Cash rather than contract: The re-emergence of traditional agrifood chains in post-communist Europe

•Traditional agrifood chains in post-communist Europe are largely unstudied.•Rural households produce most food in the largest post-communist countries.•Household production facilitated the emergence of traders in the fieldwork area.•Households and traders matter in food production even in areas with rapid collective farms dismantlement.

Usually considered the polar, informal opposite of the “modern procurement system” dominated by supermarkets, the “traditional system” has received only scarce attention in post-communist countries, even though it is credited with having had supplied most of the food produced in the largest countries throughout transition. This paper asks how did traditional agrifood chains re-emerge, in particular since “tradition” is hard to define in the post-communist context. It focuses on the role of land reform, the mixed-incomes rural household, and the farmer-trader dyad in explaining the return of the “traditional” in two post-communist countries, Ukraine and Romania. Data comes from an ethnographic study of agricultural value chains in the Ukrainian-Romanian border region of Bucovina.