Food Security

Agricultural Value Chains and Cities.  Towns and cities have, from ancient times, played a key role in agricultural value chains.  Value chains describe productive processes around a product from the provision of inputs to production, transportation, transformation, processing, marketing, trading, and retailing to final consumption.  Cities are the essential market centers where post-production finance, processing, marketing, trade, distribution and, of course, consumption takes place for most non-subsistence, agricultural and other resource-based production activities.  For these reasons, networks of towns and cities have long been critical for food security in most countries around the world.  Nevertheless, traditionally, many agricultural development projects have tended to focus more on research, extension and input support to farmers for subsistence and commodity production, especially for staple crops, and have paid much less attention to the upstream and downstream elements supporting that production system.  In recent decades, with greater attention to value chain analysis and interventions, especially in cash crop value chains for export, an appreciation of the roles of processing, marketing and distribution centers in agricultural development projects has increased.  Most of these value chain elements are located in towns and cities.  However, even these new interventions often do not examine the capacity of towns and cities to efficiently support and facilitate these essential value chain activities through improved transport, storage and marketing infrastructure and processing centers, improved local governance, telecommunications and education.

In addition to the geographical and infrastructural importance of towns and cities for supporting agricultural value chains, there is the additional aggregating factor.  Towns and cities facilitate the creation of networks of supply chain actors that may compete with each other but which also frequently provide complementary products and services to contribute to individual (or many) agricultural value chains.  This aggregating or synergistic process creates efficiencies and scale effects that would not be possible under a highly dispersed chain of value providers.  In this way, the existence of towns and cities and, more importantly, the quality of the support they are able to provide is essential to the smooth operation of agricultural value chains and enhanced food security.  Conversely, the poorer the physical and networking infrastructures are in cities, the more costly it is for food-related transactions (logistical, financial, and processing).  This includes port infrastructure for food imports to countries. The urban poor are especially vulnerable to price fluctuations, since they spend from 60 to 80 percent of their income on food^[1].

Rural-Urban Migration and Food Security.  Throughout the developing world and, in large part, due to the opportunities for off-season income generation, military draft, marriage, education and permanent migration to towns and cities, rural to urban migration has gradually transformed the economies of many countries. [2] This has been dramatically evident in most sub-Saharan African countries, which have seen their population distributions shift from being overwhelmingly rural to increasingly urban. This process has been greatly facilitated by improvements in transport and communication infrastructure and employment opportunities presented by economic globalization.  Hence, off-farm sources of income have started to become greater shares of household income for an increasing number of families.  Circular migration (sometimes daily or weekly), seasonal migrations, and the reasons mentioned above for greater rural-urban mobility have blurred the previously sharp rural-urban distinction of several generations ago.  This means that, on the one hand, even the rural landless are not necessarily dependent upon subsistence production for food security if they can find work in towns and cities to enable them to buy food.  Conversely, in times of economic crisis or natural disaster with the collapse of low skilled, urban jobs, the hinterland and the broader extended family networks in rural areas are critical social safety networks that allow the poor, in particular, to survive.  Finally, part-time farmers working in cities gain new knowledge about more productive crops, inputs and specialized markets, often through the networks they encounter in cities or through contract farming.  In some instances, these informal knowledge networks are more important than formal agricultural extension systems. However mediated, these farming extension and contracting relationships bind rural producers ever more closely to towns and cities, where processing, marketing and distribution is carried out.  While this is more pronounced for farmers relatively close to market towns and cities, the extent to which agricultural production becomes formalized in supply chains, the closer these urban-rural linkages become.

In addition to migratory patterns affected by urbanization, dietary patterns also tend to change when migrants reach the city.  Urbanization often leads to a much greater diversification of diets, including the consumption of much greater amounts of vegetables, meat, processed foods and snacks.  Thus, urbanization opens up many new markets for both domestic and foreign producers to supply foods to niche, specialized markets within towns and cities.  This leads to the expansion of the numbers of small businesses and the employment they generate.  On the other hand, urbanization and the change in diets may complicate food security.  The significant increase in the consumption of meat by city populations requires a significant increase in the amount of land set aside for growing feedstock (or grazing) as well as increases in transport and process heat fuels (and costs) to meet the requirements of this large increase in consumed calories. The rapid rise of fast food enterprises in developing country cities has led to a tremendous increase in the domestic production of potatoes (or their import) for French fries or the significant increase in imported wheat for bread making.  As was demonstrated in 2008, these new imports can lead to swift and sharp food supply vulnerabilities when sudden shocks to international commodity supply chains lead to sharp price increases, hoarding or both.  

As the share of urban populations to total population increases dramatically, so too does the focus of food security shift to urban populations.  Since most urban dwellers must pay for their own food needs, they may be more sensitive to food and other commodity price increases, which, in turn, have frequently led to political and social instability.  At the very least, the renewed donor focus on food security will need to seek the right balance between urban and rural food security requirements. 

Urban Agriculture and the Poor. Growing food within towns and cities or in the immediate peri-urban areas generally has not been a significant factor in assuring food security for urban populations.  This is clearly even more the case in cities with larger populations.  For smaller urban areas and especially those with agriculturally active peri-urban areas, specialized agricultural production can be important for employment and household incomes.  This includes intensified horticulture (fruit, vegetables, cut flowers) sometimes grown in greenhouses and may include some dairy and small livestock, especially eggs, cheese and poultry production.  One very interesting aspect of urban agriculture concerns the relatively large proportion of women involved partly in production but especially in processing, marketing and distribution.  This includes the preparation of food in street stalls and small-scale catering operations.  This also represents another manifestation of the phenomenon of relatively greater independence and social and economic mobility for many women working in towns and cities compared to life in rural villages.