Member profile
Ingrid Jacobsen
Organization:
Bread for the World, German Protestantic Church
Country:
Germany
Field(s) of expertise:
I am working on:
Food security in urban areas, climate change and land use, water
Ingrid Jacobsen
The proposed scope of the report is already very comprehensive. However, the report is mainly focusing on the production and marketing side of food systems. These are important aspects, but looking at the consumer side is needed as well. A more holistic view on food security, which is taking into consideration the general living conditions of the urban poor and people living in informal settlements on the outskirts of the city will add value to the report.
1. Food insecurity in urban areas is less a problem of food availability in general but a problem of the lack of spending capacity of low income households. Living costs in cities are extremely high, especially for securing shelter and transport. Rents in the regulated and even more in the unregulated informal rental markets are a heavy burden for poor people but have to be paid, even by households with very low and precarious income. I many cases low-income households are forced to save on food and skip meals to be able to pay their rents and transportation costs to get to work.
2. Due to the high rental costs in well-located city areas people have to share the costs and the space they live in. As a consequence, especially poor households often ive in very dense conditions. In many cases, there is no space for food or water storage and there is also no space for cooking. Food has to be bought in the streets or as mostly imported highly processed and unhealthy products, which are easy to prepare e.g. with hot water only.
3. More and more people in urban or peri-urban areas are living in informal or even illegal housing conditions with very bad or even not existent physical infrastructure. Access to water and electricity in these areas is scarce or not available. Drinking water has to be bought at very high prices. There often is no possibility to install cooling facilities and food gets rotted quickly. These settlements are growing fast and unplanned and therefor there is seldom space for markets with fresh local products and vegetables and people are pushed into consuming imported products, which in most cases are highly processed and unhealthy.
4. People living in informal or illegal housing conditions are in a permanent threat of being resettled or even evicted. This hampers them to start with own food production like urban gardening. It also make it difficult for them to organize themselves in all kinds of social networks especially networks related to food access, e.g. food policy councils or similar platforms. In these areas people generally do not have a formal address and therefore they do not qualify for social protection schemes to improve the family income or to get access to governmental food supply schemes like school meals etc.
Conclusion: the improvement of housing conditions based on the human right to adequate shelter is closely related to the implementation of the right to food and nutrition as well as the right to water. It should be mentioned as a pre-condition to improve food security in urban and peri-urban areas.