Using examples from the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper reviews the contribution a City Region Food Systems (CRFS) approach makes to regional sustainability and resilience for existing and future shocks including climate change. We include both explicit interventions under United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO-RUAF) led initiatives, as well as ad hoc efforts that engage with elements of the CRFS approach. To provide context, we begin with a literature review of the CRFS approach followed by an overview of the global food crisis, where we outline many of the challenges inherent to the industrial capital driven food system. Next, we elaborate three key entry points for the CRFS approach—multistakeholder engagement across urban rural spaces; the infrastructure needed to support more robust CRFS; system centered planning, and, the role of policy in enabling (or thwarting) food system sustainability. The pandemic raises questions and provides insights about how to foster more resilient food systems, and provides lessons for the future for the City Region Food System approach in the context of others shocks including climate change.
There is a growing realization of cities' vulnerability to the problems posed by the food system that are described in the chapter "Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability". Reliance on globalized supply chains puts food provisioning arrangements at risk from environmental, political or economic disruptions. Cities lack productive space to produce all the food needed to feed their populations (Steel 2008, 2012), yet cities in less developed countries of the Global South will host most of the growth in world population, projected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050 (FAO 2009). Household food insecurity (or food poverty) is a major issue in many cities in developing countries, but incidence has also risen in the Global North, where the long-term effects of the 2008 economic downturn are still felt. Moreover, urban consumers are increasingly disconnected from the origins of their food (see chapter "Urbanization Issues Affecting Food System Sustainability"), and modern cities are obesogenic environments where calorie-dense/nutritionally-lacking food is cheap and available, but where opportunities for physical activity are limited (Morgan and Sonnino 2010). Consequently, diet-related ill-health has reached epidemic levels. While the capacity of cities to implement food policies has ebbed since the end of the Middle Ages (see chapter "History of Urban Food Policy in Europe, from the Ancient City to the Industrial City"), a small but increasing number of cities around the world are devising policies to address food-related problems or to mitigate their effects. This chapter describes the range of cities' aims in so doing, while drawing on existing literature to develop a broad typology and exploring relations between cities and their hinterlands, since many policies have repercussions that are felt beyond the boundaries of cities or involve external actors. The analysis in this chapter focuses on the levers and instruments that are employed by cities to meet their objectives, with attention to the importance of cross-domain working and determining
Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) is widely distributed throughout the Global South. Despite urban population growth and diversifying food habits, UPA delivers an important part of urban food supply, as well as other types of services to cities, such as employment and waste reuse. Nevertheless, the extent and importance of UPA varies between different urban areas, while challenges like limited recognition, land conversion, and water pollution and competition threaten the potential of UPA to contribute to urban resilience. Key investment priorities for research and innovation for overcoming current challenges include incentivized peri-urban zoning, urban allocation of productive lands, and increasing capacities for controlled environment agriculture (CEA). Innovative repositioning of food marketing can help to strengthen supply of healthy food from UPA production, increase decent employment, and turn food markets into nutrition hubs. Priority innovations for contributing to the circular bioeconomy of cities include scaling the safe use of wastewater for irrigation through investments in the adoption of multiple risk-barrier approaches and scaling UPA-based ecosystem services for valorising solid waste and environmental management. Innovations in urban governance are required to support these processes by bringing food systems into urban planning through food mapping and the multisectoral platforms for dialogue and policy formulation across city regions and with vertical levels of government.
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