex scenarios, in scales traversed by different power coordinates, in unexpected assemblages between life perspectives’ (p. 146). Thus resistance through Kawsak Sacha principles is confronted with its suporters’ constant economic needs. For Vélez (2017), this means that autonomous reproduction is subordinated to market dependencies; labor is incorporated into the workforce, chakra products are commercialized, and more food is made inaccessible for local consumption.

Chakra products’ dependence on market dynamics leads to the domestication of women’s work and reflects not just the devaluation of women’s work but also its incorporation in service of capitalist relations of accumulation. As we saw earlier in development projects on the coast of Ecuador, women’s continued central and active role in yuca cultivation is devalued when crops are incorporated into productive contexts.

In contrast, Kichwa women’s connection to yuca’s cultivation continues to represent a highly valued relationship among women:

My mother taught me, gave me the power to plant yuca. Power is the moment when we learn to clean the soil, to know the root of the plant and to clean its leaves. The power is transmitted from generation to generation, from mothers to daughters (Female Kichwa farmer, 2023, interview).

Anthropologist Maria Antonieta Guzman (1997) explains,

Gender is closely linked to the internalization of skills that, in principle, can be considered as external. . . Gender is developed and completed to the extent that she acquires certain skills, which are incorporated into the person’s body and externalized in certain products (p. 59).

These gender-specific relations acknowledge the interdependency not only of human but also non-human actors, exemplifying care as a form of ‘material vital doing’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 90). These forms of care challenge ontological assumptions that separate humans, nature, and food, instead showing how the cultivation of food produce affective ecologies. The ‘affective turn in the agrifood literature attempts to show food in the making . . . as it is a process that cannot be divorced from the embodied practices, socio-institutional arraignment and cultural conventions from whence it came’ (Carolan, 2014: 3). Biologists, in fact, have found that forms of care and social interaction shape biological characteristics of diverse yuca varieties (Peña-Venegas et al., 2014). The gendered knowledge and memories that are part of yuca’s cultivation are embodied, affective, and situated.

In fact, a biologist we spoke to described yuca’s resilience in vital and feminine terms, to explain its tolerance to different climactic conditions, particularly drought:

Yuca has special stomas on her leaves. When she sees that humidity is decreasing, she closes her stomas. We’ve sometimes seen that yuca does not allow her leaves to fall, but instead bends them when she sees a lot of sun. It’s that she’s closed her stomas to preserve the humidity. It’s a defense mechanism that the yuca has (Biologist, 2023, interview).

Such an interpretation points to the ways that affect theory ‘disrupts both discrete notions of embodied selfhood and static notions of environment, encouraging us to trace the trajectories of transcorporeal encounters that are intricate and dynamic’ (Bladow and Ladino, 2018: 8). In this sense, environments and ecologies are understood to be unstable and emergent, with human and non-human agents generating and shaping them.

Contemporary processes of social transformation of the Amazon have also shifted local ecologies and populations’ hopes and needs for development and market incorporation. Since the state-led neo-extractivist period began in Ecuador and the Latin American region, the intensification of extraction and the expansion of the oil and mining frontiers have been justified to fund the fight against poverty, with primary-goods export surplus allocated to social programs, particularly during the period of high primary commodity prices (Acosta, 2017; Burchardt et al., 2016). Although yuca and the chakra have allowed families and communities to sustain themselves in critical periods, in the context of increasing costs for Amazonian populations, women have extended their chakras to earn income to manage the reproduction of their families’ lives, particularly their children’s education. As Karen Toledo (2021) writes, the chakra becomes a ‘social space of transformations, permanence and cultural resistance for Napo Runa producers’.

Paradoxically, while the definition and study of interdependent ecologies by social and biological scientists have made these ecologies more defensible, they have also made them more marketable. Local entrepreneurial spirit has increasingly turned to ‘selling’ knowledge and experiences of the cultivation of yuca and the chakra. In coordination with provincial government institutions, local organizations succeeded in obtaining official recognition of the chakra as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. This recognition seeks to protect biodiverse cultivation and communities. Nevertheless, provincial government professionals emphasize as often its importance as a ‘certification’ for chakra-produced goods that will better position them in the market.

Such commercialization is no doubt necessary for populations’ increasing incorporation into national economic dynamics, as agrodiversity continues to be transformed, along with strategies for the use of subsistence resources (Silva et al., 2017). The diversification of Amazonian populations’ work has taken place through the sale of their agricultural and agroforestry products, through tourism initiatives, and through increased participation in paid employment. An entrepreneurial spirit has taken hold of local initiatives in the Amazonian city of Tena capital of Ecuador’s Napo province. The provincial government holds regular fairs for local producers and designates locally made or based products with the NapoMarka certification. The hope is that tourism will ‘help conserve nature, conserve the family, the community, while having some income. Tourism is a better resource, it won’t make us sick or make our animals move far, far away’ (Napo Kichwa farmer, 2023, interview). Our study suggests that affective ecologies can not only help us to understand but will also help shape yuca’s contribution to resilience as biodiverse ecologies and cosmologies are not only recognized but also commercialized.

