Handbook on Urban Food Security in the Global South 2020950131, 9781786431516, 9781786431509

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HANDBOOK ON URBAN FOOD SECURITY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Handbook on Urban Food Security in the Global South

Edited by

Jonathan Crush University Research Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Professor, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Canada and Extraordinary Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Bruce Frayne Professor and Director, School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo, Canada

Gareth Haysom Researcher, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Cheltenham, UK

+

Northampton, MA, USA

© Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne and Gareth Haysom 2020 Cover image: © Mariella Salamone, Oshakati, Namibia, October 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950131 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781786431516

ISBN  978 1 78643 150 9 (cased) ISBN  978 1 78643 151 6 (eBook)

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Typeset by Sparks – www.sparkspublishing.com

Contents

List of contributors vii Acknowledgements x   1 Introduction to urban food security in the Global South Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne and Gareth Haysom

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  2 Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts Cecilia Tacoli

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  3 Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world James Tefft and Marketa Jonasova

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  4 An impermanent subsidy: Cheap industrial food and the urban margins Tony Weis, Marylynn Steckley and Bruce Frayne

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  5 Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity: Trends for low-income and middle-income countries Susan Horton   6 Scales of (in)action at the climate change–food security nexus in cities Carrie L. Mitchell, Joanne Fitzgibbons, Kristen Regier and Siya Agarwal   7 The “supermarket revolution” in the South Reena das Nair   8 Urbanization and the quiet revolution in the midstream of agrifood value chains Thomas Reardon   9 Food systems at the rural–urban interface Felicity J. Proctor and Julio A. Berdegué v

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10 The urban informal food sector in the Global South Graeme Young and Jonathan Crush

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11 The gender–urban-food interface in the Global South Liam Riley and Belinda Dodson

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12 Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries Piero Conforti, Giulia Ponzini and Alberto Zezza

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13 Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South Abel Chikanda, Jonathan Crush and Godfrey Tawodzera 14 Food remittances and food security Jonathan Crush and Mary Caesar 15 Industrialization, food safety and urban food security in the Global South Jodi Koberinski, Zhenzhong Si and Steffanie Scott 16 Food waste and the growth of food banks in the Global South Daniel N. Warshawsky 17 The planned “city region” in the New Urban Agenda: An appropriate framing for urban food security? Jane Battersby and Vanessa Watson 18 Perspectives on urban food-system governance in the Global South Gareth Haysom 19 Urban food systems and diets, nutrition, and health of the poor: Challenges, opportunities, and research gaps Marie T. Ruel, Jef L. Leroy, Olivier Ecker, Manuel Hernandez, Danielle Resnick and James Thurlow Index

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Contributors

Siya Agarwal, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada Jane Battersby, Associate Professor, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Julio A. Berdegué, Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Santiago, Chile Mary Caesar, Post Doctoral Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, ON, Canada Abel Chikanda, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science, University of Kansas, Kansas, USA Piero Conforti, Senior Statistician (Economist), Statistics Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy Jonathan Crush, University Research Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Professor, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Canada and Extraordinary Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa Reena das Nair, Senior Lecturer, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa Belinda Dodson, Adjunct Research Professor, Department of Geography, Western University, London, ON, Canada Olivier Ecker, Senior Research Fellow, International Food and Research Policy Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA Joanne Fitzgibbons, PhD Student, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, BC, Canada Bruce Frayne, Professor and Director of the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

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viii  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Gareth Haysom, Researcher, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Manuel Hernandez, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA Susan Horton, Professor, School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada Marketa Jonasova, Operations Officer, World Bank Group, Washington, DC, USA Jodi Koberinski, Researcher, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada Jef L. Leroy, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA Carrie L. Mitchell, Associate Professor, School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada Giulia Ponzini, Consultant, World Bank Group, Washington, DC, USA Felicity J. Proctor, Research Associate Rimisp-Chile and Independent Consultant, London, UK Thomas Reardon, Professor, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, Michigan, USA Kristen Regier, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Mississauga, ON, Canada Danielle Resnick, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, USA Liam Riley, Researcher, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, ON, Canada Marie T. Ruel, Director, Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA Steffanie Scott, Professor, Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada Zhenzhong Si, Post Doctoral Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, ON, Canada Marylynn Steckley, Instructor 1, Global and International Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada Cecilia Tacoli, Principal Researcher and Team Leader, Human Settlements

