Walk through almost any city or town in a low-income or middle-income country and you’ll pass them: the woman selling deep-fried fish from a cart, the mobile vendor with a bicycle full of vegetables, the kiosk operator who’s the only source of a hot meal within walking distance. Food systems employ an estimated 1.23 billion people globally, and a majority of those jobs are informal—unlicensed, unregistered or otherwise outside the reach of formal regulation. In low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) especially, informal vendors are not a marginal feature of how people eat; they are a linchpin of food security and livelihoods for over a billion people.
Informal food vendors: The invisible backbone of the world’s food system
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Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to create convincing fake political content and harder to tell what’s real. Now, a University of Missouri expert is helping voters navigate that changing information landscape ahead [...]