Conclusions: Affective food ecologies and precarious affiliations

The pandemic, climate, and economic crises have thrown into stark relief both economic and food vulnerabilities deriving from globally structured and locally lived inequalities, as well as responses to these urgent needs. As we have shown earlier, provisioning and sustenance require coordinated work, not just by public authorities or institutions but also by collective, provisional, and even multispecies arrangements. We have argued that an affective ecological approach allows us to understand these arrangements and their consequences, influenced by territorial histories and the influence of expert interpretations. What is at stake in the economic and developmental role of yuca in the coastal region of Ecuador and in its role in the affective and interdependent ecologies of the Amazon is not simply an economy of survival but more generally a dispute around social wealth, under contemporary conditions of crisis.

While precarity names the vulnerability of our lived condition of interdependence (Butler, 2011), we have seen that particular configurations of food systems have gendered implications for inequalities. A key component for the analysis of food systems is a relational consideration of the interconnections between subsistence and reproductive labor and their interdependence with economic reproduction. This highlights the ways in which these connections challenge constructed distinctions between social production and natural reproduction that are central to the economic appropriation of gendered labor and resources and its consequent inequalities (Federici, 2020; Strauss and Meehan, 2015; Mezzadri, 2019). Appropriations, at both the practical and macro scales, depend on the subjective scales of differentiation and devaluation of people and environments (Moore, 2018).

The devaluation of women’s work and the separation of our affective co-constitution with nature embody the particular forms by which contemporary productive and extractive relations work. And these, in turn, impact the food ecologies of already vulnerable populations, from the encouragement of agricultural monoculture and its consequent dependency to the direct impact that violence against women has on food security (Hatcher et al., 2022) to climate changes that have made famine a cyclical phenomenon. Affective food ecologies allow us to bring together political ecological and feminist perspectives to better understand and interact with these emergent and contingent processes.

These affects and ecologies are dynamic. An academic interviewed in Manabí commented that a visiting Haitian technician was shocked and insulted when he was served yuca. He understood it as a disrespect, that he was not considered worthy of a better meal (Yuca agronomist, 2023, interview). Nevertheless, yuca – as quinoa and other ‘exotic’ foods before it – is now enjoying a boom in national and international markets.

Dozens of business studies published in the last decade have sought to identify markets for internal consumption of the province’s iconic yuca bread and for international export of multiple yuca products, from starch to processed yuca chips (e.g. Sabando, 2017; Taco, 2022; Zambrano, 2015). Yet not only are entrepreneurial initiatives unreliable insofar as development projects increase heteronomy, but the affective ecology of processed and industrialized food allows for a specific ‘epistemic distance’ (Carolan, 2006) which makes it more difficult for consumers to understand the food systems in which they are imbricated. Although these initiatives, or redistributive social policies that characterized the neo-extractive period in the region, may help marginal populations sustain themselves materially, they place more emphasis on economic sustenance than on the kinds of relations with food that contribute to an attention to our interdependent relationship to our environment.

Although productivism remains at the center of food security analyses and initiatives (Nisbett, 2019), interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight interdependence allow us our role in interconnected processes of cultivation and consumption. An affective food ecology perspective encourages us to see farming and food systems as sets of ‘constituent practices which are bundled in different ways through time’ analytically highlighting the mechanisms and contingencies of any structural ordering, implying a re-conceptualization of human-nature relations, and suggesting an understanding of technology as an expression and stabilization of modes of ordering (Darnhofer, 2020: 515).

This perspective may very well help us to forge responses to market marginalization that do not increase market dependence. On the Ecuadorian coast, such marginalization has most recently translated into opportunistic penetration by narco-economic organizations that offer disenfranchised and precarious Ecuadorians possible means to sustain and feed their families. Ruthless violence along the coast has increased exponentially.

We often think of preparing food as completely separate from violent extraction. Through understanding the affective, ecological, and political economic dimensions of food, we have examined the articulation of disparate and unequal contexts for sustainability, through the organization of diverse elements that constitute specific political socialities, living assemblages, and inventions against precarity. Yuca’s differential incorporation into responses to multiple and increasingly acute crises highlight the ways local histories and expert interpretations of social, biological, agricultural, and developmental dynamics shape contemporary social and human-nature relations, understandings of common life and futures, and possibilities for negotiating and disputing existence.