As an urban food systems researcher, and policy advisor, the opening chapter of CFS HLPE Report #19 offers what I believe to be critical insights and positions as these pertain to the work of the HLPE and the wider food and nutrition security challenges, notably that:
- The future of the world is urban; more than half of humanity now lives in cities. Much of the projected urban population growth is happening in the poorest parts of the world.
- This ‘urbanization of poverty’ becomes food insecurity as the urban poor spend a large amount of their income on food and bear the cost of urban living.
- The urban and peri-urban need to be understood as active agents in shaping food systems and FSN conditions.
These framing statements directly reflect evidence, and gaps in the current approaches to the wider FNS challenges, gaps that for the most part have not been adequately engaged and addressed within urban food governance, national food and nutrition policy responses, or despite emerging work, in global governance domains. These framing statements are further supported by the points that:
- As much as there are challenges, urbanization also provides opportunities for livelihoods, improved diets and increased agency.
- Urban and peri-urban food governance can be transformative of the wider food systems.
Seeing urbanization as an area of solution and a key site of “struggle” through which global, regional, and local FNS challenges can be addressed is profound, and again, a position that has been largely absent in global discourses. Incorporating the role that governance at the urban scale can play in FNS transformation also requires significant acknowledgement.
The importance of these framing positions is re-enforced by the very real challenge detailed in the report that “many future urban residents, predominantly in Africa and Asia, will be living in cities and peri-urban areas as yet unbuilt”. For researchers and policymakers working in Africa and Asia, this view resonates strongly and reflects the current position. The statement further highlights the critical need to avoid path dependencies that will result from the current infrastructure investment focus (and development) in these regions. The intersection between cities that are yet to be built, and the stated FNS challenges detailed in the Draft Report further highlights the need for active FNS engagement at the urban scale, specifically how concepts such as Food Environments, Food Deserts, Food Retail (formal and informal), are governed for urban and peri-urban food system outcomes. Other infrastructure factors, such as energy supply, energy use, WASH, transport, all being built now, will dominate how the food system of these emerging urban areas function. These factors present an interesting challenge for the wider urban framing.
There are arguably three urban contexts that impact, influence and dictate food system outcomes. The developed city, cities largely formed during the first urbanisation transition; cities at various scales of urbanisation, effectively cities that largely reflect the first urban transition, but also reflect elements of the second urban transition; and then the sites of significant change and rapid, and very different urbanisation, cities and regions experiencing the second urban transition.
Given these differences and the need that these variations in urbanisation present, it is suggested that more attention is given to the second urban transition taking place in the Global South. I do need to acknowledge my own bias as a researcher from this context.
Chapter 2 – Urbanisation.
While I appreciate the need for brevity and that the work engaging the urban transitions are too vast and detailed for inclusion here, I do feel that there are four overarching urban considerations that are needed to ground this report in a specific urban context. Many of these have been named or inferred in Chapter 1. However, the different scales of urbanisation across regions and in countries, needs recognition and detail.
1) A key challenge in framing a global position is to avoid the instinct to generalise. This point is highlighted by the point noted in Ch1 on the pace and scale of urbanisation in two specific regions, SSA and South Asia.
2) Importantly, the work of Pieterse, Parnell, Oldfield, Siame, Watson, Simone, Revi, Bhan and many other Southern authors have made it plain that the urbanisation in the Global South differs significantly from that of the earlier urbanisation transition in the Global North. The current, largely Southern, urban transition has been referred to as the “second urban transition”. The “first” transition included a number of factors engaged in this chapter, specifically increased income, employment, and wellbeing. The first urban transition occurred at the same time as industrialisation, enabling significant infrastructure investment, employment and wealth generation. While the inequities associated with the first transition did exist, the general trend was one of industrial opportunity, economic benefit and the realisation of the so-called urban dividend. The second urban transition is taking place in in the context of a largely absent industrial transition, a global economy that is largely service (and thus highly skilled) oriented, and a globalised economy. Governance and developmental assets, specifically infrastructure, social services and income, came with the first urban transition, the benefit from an "urban advantage". The urbanisation that is currently taking place is taking place in much of the global South it taking lace in the context of an absent economy, a largely absent state, limited employment, reduced public services, and virtually no infrastructure investment. Southern urban residents able to counter these trends are often ensconced in elite estates, splintered from the urban majority. As a result, the second urban transition is symptomatic of high levels of informality, in terms of physical infrastructure and housing, economy and governance, and significantly limited fiscal resources to enable development and policy action.
It is felt that this fundamental component of the state of urbanisation need inclusion in this section for a number of reasons. However three are paramount: First, concepts and approaches adopted in the Global North, and aligned to contextual needs of the Global North, are fundamentally out of alignment with the contextual realities of the Southern urban transitions, demanding very different approaches and perspectives. Second references to slum urbanism and informality are often framed in negative terms, as an urban pathology, where urbanisation is seen as the issue. This fails to acknowledge the specific difference of the transition, and often then defers to development strategies that are ill suited. Given the fact that urbanisation globally is now largely driven by internal growth (as correctly detailed in this chapter), rural re-investment, agricultural development, new green revolutions, etc. that dominate food systems development discourses of the South, will not generate the developmental and FNS benefits imagined by development practitioners and the political class in these urbanising countries. Finally, given that development will take place, and that despite high levels of informality, formality, specifically in terms of physical infrastructure will take place and it is this infrastructure that will determine the nature of future urban and global food systems. Countering negative path dependencies is essential.
