The Food Desert as a Concept and Policy Tool in African Cities: An Opportunity and a Risk

Abstract

The idea that food insecurity can be resolved by increasing the presence of supermarkets has been gaining traction in African cities and has recently gained political traction in Africa. This paper interrogates the potential value and risks associated with the adoption of the discourse of the food desert in the African context. The paper draws on findings from a households survey, neighborhoods-scale food retail mapping and surveys, and city-wide supermarket mapping conducted in Cape Town (South Africa), Kisumu (Kenya), and Kitwe (Zambia). Following a discussion of why the concept is gaining traction, the paper identifies false assumptions associated with the food desert framing in Africa, namely: supermarkets provide better access to healthier food, low-income areas have poor access to healthy food; and food security can be reduced to economic and physical accessibility. The paper concludes that although the food desert concept may be valuable for African researchers to provoke debates about systemic inequality, the food desert policy narrative should be rejected as it is ill-informed by the lived experiences of food insecurity in African cities and may promote policy interventions that erode rather than enhance the capacity of the food system to meet the food security needs of African urbanites.

Urban poverty and nutrition challenges associated with accessibility to a healthy diet: a global systematic literature review

“…differences in income within poor groups, different levels of FI, amongst others). Among studies lacking a comparison group, they were mainly cross-sectional studies [ 38 , 39 , 42 , 43 , 47 , 52 , 77 , 81 , 88 , 89 ] that intended to provide descriptions of urban poverty in terms of nutrition outcomes. Close to 70% of all quantitative studies controlled for confounders and presented adjusted models.…”

“…fresh produce) and oftentimes products of lower quality [ 71 ]. Such fragmented market can lead to the establishment of informal arrangements, especially in low- and middle-income countries, such as street traders and house shops that are more likely to be unstable and deregulated [ 43 , 85 ]. Corner shops are another common source to meet food demand, but this has been associated with increased consumption of ultra-processed foods and inversely associated with home meal preparation, positive beliefs and self-efficacy toward healthy food [ 55 ].…”

Systematic review of the role of social inclusion within sustainable urban developments

“…(a) resilience theories such as Urban Resilience (Béné et al 2017;Moragues-Faus and Carroll 2018) together with related concepts of Resilient Urban Food Systems (Hecht et al 2018) and Socially Sustainable Urban Transportation (SSUT) (Boschmann and Kwan 2008); (b) social theories such as Social Practice Theory (Rojas et al 2011;Yi et al 2015;Giatti et al 2019), Food Citizenship Theory (Rojas et al 2011), and conceptualisations of intersectional characteristics within Food Deserts (Battersby 2019) and social and material flows across the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) urban nexus (Covarrubias 2019); (c) social and spatial theories such as Forest Transition (Matteucci et al 2016) and Affordance Theories (Stoltz and Schaffer 2018), and the concepts of Urban Ecology (Bentley 2014), Urban Agriculture and Edible City Solutions (Rojas et al 2011;Matteucci et al 2016;Cinà and Khatami 2017;Oyuela and Van Der Valk 2017;Säumel et al 2019;Zasada et al 2020);…”

“…For example, the concept of food security entails a complex network of actors, processes and relationships to do with food production, processing, marketing, and consumption (Dubbeling et al 2017), so it is critical to ensure its acceptability by all city residents with differing dietary habits, preferences and restrictions. A food desert policy narrative appears to be ill-informed by the lived experiences of food insecurity in African cities, and may therefore promote policy interventions that can erode rather than enhance its contextspecificity within African urbanites (Battersby 2019). It is critical, therefore, to explicitly articulate key contextual facilitators and constraints of effective interventions (Mehdipanah et al 2015) in exploring transferability of lessons across the different countries.…”

Changes in Food Environment Patterns in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, 2010–2020

“…Food environments have been studied extensively in the context of the Global North [ 4 , 10 , 11 , 26 ]. As the term became more complex and its political use increased, it began to be studied through its empirical application in food environments in the Global South, in countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ].…”