“We Are Just Surviving”: The Paradox of Robust Homegardens in Northern Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Outside formal supply chains, Bosnian gardens provide meaningful contributions to food security through calories and culturally understood “good” food. Much of this food is ultimately sold, gifted, bartered, or paid in kind in a rural economy where labor is skilled and people have some means to produce, but cash is rare. Amid state failures to provide work and safety nets, garden networks of exchange, debt, and caregiving revive and transform the remains of Yugoslav village sociality in the 2020s. Yet in cash-poor and labor-squeezed rural communities, maintaining the ecological diversity of these montane environments presents a paradox: while providing nourishing and socially desired foods, these gardens cannot offer a desirable future to families who abandon homes to outmigration and work abroad. Food self-provisioning in northern Bosnia lays bare the aftermath of social and economic violence for environmental stewardship and rural belonging: while providing an important source of food security and sustaining networks of labor and exchange, Bosnian gardens are also a reverberation of profound socioeconomic gaps and unmet aspirations for economic growth. Even as they provide the physical means for social reproduction through food that is both culturally and culinarily nourishing, these gardens also represent deep ambiguities about rural futures in a mountainous region with high biodiversity, uncertain formal economies, and a desire to maintain a sense of home despite outmigration. Recognizing these tensions across gender, generation, and class demands a vision of agricultural sustainability centered around farmer labor, knowledge, and valuation.