Contributors  ix

Department, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, UK Godfrey Tawodzera, Associate Professor, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia James Tefft, Senior Economist, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Investment Centre, Rome, Italy James Thurlow, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, USA Daniel N. Warshawsky, Associate Professor of Geography, Wright State University, School of Public and International Affairs, Dayton, Ohio, USA Vanessa Watson, Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Tony Weis, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada Graeme Young, Research Fellow, Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (GCRF), University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland Alberto Zezza, Senior Economist, Development Data Group, World Bank, Washington, DC, USA

Acknowledgements

The publication of this book was made possible by funding from the Hungry Cities Partnership funded by an International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies (IPaSS) Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Supplemental funding for the preparation of the volume was received from the Balsillie School of International Affairs, the SSHRC-funded Consuming Urban Poverty 2 Project and the Office of Research Services at Wilfrid Laurier University. The editors are particularly grateful for the logistical and editorial support of Mariella Salamone, Project Manager for the Hungry Cities Partnership, Bronwen Dachs of Cape Town, South Africa and Jeremy Wagner at the Balsillie School.

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1.

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne and Gareth Haysom

Food and cities are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they are almost too big to see. Yet if you put them together, a remarkable relationship emerges. (Steel, 2008, p. ix)

1. INTRODUCTION This book sits at the confluence of three transformative processes in the Global South. First, the South is undergoing a rapid urban transition fuelled by natural population increase and migration. Attendant to this urban transition are many daunting challenges, not the least of which is how hungry cities and city regions will actually be fed. Second, the cities of the South have witnessed major changes in the ways in which their food supply is organized. In the vanguard of this second transformation are new linkages to global processing and distribution networks, that are vertically integrating all aspects of the food value chain and incorporating cities into global food markets. Third, there is a major upsurge in levels and trends of food insecurity in the cities of the South. Long a characteristic of rural populations, undernutrition and overnutrition are both rising in the cities and towns of the Global South, and constant hunger is the lot of millions. Yet, most cities are not short of food; the key issue is not how to grow more but how to improve access to the food that is available. 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. Most new urbanites are not going to grow all their own food, nor are they going to be fed by the household members they left behind in the rural areas, places they left precisely so that they could locate an income and improve the food security and life chances of all. Failure to address the 1

2  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

development challenges of urban food insecurity, rising food prices, and low incomes will have serious unintended consequences for the Global South and will undermine efforts to achieve a sustainable urban future. This book’s aim is to unpack the various dimensions of food and nutrition insecurity that is now a pervasive characteristic of cities and towns in the Global South. Each chapter investigates and explains key dimensions of the rising urban food and nutrition security challenge, and also provides insights as to possible pro-poor policy and investment pathways that can properly address this key developmental imperative in our predominantly urban world. The remainder of this chapter provides the context of the urban food challenge facing the Global South, which is followed by an outline of the subsequent chapters and their contributions to this critical development challenge confronting the global community in the 21st century.

2. THE SECOND URBAN TRANSITION Saunders (2010, p. 1) begins his exploration of global urbanization with the prediction that “what will be remembered about the 21st century, more than anything else except perhaps the effects of a changing climate, is the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life and into cities.” The international community has only recently accepted that the fundamental urban transition taking place across the Global South is not a temporary or reversible phenomenon (Seto, et al., 2017). In contrast to the first urban transition in the Global North, the process is taking place much more rapidly and involves much larger numbers of people. Urbanization in the Global South outstrips the growth of 19th-century cities in Europe and North America, with the result that in 2020, more countries have moved from incipient and moderate to extensive and advanced urbanization (Smith, 2019). Fuelled by the second transition, the world’s urban population is expected to continue to rise to nearly 60 per cent by 2025 and to two-thirds by mid-century. In contrast, the rural population is expected to stabilize in 2020 and then to start declining (Figure 1.1). The combined urban population of Africa, Asia and Latin America increased from 1.8 billion in 1995 to 2.9 billion in 2015 and is projected to rise to 3.7 billion by 2050. In 1950, only 24 per cent of countries (mainly in Europe and North America) were more than 50 per cent urbanized. By 2014, this figure had increased to 63 per cent and is projected to exceed 80 per cent by 2050 (UN, 2015, p. 7). Current levels of urbanization vary considerably but all regions are becoming more urbanized (Figure 1.2). In the Global South, Latin America urbanized the earliest and now has levels of urbanization comparable to those in Europe and North America. Asia is currently urbanizing at the fastest rate, with countries such as China and India at the forefront. Even in Africa, often regarded

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  3

Source: UN, 2015, p. 7.

