5. THE “SEARCH FOR SECURITY”: INFORMAL STREET FOOD VENDORS IN MATARIYA  - Cairo

Jörg Gertel and Said Samir

University of Freiburg, Germany, and Ain Schams University, Egypt

1. The socio-economic situation of the vendors, with particular regard for income and social security.

2. The conditions of stalls and the related equipment with a focus on investments, pennanence of location, and legal status.

3. The role of Street food commodities within the urban food system in regard to the spatial and socio-economic relationships to both the suppliers, and consumers in terms of turnover and food prices.

 
Street food vendors can be considered as part of the so-called “informal sector” For Egypt Hopkins. for example, delineates this sector as:

[Activities which are not officially noticed through registration and tax procedures, and which range from small-scale businesses to sporadic individual and sometimes illegal activities. The contrast is to formal economic activities, which take place within a visible institutional hierarchy or structure of some kind (a ministry, a firm, etc.), which are licensed, and which (if appropriate) keep accounts. The informal sector, as identified by most researchers, is highly structured or organized in its own way, so one should not construe “informal” to mean “unstructured” (1991, 1).]

However, the concept is also rooted in the tradition of dualistic approaches, opposing, for example, “traditional” and “modern” spheres of society, and “formal” and “informal” sectors of economy. What is neglected is the historical dimension of the (violent) integration of local economies into the world system (see KUPPINGER, this volume), and de facto existing articulations between the respective sectors (SANTOS 1979). “Informal” and “formal” economies are not opposite to each other and neither do they exclude each other; nor is the state - as the representative of formality -necessarily always identical with public interest (ScHIEL 1987). However, here we are more concerned with the shift in focus which was brought forward by ELWERT et al. (1983): Approaching the eveiyday practices of (urban) low income groups, these authors are less interested in defining an aggregated “catch all” concept and more concerned with the disaggregated grassroot level and the “economy for survival” of these groups. The “economy for survival” is characterized by the continuous “search for security”, which is, of course, articulated with and constrained by the forces of the world system. For the (economically) unsecured - ELWERT et at. argue - it makes more sense to split economic risks instead of maximizing income (1983). Their survival strategies, in attempt to cope with the lack of security, include combining different sources of income (such as subsistence production with income from informal and formal activities), maintaining the mobility of the division of labor within the household (including unpaid female labor, depending on migrant workers), and relying upon social networks in, for example, situations of individual crisis. Analyzing the role of street food vendors within the urban food system of Cairo, this paper argues, requires, therefore, an examination of how vendors and their families negotiate their “search for security” in evetyday life.