Routes of Sustenance: Infrastructure and Food Security Strategies in Chukotka

The problem of food supply is especially poignant in the remote and hard to reach Arctic settlements. Therefore, local people have to develop their own food distribution strategies. They actively employ the alternative ways of food acquisition and accumulation to maintain a sense of their food security via the use of local infrastructure, networks of relatives and friends and technologies for self-production, processing and storage of products. The article describes the recent trends in food circulation in the Iul’tinskii district of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. The authors consider the existing model of food redistribution between the tundra camps, reindeer herding and coastal villages, as well as the district center. They analyze the impact that one of the largest Soviet projects in Chukotka – the Iul’tinskaia road had on food security practices of the local people. The emergence of new infrastructure has affected both their mobility and perception of food. The article demonstrates how a whole set of various state projects and commercial initiatives frame local nutritional needs, but at the same time can either hinder or contribute to their satisfaction. The relations between the infrastructural projects and the basic needs have both intersection points and “gaps” which require active regulation both by the members of the local community and the state. In this context, local people can be seen as the active agents who creatively use the existing in the region infrastructure in order to maintain their food securit