Figure 1.1  Global urban and rural population

Source: UN, 2015, p. 10.

Figure 1.2  Level of urbanization by region, 1950–2050

4  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Source: UN, 2019, p. 58.

Figure 1.3  Urbanization trends and city size, 1990–2030

as the most rural region of the Global South, the urban transition is well under way. The urban population of Africa increased from 248 million (or 34 per cent) in 1995 to 412 million (44 per cent) in 2010 and is projected to climb to 658 million (47 per cent) by 2025. By 2030, there will be more people living in towns and cities in Africa than in the countryside. By 2050, the bulk of the world’s urban population will be living in the Global South and especially Asia (52 per cent) and Africa (21 per cent). The number of megacities (of over 10 million in size) increased from 3 in 1950 to 29 in 2015 and is projected to rise to 43 in 2030 (UN, 2018). The majority of megacities and large cities of 5 to 10 million inhabitants are in the Global South. However, the fastest growth is in the number of secondary cities (Figure 1.3). The number of cities with 1 to 5 million people increased from 127 in 1970 to 439 in 2015 and those with populations of 300,000 to 1 million, from 415 in 1970 to 1261 in 2015 (UN, 2019). The UN estimate is instructive in detailing the importance of secondary cities in the transition and in global urbanization more generally (Battersby and Watson, 2019). The data demonstrates that in 2015, the number of urban Africans residing in cities of one million or less totalled slightly less than 320 million. Those residing in cities of more than one million made up 175 million (UN, 2019). According to Chai and Seto (2019), urban areas of less than 500,000 are now home to just over a quarter of the world’s population.

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  5

The rate of urbanization in Latin America over the last 50 years has been called “remarkable” (Cerrutti and Bertoncello, 2006, p. 140). Within the region, however, the pace of urbanization has varied from country to country. These authors suggest that there are four groups of country based on their level of urbanization: incipient (40–50 per cent urban), moderate (55–65 per cent urban), extensive (70–80 per cent urban) and advanced (85–95 per cent urban). The drivers of Latin America’s urban transition have been analyzed in considerable detail, but it is clear that rural poverty and fundamental transformation of the agricultural sector from peasant production to large-scale commercial farming have been critical drivers (Portes and Roberts, 2005; Roberts, 2005; Rodgers et al., 2011; Thurlow et al., 2019). If Latin America’s urban transition is remarkable, Asia’s is “profound” (Hugo, 2006, p. 115). Almost half of all the world’s urban residents now live in Asia. By 2030, Eastern Asia (including China, South Korea and Japan) is projected to be 63 per cent urban, South-Eastern Asia (including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines) to be 56 per cent urban, and South-Central Asia to be 44 per cent urban. Among the most urbanized Asian countries will be South Korea (90 per cent), Japan (85 per cent), Indonesia (64 per cent) and China (60 per cent). One of the defining characteristics of Asian urbanization has been the emergence of megacities (defined as urban agglomerations of over 10 million people) (Hugo, 2006, p. 119). In 2001, two-thirds of the world’s megacities were in Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Calcutta, Dhaka, Delhi, Shanghai, Jakarta, Osaka, Beijing, Karachi and Manila). Latin America had three (Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires), and North America just two (Mexico City and New York). Africa as a whole is at an earlier stage of the transition, although countries such as South Africa and Botswana are already more than 60 per cent urban. The least urbanized African region is Southern Africa which will still be only 35 per cent urbanized in 2030. However, it does have the highest rates of urbanization in the world (UNDESA, 2018). The most urbanized region is Eastern Africa, which became more than 50 per cent urban between 1990 and 2000. By 2030, the proportion of people living in towns and cities could exceed 60 per cent. In Northern Africa, levels of urbanization were 47 per cent in 2010 and are projected to increase to 58 per cent by 2030. Some Northern African countries (such as Algeria and Libya) already have levels of urbanization equivalent to North America and Europe. The urban population of Western Africa was projected to pass 50 per cent between 2010 and 2020 and rise to 56 per cent by 2030. While some have questioned the UN methodology for projecting future urbanization levels, no one seriously contends that the transition towards a predominantly urban future in the Global South is a statistical invention. Promoters of rural development in Africa (such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution

