Food Security Challenges in Rapidly Urbanizing Developing Countries: Insight from Indonesia

Abstract

Urbanization has become a global phenomenon that affects the food system. Some studies revealed that urbanization increases income/capita, thus transforming food consumption from cereals to animal products, vegetables, and fruits. Urbanization, particularly in developing countries, not only produces economic benefits but also various issues that might lessen peoples’ capacity to afford food. This study aims to analyze the impact of urbanization on food consumption, food composition, as well as farming performance. Series of consumption data since 1976 and statistical descriptive approaches were employed. The results showed a trend of declining the share of food expenditures, especially in urban areas, which is commonly regarded as a sign of increasing prosperity. Surprisingly, food composition remained stable, dominated by rice, due to lower-income and higher non-food expenditures of urban inhabitants mainly for housing, transportation, water and energy. The stagnancy of food composition provides less incentive for farmers; thus, farming is dominated by low-revenue paddy fields, uneducated laborers, and older farmers. Based on these findings, some recommendations can be suggested: (1) incorporating food composition and farming performance into food security policies, instead of merely focusing on the compliance of food supply and demand, (2) linking food issues with non-food issues, especially with urban planning, housing development, and transportation management to increase the income capacity of the society to purchase a greater variety of food, and (3) developing food diversification served by urban food vendors to support the benefits of the farming business.

The pattern of poor household food consumption: The case of West Java Province

“…This aligns with previous research that found food expenditure in urban areas was lower than in rural areas. The value for all food groups was positive and was characterized as normal goods (Kosaka et al, 2018;Putra et al, 2020).…”

Spatiotemporal Differences, Dynamic Evolution and Trend of the Coupled Coordination Relationship between Urbanization and Food Security in China

“…While previous studies have focused more on the one-way impact of urbanization on food security and the challenges faced by food security in the urbanization process [ 51 ], this paper innovatively explores the interaction between urbanization and food security. The CDUFS always fluctuates in the low coordination interval, which is different from the study of Yao [ 20 ].…”

Two decades of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines: A systematic review and research agenda for the social sciences

“…The IPB University, a public agrarian university in Bogor, Indonesia, investigates rice productivity and sustainability (Arif et al, 2012;Mucharam et al, 2020;Setiawan et al, 2013), irrigation (Nugroho et al, 2018;Panuju et al, 2013), extreme weather events such as drought (Dulbari et al, 2021), floods (Wakabayashi et al, 2021), and emerging social issues such as food security (Putra et al, 2020), land-use change (Chrisendo et al, 2020; Munajati et al, 2021), and sustainability (Mizuno et al, 2013). This university has 23 research centers, including those which focus on environmental research; agricultural and village development; engineering applications in tropical agriculture; Southeast Asian food and agriculture; and agrarian studies.…”