In North American, ‘alternative’ tends to be used in a
rather more politicised discourse of oppositional activism where AFN’s can be seen as
contesting mainstream corporate industrial agro-food systems (Allen et al. 2003).
While in Western Samoa (Paulson and Rogers 1997), an alternative system arose to
provides subsistence security without isolation from the global economy. However,
while it is clear that there is much academic interest in the area of these alternative
systems of food provision, the nature of the alternatives is unclear (Watts, Ilbery and
Maye 2005)