6  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

in Africa, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development) suggest that urbanization is an inherently negative and problematic phenomenon that can and should be slowed, or even reversed, through judicious technocratic support of rural small farmers. IFAD’s president recently argued, for example, that “if smallholders are excluded from the region’s food security response, they will follow a well-trodden path to over-crowded urban areas and abroad. Rural areas will become increasingly depopulated … Africa needs vibrant rural areas that offer a variety of enterprises of all sizes, providing employment, income and food security, as well as offering essential environmental services” (IFAD, 2013). Romantic visions of pastoral Africa may provide a convenient rationale for institutional relevance but fly in the face of reality. As Collier (2009, p. 62) notes, “peasant agriculture offers only a narrow range of economic activities with little scope for sustaining decent livelihoods. In other societies people have escaped poverty by moving out of agriculture. The same is true in Africa: young people want to leave the land; educated people want to work in the cities. Above all, people want jobs”. As Gebre-Egziabher (2019, p. 219) observes, “the welfare gains of properly managed urbanization for urban dwellers come in the form of higher income and employment, better access to services and infrastructure” (see also Collier and Dercon, 2014). In the context of the second urban transition, it is now increasingly recognized that the cities of the South are confronting a deepening crisis of food inaccessibility, characterized by growing food poverty, hunger and malnutrition, a lack of dietary diversity, child wasting and stunting, increased vulnerability to infectious and chronic disease, and a growing obesity epidemic (Caprotti et al., 2017; Crush et al., 2012; Frayne and McCordic, 2018; MSSRF and WFP, 2010; Popkin et al. 2012; Popkin, 2017). However, this urban crisis still seems largely invisible to the policy and research communities concerned with global food security.

3. THE SOUTHERN URBAN FOOD CRISIS In 1996, the Rome World Food Summit Plan of Action offered a new definition of food security which has since become embedded in academic and policy discourse: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996, Article 1). The staying power of this definition is due to the fact that it moves beyond the unsustainable idea that food insecurity is simply a matter of insufficient food production. In the urban context, in particular, where households have to purchase most of their food and other goods and services, food security

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  7

Source: Burchi et al., 2011.

Figure 1.4 The four dimensions of food security Source: Burchi et al., 2011 Figure 1.4  The four dimensions of food security “depends to a large extent on individual household circumstances as the household operates within this purchasing environment” (Teng and Escaler, 2010, p. 2). The FAO definition suggests that a holistic understanding of food security should focus on four interlinked issues: food availability, food access, food utilization and food stability (Burchi et al., 2011) (Figure 1.4). Understanding these different dimensions of food security and their interrelationship is clearly a trans-disciplinary challenge (Drimie and McLachlan, 2013). For example, the food utilization component in Figure 1.4 identifies “food preparation, nutrition knowledge and cultural traditions” as determinants of food insecurity. Thus, people may be consuming a sufficient number of calories but if the food is unsafe, their dietary diversity is poor, and they are forced to eat food they prefer not to, then, by this definition, they are food insecure. To fully comprehend these connections would require an approach that incorporated concepts and methodologies from the social sciences and humanities as well as nutrition and public health. The measurement of food security in the urban context is a subject of considerable debate (Haysom and Tawodzera, 2018). Anthropometric measures of food insecurity outcomes are widely used in the biomedical literature. The

8  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 1.1 Prevalence of undernutrition in children (age 6–36 months) in urban India, 2005–2006 State

% Stunted

% Wasted

% Underweight

Andhra Pradesh Assam Bihar Gujarat Haryana Karmataka Kerala Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Orissa Punjab Rajasthan Tamil Naidu Uttar Pradesh West Bengal Total

33 35 38 42 36 34 27 41 40 36 33 29 30 33 30 37

15 19 37 17 24 17  9 31 15 14 11 20 22 13 13 19

24 28 33 36 37 26 15 44 27 28 20 26 23 26 24 30

Source: MSSRF and WFP, 2010, pp. 72–5.