Ch1 references UN-Habitat NUA but Chapter 2 pays no attention to this.
3) The intersections between the impacts of urbanisation and the food system are having a profound impact determining global challenges, specifically climate change. Do these two factors not need linking here, or at least acknowledgement that these are interconnected, and if urbanisation and food are considered differently, these could generate multiple global benefits.?
4) While addressed in the governance section, is there not utility in describing some of the different governance opportunities as these relate to FNS systems and how these differ in rural and urban areas. My question is embedded in the comment in Ch1 that very different approaches are needed. As an example, the food safety discussion in this chapter reads as a drop in. However, would the point be better made if the differences in Food Safety governance in rural and urban are details, rather than simply saying food safety in urban areas presents challenges?
In addition to this:
2.2 Peri-urbanization and urbanization: Secondary cities face unique challenges. The relationship that cities have with other levels of government depends on their size such that primate cities, which comprise a large percentage of a country’s urban population, tend to receive a larger share of public investment from central governments than their smaller counterparts (Henderson, 2002). While mentioned below it is suggested that greater emphasis is given to the contextual aspects associated with secondary (or intermediary cities) and the importance of not seeing all secondary cities as similar. These contextual, and typology differences result in very different UP FS challenges.
Figure 2.2: A simplified visualization of links between urbanization and food systems, with a focus on urbanization processes impacting consumption of food away from home - figure is confusing (and masks the complexity of the described interactions. It also categorises aspects in silo-ed ways. Further, it fails to capture the socio-material infrastructure intersections. Arguably it appears to undermine, or over-simplify the critical foundational point, that “The urban and peri-urban need to be understood as active agents in shaping food systems and FSN conditions.”
2.3 Links between urbanization processes and food systems: - Notably, while increasing dietary convergence across the urban-rural spectrum has been observed, household income remains an important determinant of diet and consumer behaviour, including higher animal source foods and fruit and vegetable consumption for higher income consumers (FAO et al., 2023; Warr, 2020). Indeed, links between food value chain transformations and dietary outcomes (i.e., undernourishment, micronutrient deficiencies, and excess consumption) are moderated by income, such that lower-income households suffer from poorer dietary outcomes across types of food value chains and across the rural-urban continuum relative to wealthier households (Gómez and Ricketts, 2013) (Page 17) – I question this, other research shows that infrastructure is a more important determining factor (Crush and McCordic, 2015; etc.), income is less important.
3.4.1 Food environment factors – impact of second urban transition on food environments, specifically how in many LMIC informal areas infrastructure is limited, or costly. This has two implications: 1) infrastructure is costly, and as a result, plays a far greater role in food choice than market or proximity to healthy foods might. Despite availability, preparing pulses and traditional foods might be made more costly overall given the infrastructure (water, energy, transport, time) cost. 2) given the state of informality, many urbanites do not have kitchens, fridges, stoves, etc. As such the street is the larder, the kitchen, the dining table. This plays a significant but unrecognised role in FAFH factors.
As such a clear FE differentiation between current generalisations of the FE (informed largely by Northern positions) and Southern second urban transition factors need inclusion.
4.5.1 Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) – while this section offers a useful and balanced conversation on UPA, it is felt that given the other detail documented in the report, a reflection on the presentation UPA as a solution in LMIC regions requires discussion, or mention at least? Given the extent of marginalisation in LMIC urban areas, the negative impacts and inequities associated with globalisation, etc. is it fitting to present UPA as the development solution to the FNS challenges. Many in the South have been and are still subjected to significant marginalisation, inequities and exclusion in the global agenda. Now, these same marginalised Southern urban residents are being asked to self-help, to solve systemic challenges that are not of their making. They are expected to be innovative, problem solve and become UPA experts in contexts that are far from opportune. The historical marginalisation is brushed aside, disregarded and trivialised. Problematically, when these Southern actors seek to find some solution to FNS issues through UPA, and fail, for the same historical, systemic and other contextual issues, they are then blamed, labelled as feckless, and lacking of initiative. Caution is required in such a report, specifically as the reasons that drive such FNS issues have previously been detailed, specifically in HLPE Report #18, and as discussed therein, simply attempting to grow oneself out of poverty and hunger, and wider inequities, is not possible.
Engagement with food safety – In Chapter 3 food safety is discussed but in a very general manner. In Chapter 4 it is again engaged, as a cross cutting issue. In Chapter 5, the deployment of food safety as a means of control and repression is effectively highlighted. These different engagements are at times contradictory, or can create confusion with readers, and policy makers, selecting the framing that suits their needs. Is a more active engagement in the positives, negatives, use for other reasons, etc. is necessary.
Figure 6.1: In ongoing work in African, Asian and some Caribbean cities, historical path dependencies were found to be a significant “contextual dimension” that needed detailed understanding, engagement and reflection as these factors played a significant role in the nature of the other contextual dimensions – does some recognition of this not need inclusion in the theory of change? This is asked given the point that “this radical transformation also means developing policy initiatives that reshape the underlying principles that guide current food systems activities” – these current underlying principles have a distinct genealogy and as such, impact both current and potential future actions.
Dr. Gareth Haysom