Urban food security and urban food systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
Thank you for the useful and provocative document. I hope that the comments made will be useful. I write from the perspective of the work we have conducted with the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) in 11 cities in 9 southern African countries and our Consuming Urban Poverty project, which focuses on secondary cities in Africa.
My comments do not speak directly to all four of your questions. I support the various interventions that have been made, particularly those that speak of the need to more closely align the work to nutrition concerns.
1. Many of the key issues are addressed. My fundamental concern with the document is the assumption of the strength of ongoing rural-urban linkages. As urban growth is increasingly the result of natural growth, and as the food system becomes ever more globalized, it is likely that these connections are just one kind of connection that cities have. Initial work from one of our projects tracking where fish sold by traders in a Copperbelt town in Zambia has found that although some fish is regionally procured, much of it originates in Namibia or even China. Likewise, at the Market in Kisumu, Kenya, the eggs had come from Uganda, and the chickens in a market in Maputo, Mozambique, from Brazil. If we are tracing food from field to fork we will see strong rural-urban linkages, but perhaps if we look from fork to field, a different set of linkages become evident. Both local and distance linkages are important for the resilience of the food system, and for rural livelihoods.
My concern about the focus on the city-region food system is that it encourages neglect of the global players shaping the food system and the ways in which powerful actors are ignored. Many of the policy responses that emerge as a result of this kind of framing are about supporting small scale farmers and perhaps traders, without considering the need to regulate and govern that large actors driving food system and consumption change.
The work on climate change could be elaborated to consider the impact of climate change along all points of the food system from production to consumption, and to consider the vulnerability of different types of food flow at different points (for example, in what ways is the supply chain (and storage component) of chicken vulnerable to climate change if you consider a supermarket supply chain that may cross continents and if you consider a chicken reared by a local small holder sold live in a local market?).
3. Governance: The point about decentralization is an important one, however, we have a concern that decentralization without an extension of the better understanding of food security issues in cities on the part of national and local governments will mean that policy and governance responses will merely reflect the “urbanization” of food security programming conceived in the rural realm (namely the promotion of urban agriculture). Without a clear understanding of the spatial and structural drivers of food insecurity in urban areas, policy and programmes will be poorly aligned, with local government merely implementing programmes from higher levels of government rather than “speaking up” to help formulate appropriate responses.
A second point within the governance discussions in the role of non-state actors. There are a number of authors who have been critical of the promotion of public-private partnerships in development, particularly within the realm of food security where large private sector players are viewed as having an important role in accelerating the nutrition transition. I would welcome a more nuanced representation of the role of non-state actors, and a broadening of the scope of who “non-state actors” are (for example, to what extent are small-scale traders and their associations viewed as non-state actors?).
Finally, the document is correct in highlighting the importance of secondary cities. It is important however, to note that these secondary cities have particular economic vulnerabilities, such as dependence on one industry (as in the case of cities in the Copperbelt Region of Zambia). If that industry should fail, the impact on food security and rural urban linkages is profound. A more important point is that these secondary cities may also have governance challenges, associated with limited capacity within government and a lack of supporting institutions.
4. In terms of value add, I think it would be important for the CFS to provide connections between the multiple large-scale research and policy projects working on city region food systems and urban food systems. Further, the issue of urban food insecurity is largely off national and local policy agendas. In order for it to become a part of national and local debates, it will be necessary for global agencies to raise its profile in international discussions. This is a key role for the CFS.
Other comments:
There appear to be some inconsistencies within the document. This is most likely the result of the authors managing such wide ranging and often conflicting literature. However, I think that some of these inconsistencies need to be recognized and addressed.
For example, much of the document suggests that urbanization is largely the result of migration from rural to urban, and that this sets up new and deeper forms of rural-urban linkages. However, on p. 7 it is noted that from 2000-2010 less than half the world’s urban population growth was the result of migration. If cities’ population growth in increasingly the result of natural growth, this would seem to be a challenge to the notion of increased rural-urban linkages.
While I fundamentally agree with the material in the first paragraph of p.8 that talks about how current dominant measures of poverty may under-estimate urban poverty (Satterthwaite’s perspective), the point is a little lost in the narrative. This could be strengthened, as it really gets to the heart of why the urban has not been an area of focus by agencies working on food security, and also why the urban is different and requires different responses.
At the start of the consumption patterns section changing diets are attributed to rising incomes. However, the second and third line of p. 9 contradict this. I would support the fact that increasingly consumption of ultra processed foods is an indicator of poverty as much as one of wealth. This suggests that there are some fundamental issues within the food system that require addressing.
I found the final section of the first paragraph of p. 10 hard to follow. Is it possible to make this clearer?
Dr. Jane Battersby
The document has done well to identify these 7 key (and interlinked) issues.