three most common are child wasting (low weight for height), stunting (low height for age) and underweight (low weight for age). A national study of urban food security in India reported, for example, that in all but one Indian state, more than a third of children in urban areas were stunted (Table 1.1) (MSSRF and WFP, 2010). Levels of wasting varied from a low of 9 per cent in Kerala to a high of 37 per cent in Bihar. In almost every state, over 20 per cent of children were underweight. Apart from the very high levels of child undernutrition captured in these figures, there are striking differences from state to state and, by extension, city to city. Another conventional measure of food insecurity is the amount of dietary energy consumed by individuals or a household. Various cut-offs are generally used to classify the undernourished into increasingly deprived groups: for example, the subjacent hungry (1800–2200 kcals per person per day); the medial hungry (1600–1800 kcals per person per day) and the ultra-hungry (less than 1600 kcals per person per day) (Ahmed et al., 2011). In a number of countries food-energy deficiencies are already higher in urban than rural areas (Ahmed et al., 2011, p. 38). The Global Hunger Index (GHI) combines food-energy with anthropomorphic data including the proportion of people who are food-energy deficient, the prevalence of underweight children under five, and the under-five child mortality rate (IFPRI, 2012). The GHI is a useful composite measure for tracking changes over time but tends to rely primarily on national level data.

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  9

As a result, its utility for tracking and mapping levels of urban food insecurity is untested. Experiential efforts to measure the utilization dimension of food insecurity include the World Food Program’s Food Consumption Score (FCS) and the Hungry Cities Food Purchases Matrix (HCFPM), which have been usefully applied in case studies in Accra, Ghana and Maputo, Mozambique at the subnational urban scale to link food insecurity with dietary diversity, food consumption frequency, and food sourcing behaviour (Crush and McCordic, 2017; Tuholske et al., 2020; Wiesmann et al., 2009). More widely used at the subnational level are a set of cross-cultural measures of food access insecurity developed by the FANTA (Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance) Project in Washington DC (Swindale and Bilinsky, 2006). The FANTA methodology was used in a baseline survey of poor households in 11 cities in Southern Africa by the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) (Crush et al., 2012; Crush and Battersby, 2016; Frayne et al., 2018). The survey revealed a stark picture of food insecurity in poor urban neighbourhoods across the region. Only 17 per cent of the 6453 poor households surveyed were classified as food secure on the FANTA scale (Figure 1.5). As many as 57 per cent were severely food insecure and another 19 per cent were moderately food insecure. In cities in crisis, such as Harare (Zimbabwe) and Manzini (Swaziland), food security rates were less than 7 per cent and severe food insecurity levels were over 70 per cent. Other findings included consistently low dietary diversity, severe fluctuations

Source: 2012. FigureCrush 1.5 et al.,Levels

Source:

of food insecurity in Southern African cities Crush et al., 2012

Figure 1.5  Levels of food insecurity in Southern African cities

10  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

in levels of food insecurity during the year, and particular vulnerability to food insecurity on the part of female-headed households. Popkin and Gordon-Larsen (2004, p. S2) observe that “there has been increasing evidence that the structure of dietary intakes and the prevalence of obesity around the developing world have been changing at an increasingly rapid pace”. Urban food insecurity is therefore increasingly viewed as a problem of both undernutrition (insufficient good quality food) and overnutrition (too much of the wrong kinds of food) (Popkin et al., 2012). A review of 28 studies in West Africa, for example, found that the prevalence of urban obesity had doubled in the previous decade and a half (Akubakari et al., 2008). Another study of West African cities reported that the prevalence of obesity increased by nearly 35 per cent between 1992 and 2005 (Ziraba et al., 2009). Amugsi et al. (2017) found that rates of overweigh and obesity among urban women had increased between 1991 and 2014 in all 24 African countries studied, with rates doubling or tripling in half of them. In Latin America, a recent study of seven major cities found that 23.5 per cent of the adult population was obese (Armaz-Hernandez et al., 2016). In addition, “childhood obesity is on the rise as a result of diets that favour energy‐dense, nutrient‐poor foods and the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle” (Corvalán et al., 2017, p. 7). The Asian Development Bank has warned of an imminent “obesity crisis” in Asia and the Pacific where over 40 per cent of the adult population is already overweight (Helble and Francisco, 2017). In the Global South, obesity rates tend to be significantly higher amongst females than males and amongst urban than rural populations as high-fat, highsugar urban diets displace more traditional fare (Ford et al., 2017; Harris et al., 2019; Ruel et al., 2017; Subramanian and Davey Smith, 2006). Obesity is also increasingly affecting the urban poor (Case and Menendez, 2009; Frayne et al., 2014; Monteiro et al., 2007). Studies in India show that poor migrants who move from the countryside to the city immediately begin to experience higher rates of obesity and chronic disease as a result of changes in diet (Ebrahim et al., 2010). In many households in poor urban communities in the South there is also evidence of a “nutrition transition paradox” of child undernutrition and adult obesity within the same household (Dang and Meenakshi, 2017; Doak et al., 2005; Roemling and Qaim, 2013; Van Hook et al., 2013). As Caballero (2005, p. 1515) notes “cheap, energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods may adversely affect the growth of the child but may provide sufficient calories for the adult to gain excess weight”. The growing public health and economic burden of soaring rates of urban obesity has been documented most thoroughly in countries such as Mexico (Levasseur, 2019; Rtveladze et al., 2013). Changes in levels and types of food insecurity accompanying the urban transition in the Global South are increasingly well-documented. Coherent strategies to mitigate rising levels of undernutrition and overnutrition are, by

