Rural bias and urban food security

Crush, Jonathan; Riley, Liam

doi:10.4324/9781315191195-3

Cited by 24 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, while Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 provides a list of targets for the achievement of sustainable cities by 2030, food security is absent. The reasons for the neglect of urban food deserts in the international food security agenda relates to the pervasive anti-urban bias in the global food security agenda [64]. Rapid urbanization in Africa is leading to the explosive growth of informal settlements which are particularly intense and chronic spaces of deprivation and vulnerability.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Informal Food Deserts and Household Food Insecurity in Windhoek, Namibia

Crush

Kazembe

2018

Sustainability

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Informal settlements in rapidly-growing African cities are urban and peri-urban spaces with high rates of formal unemployment, poverty, poor health outcomes, limited service provision, and chronic food insecurity. Traditional concepts of food deserts developed to describe North American and European cities do not accurately capture the realities of food inaccessibility in Africa’s urban informal food deserts. This paper focuses on a case study of informal settlements in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, to shed further light on the relationship between informality and food deserts in African cities. The data for the paper was collected in a 2016 survey and uses a sub-sample of households living in shack housing in three informal settlements in the city. Using various standard measures, the paper reveals that the informal settlements are spaces of extremely high food insecurity. They are not, however, food deprived. The proximity of supermarkets and open markets, and a vibrant informal food sector, all make food available. The problem is one of accessibility. Households are unable to access food in sufficient quantity, quality, variety, and with sufficient regularity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Informal Food Deserts and Household Food Insecurity in Windhoek, Namibia

Crush

Kazembe

2018

Sustainability

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“…While urban agriculture can play a role in enhancing food security and dietary adequacy, its role should not be overemphasized as it is often quite limited, albeit with large inter-city variations [ 4 , 21 , 22 ]. Lack of sufficient and regular incomes is effectively the root cause of urban food insecurity.…”

Section: Income Poverty and Food Insecuritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is due to a number of interrelated factors that broadly reflect two transitions: the urban transition, with the majority of the world’s population now residing in urban centres [ 1 ], and the nutrition transition, with a growing proportion of overweight and obese individuals, often living in the same households as malnourished children [ 2 ]. Notwithstanding this shift in focus, food production remains to a large extent the predominant concern of policy-makers at global and national levels, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals, with little indication of an understanding of the major challenges in securing adequate diets facing the urban poor in low-income urbanizing regions [ 3 , 4 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food (In)Security in Rapidly Urbanising, Low-Income Contexts

Tacoli

2017

IJERPH

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Urbanisation in low and middle-income nations presents both opportunities and immense challenges. As urban centres grow rapidly, inadequate housing and the lack of basic infrastructure and services affect a large and growing proportion of their population. There is also a growing body of evidence on urban poverty and its links with environmental hazards. There is, however, limited knowledge of how these challenges affect the ways in which poor urban residents gain access to food and secure healthy and nutritious diets. With some important exceptions, current discussions on food security continue to focus on production, with limited attention to consumption. Moreover, urban consumers are typically treated as a homogenous group and access to food markets is assumed to be sufficient. This paper describes how, for the urban poor in low and middle-income countries, food affordability and utilisation are shaped by the income and non-income dimensions of poverty that include the urban space.

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“…This siloed approach to food security is only the latest example of a more chronic problem. With few exceptions, food insecurity in the Global South has been sidelined in urban research and policy-making over the last decade (Battersby and Watson, 2018b; Crush and Frayne, 2011;Crush and Riley, 2018;Frayne et al, 2018). When the UNDP (2012) called for "inclusive growth and people-centred approaches to food security", for example, it framed the issue purely as a matter of rural production and employment (Hanson, 2013;Spoor and Robbins, 2012).…”

Section: Sustainable Development and Urban Food Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The central proposition of this book is that the links between these three processes are imperfectly understood, partly because they have been sidelined by the anti-urban bias of the new international food security agenda (Crush and Frayne, 2011;Crush and Riley, 2018). If a fraction of the resources devoted to developing new agricultural technologies were directed to applied research and policy-making on urban food insecurity, the countries and cities of the Global South would be in a much better position to comprehend and respond to the growing crisis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%