In response to the first prompt.
1) I believe that these 7 are well selected and address many of the key concerns going forward. However, I wonder if there is a need to address two issues more overtly - although they do thread through the text. The first is the role of large scale private sector actors and Big Philanthropy in shaping the food system and food system politics. It is implicit in the framing of the first key issue, but I believe it warrants far greater attention. Bene's 2022 paper addresses why this is essential (Béné, C., 2022. Why the Great Food Transformation may not happen–A deep-dive into our food systems’ political economy, controversies and politics of evidence. World Development, 154, p.105881.) And in the wake of the wide spread criticism of the UNFSS last year and the role of these actors, it seems important to address. This is even more evident in the work on nutrition transitions as per Phil Baker, Ron Moodie inter alia.
The second issue the explicit of inclusion of enhancing Agency of consumers and food systems actors within food systems transformation. This is implicit, paricuarly in key issue 5, but given the HLPE 2020 report framing, I would have expected a stronger focus on enhancing agency and on addressing factors that undermine agency.
In response to the second prompt
2) a) Key issue one needs to be more overt about the power of the corporate sector is shaping food systems and its politics (see above)
b) Within key issue 2 there could be a stronger presentation of the extent and nature of urban food insecurity (perhaps building on Tefft, J., Jonasova, M., Adjao, R. and Morgan, A., 2017. Food systems for an urbanizing world and perhaps focussing on dietary change e.g. Demmler, K.M., Ecker, O. and Qaim, M., 2017. Supermarket shopping and nutritional outcomes: a panel data analysis for urban Kenya (No. 858-2016-60246)..). Within the focus on urban there needs to be consideration of the drivers of transformation of urban food systems from an urban perspective. The inclusion of material on the importance of the informal retail sector is well noted, and yet the section fails to address where some the factors impacting this vital sector intersect with urban mandates and the urban political economy (Battersby, J., 2017. Food system transformation in the absence of food system planning: the case of supermarket and shopping mall retail expansion in Cape Town, South Africa. Built Environment, 43(3), pp.417-430., Battersby, J. and Muwowo, F., 2018. Planning and governance of food systems in Kitwe, Zambia: A case study of food retail space. In Urban food systems governance and poverty in African cities (pp. 128-140). Routledge.). The issue of the assumed absence of an urban food systems mandate is crucial here, and it may be worth engaging the New Urban Agenda's framing of the role of urban food systems in urban well being.
3) Given current experiences, I do wonder if the conflict key issue doesn't a require a module that focusses on the impact of conflict beyond national borders?
4) The framing of the climate policies section should be broadened to explicitly consider food system impacts of climate change, beyond the productive realm. Climage change will impact (is impacting) as points along the food supply chain, and impacting consumers ability to safely acess and store food. Indeed, it may be pushing consumers towards more shelf-stable highly processed foods. Sorry for self-citing again - but this may be useful: Battersby, J., 2013. Urban food security and climate change: a system of flows: In Climate Change, Assets and Food Security in Southern African Cities (pp. 46-67). Routledge. It is also worth being more explicit about how climate change impacts with affect different sectors within the food system differently, with smaller scale and informal sector actors being more likely to more severely impacted by weather events which destroy critical infrastrcture and resources. There is a need for a strong equity lens in this section.
5) Here it is important to note that there is a real challenge on accessing data on food sector employment outside of the agricultural sector. The disaggregation of ILO labour force data does not allow one to extrapolate food system specific data. This makes it really difficult to assess and monitor food based livelihoods and rights violations. Figure 3 in this paper illustrates some of the challenge of estimating livelihood data (Fanzo, J., Haddad, L., Schneider, K.R., Béné, C., Covic, N.M., Guarin, A., Herforth, A.W., Herrero, M., Sumaila, U.R., Aburto, N.J. and Amuyunzu-Nyamongo, M., 2021. Rigorous monitoring is necessary to guide food system transformation in the countdown to the 2030 global goals. Food Policy, 104, p.102163.) There is a long term need to modify modes of data collection. What cannot be measured, cannot be managed, and decisions about what is important to be measured need to be more transparent and consequences of failure to measure for effective governance and transformation must be flagged.
6) Within this key issue I think there needs to be more explicit engagement about how and why different forms of knowledge have been excluded and presentated as marginal in food system transformation processes. There was a lot written about this in the context of the UNFSS last year (Turnhout, E., Duncan, J., Candel, J., Maas, T.Y., Roodhof, A.M., DeClerck, F. and Watson, R.T., 2021. Do we need a new science-policy interface for food systems?. Science, 373(6559), pp.1093-1095.). This then returns to the critical questions of the power of large food corporations and Big Philanthropy in shaping the accepted knowledge systems informing policy, as well as questions of enhancing agency.
I look forward to seeing the next draft.