Photo credit: Mahnoor Malik

By Kim-Jenna Juriaans 

Travel back in time to 2019 and ask yourself when you last considered the origins of your carrots. When was the last time your pre-COVID self worried if there’d be flour at the supermarket or fresh tomatoes at your local fruit stall? And what about your trusted street vendor disappearing altogether?

Like a flash flood uncovering the vast root system of a tree whose fruits we’ve been enjoying daily, the global crisis that is COVID-19 has unearthed a system that for many was at best a passing thought: the global network of actors that produce, process, transport, and sell our food.

That network is now under stress: India is looking at tonnes of food rotting on the vine amidst a shortage of farm labour and storage capacity. Europe is struggling to keep up with demand for some fruits and vegetables now that importing has become harder. And in many cities of the Global South, informal food economies have collapsed under the weight of lockdowns and travel restrictions. The list goes on.

Headlines like these have renewed attention on local producers and supply systems. They’ve also forced governments to reconsider the networks designed to serve millions in major cities: How well do they hold up in times of crisis?

"COVID has brought new urgency to policy initiatives to make our cities more resilient to shocks," says Fenton Beed, Team Leader for Rural and Urban Cropping and Mechanisation Systems at FAO.

"This pandemic is just one example of the kinds of crises we can expect to see more of in the future – climate change being another one—and governments are now seeing the bottlenecks appear. That’s particularly true where a majority of food is sourced from outside the city region.”

Along the way, the current crisis has also cast a light on issues of inequality and equity, says Beed, not just in relation to which consumers can access nutritious food but also which producers have access to urban markets and under what conditions. Small local farmers, for example, have been a lifeline for many cities during the crisis but often struggle to access more formal urban markets where big, industrialised producers and foreign imports dominate.

Societally, too, the current crisis has brought about a recalibration of sorts, particularly for urban dwellers, who have long been disconnected from the source of their food and yet taken its availability for granted. That’s changing.

In major cities from Medellin to New York, millions of households in quarantine have begun to order their vegetables, milk and meat directly from nearby farms for the first time. Furloughed service workers from Britain to Japan have taken to the fields to prevent major harvest losses on understaffed farms. And Chinese celebrities are taking to social media to help struggling producers sell their surplus goods online.

The environment thus, seems fertile for changing business as usual.

Toward stronger city regions

FAO has long been working with governments to help prepare their cities for the future, including through its City Region Food Systems Programme. “That means building stronger food linkages between cities and the rural areas that surround them,” says FAO Agricultural Officer Makiko Taguchi. "It also means finding ways to support those small peri-urban producers in overcoming the challenges they face in production and distribution," she says.

Importantly, building the resilient cities of the future will require planners and agriculture ministries to recognise the role that informal markets play in providing food and work in many parts of the world, particularly for the urban poor. That’s certainly true in sub-Saharan Africa, South or South­ East Asia, where a majority of the economy is informal.

Of course, the work to make cities more resilient to shocks didn’t just start with the current crisis. Many cities from Colombo to Toronto had already begun the hard work of reimagining their food systems in holistic ways, taking into account issues like nutrition and climate change, ensuring resources are managed sustainably and value chains are fair for all. But the sudden urgency to resolve COVID bottlenecks has made it a catalyst for innovation and an incentive to put food and shorter value chains at the top of the agenda.

At the vanguard of change

China was the first country to take on the pandemic and the first to offer lessons from its food sector. Faced with broken supply chains, the public and private sector came together in unprecedented ways to reimagine the linkages that used to ferry food from farm to table: New online platforms matched thousands of producers with wholesale distributers looking for goods, and a major video conference made similar matches worth USD 47 million. At the farm level, producers helped each other harvest through mutual aid systems while e-commerce platforms retooled their websites to offer fresh farm products to consumers.

In a different context, Colombia’s Medellin and Ecuador’s capital Quito kept their quarantined population food secure through a system of city-run community gardens that produce more than 10 tonnes of food a week. Citizens in Toronto convinced their local government to open similar allotment gardens during COVID, which allowed low-income families to grow their own food. Consumers in various parts of the world also built stronger linkages with farms outside the city through mobile group chats and collaborative supply chains, to name but a few examples.  

Of course, what works in one part of the world might not in another. Online farmers markets, for instance, flourished in China, Colombia and several other middle-income countries, but not in India, where digital illiteracy hampered agro e-commerce. Instead, market vendors in the Kerala region improvised by putting their produce onto mobile vegetable trucks and selling them conveniently at people’s doorstep.

Each solution, large and small, adds an element of hope to the current moment. As more countries go through the waves of the coronavirus and FAO gathers more evidence of local impacts and responses, more lessons will emerge – so will new questions. Along the way – while governments re-imagine their future economies, businesses reshape the way they work and citizens re-examine what they value in times of crisis – the current moment presents a chance to be innovative in ways that can help us solve the food challenges of the future.