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Motivation: Detailed empirical work on the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on food security is scant. Local management of food security has received little attention. Purpose: This article describes emergency food policies in Wuhan and Nanjing, China during lockdown in 2020 and their implications for household food security in the two cities. Methods and approach: Policy documents and background data describe the emergency measures. Online surveys of residents of two Chinese cities were used to gauge household food security. Findings: Despite the determined efforts of provincial and city governments to ensure that food reached people who were locked down in Wuhan, or subject to restrictions on movement in Nanjing, households experienced some decline in food security. Most households found they could not access their preferred foods. But a minority of households did not get enough to eat. Government had contingency plans for the pandemic that ensured that most people had sufficient, if not preferred, food. But not all households were fully covered. Policy implications: A more resilient system of food distribution is needed, including a relatively closed and independent home delivery system. Grassroots organizations such as residential community committees, property management organizations, and spontaneous volunteer groups need to be brought into the management of emergency food provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the recent emergence of alternative food networks in China in the context of widespread food quality concerns. Drawing on interviews and public blog posts, we illustrate how participants in these networks are moving beyond instrumental market relations and developing the collective agency necessary to participate in shaping China's food system. We argue that the initiators and participants in these alternative food networks are not only individual shoppers who 'vote with their chopsticks', but are also nascent activists deploying grassroots community organising strategies. We reveal how these networks are using inclusive and reflexive processes to build diverse networks, how they are using internet communications to extend their reach, voice dissent and engage in nascent 'bottom up' policy formation, and how they are building influential connections and actively, but unofficially, expanding linkages to broader emancipatory spaces of global and social justice movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of globalisation in the conventional food provision system have had widespread negative impacts on small-scale farmers. Yet, alternative food networks, which are characterised by more sustainable production/consumption practices and fairer trade relations, have increasingly been 'going global' and, in the process, have been integrating small-scale farms in the South. One such high-value export-led commodity is certified organic shrimp. International third-party certification schemes are becoming popular as a tool to verify the intangible attributes of such commodities. Using concepts of multifunctionality and agrarian change, this paper examines the implications of introducing an international environmental certification programme to a site where the 'peasantry' has been preserved and has limited integration in the global agro-food system. Drawing on a case study that examines the first certified organic shrimp production project in Vietnam, this paper concludes that the current movement towards post-productivism in the global North has potential to keep local farming practices in the global South by justifying the value of peasant-like production methods through international certification. As a result, the development path of agrarian transition might be reshaped into a form not necessarily pursuing industrialisation. This leads to the new interpretation of pre- and post-productivism beyond the North and South divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the evolution of land use and mangrove forest management in a coastal commune in Central Vietnam from its early period of environmentally sound management under a common property regime, through State and cooperative management, to individual household allocation under the economic reforms of the 1990s. It analyses in particular the introduction of shrimp culture and its environmental and socioeconomic consequences. The case study demonstrates that, while opening up many economic opportunities, Vietnam's economic reforms have had uneven impacts on income inequality. Like many cases in Asia and Latin America, the disruption of common property resources – through the introduction of aquaculture as a livelihood opportunity and producer of an export crop – leaves farmers indebted and natural resources polluted. But, ironically, it was the financially better-off aquaculture farmers, who had more capacity for risk-taking and investing, who ended up most indebted, in comparison with poorer farmers who had already sold their ponds. The latter were less integrated into the market economy and relied more on marine product collection. This paper suggests that attention to local contexts and histories can contribute to a better understanding of the causes and consequences of environment-poverty interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid socioeconomic and institutional changes in Vietnam since the early 1990s have opened up new geographical spaces for field research. Reflecting on the experiences of three doctoral student researchers engaged in distinct development geography fieldwork projects in Vietnam, this paper profiles some of the conditions and procedures for carrying out fieldwork in order to serve as a basis for comparison of changing ‘fieldwork possibilities’ in Vietnam and other developing and transitional socialist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the uneven experiences of decollectivisation, using Thai Nguyen province as a setting for an exploration of divergent outcomes of, and local responses to, land allocation. Ethnicity, blood relations and settlement history are identified as emerging axes of differentiation in new patterns of vulnerability regarding access to land. This trend is evidenced by the phenomenon of farmers who migrated to the region during the collectivisation period and were subsequently left landless as longer term residents from other ethnic groups reclaimed their ancestral lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Nguyen Van De and colleagues on the impacts of migration and intensification of farming practices on soil erosion and nutrient loss in southern Vietnam and another by Nguyen Dai Trung and colleagues on the need for better collaboration, and participatory and multidisciplinary research for sustainable land use in diverse ecosystems.