Majeed Malhas

Most of the bread consumed in Jordan today is made from imported wheat, despite the country once being agriculturally self-sufficient. Following IMF-led liberalization reforms, Jordan now imports 96% of its wheat, tying everyday subsistence to volatile global markets. In recent years, inflation has strained the state’s ability to sustain bread subsidies, long upheld as a nationalist promise of protection. In response, food sovereignty movements like the Al-Barakeh Wheat Foundation have emerged, leveraging the same nationalist discourse to critique state policy through sensibilities around preserving agrarian heritage and economic autonomy. This project explores how bread, simultaneously a basic commodity and national symbol, reveals tensions around the perceived rational and moral efficacy of neoliberal state policies, which erode the heritage and sovereignty they invoke to legitimize rule. Conducting 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Amman and rural Jordan, methods include interviews with farmers, activists, policymakers, and NGO officials, along with participant observation at markets and agricultural sites. The project examines how nationalist affect mediates the tension between moral obligations to feed the nation and the economic logics of global trade. In doing so, it shows how moral sensibility, economic rationality, and nationalist legitimacy are negotiated through struggles over the cost of bread.