Food Insecurity and Poverty in Sub-Sahara African Immigrant Population in Tarragona Province, Spain i

Abstract

According to a 2012 IMO report 49.3% African immigrants in Spain were without jobs in 2011, household poverty rates in the immigrant population (31%) was 12 times more than that of the autochthon population. Despite efforts to generate enough income to secure the most modest of living standards for their families or for themselves, Sub-Sahara African (SSA) immigrants in Tarragona Province are faced with precarious economic conditions and difficulties in obtaining and controlling resources. SSA immigrants demonstrate a stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions to alleviate and/or overcome the effects of these precarious conditions and provide food for themselves and their families. Adopting a framework of human agency, this article engages the ethnography of everyday life of SSAs in the context of food insecurity. Emphasis is placed on praxis (i.e. the action itself), on the tactics and strategies employed by SSA immigrants to manage and transform constraining situations that enable the very ‘habitus’ of the group.