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  11

contrast, virtually non-existent. Very few national and city governments have thought systematically about the challenges or developed food and nutrition security plans for their burgeoning urban populations (Haysom, 2015). One of the many complex policy challenges is the dramatic transformation in urban food systems over the last three decades. This involves “extensive consolidation, very rapid institutional and organizational change, and progressive modernization of the procurement system” (Reardon and Timmer, 2012, p. 225). As the urban transition in the Global South continues to gain momentum, food and nutrition insecurity has become a serious, multi-faceted and neglected development challenge in its cities and towns. The next section examines the nature of the international community’s response to this challenge since one of the aims of this volume is to raise global awareness of the different dimensions of the crisis of urban food security.

4. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND URBAN FOOD SECURITY In the last five years, two key global compacts have been ratified, which place cities at the centre of the sustainable development imperative: The New Urban Agenda (UN, 2017) and the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2018). Embedded in both of these global development strategies is the recognition that building sustainable and food secure cities is one of the critical development issues of the 21st century (Barling and Fanzo, 2018; Birch and Wachter, 2011; Blay-Palmer, 2016; Fox, 2011; Haysom et al., 2019; Satterthwaite et al., 2010). In 2015, the UN General Assembly decided to convene the Habitat III Conference “to reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable urbanization, to focus on the implementation of a New Urban Agenda, building on the Habitat Agenda of Istanbul in 1996” (UN, 2017). The New Urban Agenda (NUA) was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, Ecuador, on 20 October 2016, and was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly at its sixty-eighth plenary meeting of the seventy-first session on 23 December 2016 (UN, 2017). The main objectives included the securing of “renewed political commitment for sustainable urban development, assess accomplishments to date, address poverty, and identify and address new and emerging challenges” (UN, 2017). The NUA highlights food security as a key element of a sustainable urban future, as Article 5 shows: By readdressing the way cities and human settlements are planned, designed, financed, developed, governed and managed, the New Urban Agenda will help

12  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South to end poverty and hunger in all its forms and dimensions; reduce inequalities; promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth; achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in order to fully harness their vital contribution to sustainable development; improve human health and wellbeing; foster resilience; and protect the environment.

The HABITAT III conference took place shortly after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and provides a potentially important corrective (UN, 2017). The SDG commitment to ending poverty and hunger in all its forms is directly addressed in Goals 1 (end poverty) and 2 (zero hunger). This congruency is important and provides the mandate for the global community to address food and nutrition security head-on within the context of the drive towards a more sustainable urban future. However, while the New Urban Agenda does well to highlight food and nutrition security as a key element of the urban sustainable development priorities, cities and food are in fact not integrated within the SDG framework, a problem which also characterized the earlier Millennium Development Goals (Battersby, 2017; Battersby and Watson, 2018a). The inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predominantly urban world (Sgro et al., 2019). However, while SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), provides goals for housing, transportation, land use, cultural heritage and disaster risk prevention, food is not mentioned at all. Similarly, SDG 2 Zero Hunger, focuses on food production and marketing, but makes no reference to urban residents’ access to that food. This conundrum reflects the dichotomy in thinking and programming when it comes to food and cities. As already highlighted, access to food remains the key development challenge for impoverished urbanites, and not food supply or availability. 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). When the current operationalization and reporting on the SDG agenda is considered, a further concern emerges. There is a real risk that the framing of hunger in SDG 2 as a production challenge will divert attention to rural hunger. If the adage that “what is measured is managed” is applied, the SDGs and their resultant reporting could unintentionally further marginalize

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  13

urban food security and so deepen hunger and malnutrition in the towns and cities of the Global South. When the UNDP (2012) called for “inclusive growth and people-centred approaches to food security”, it framed the issue purely as a matter of rural production and employment (Hanson, 2013; Spoor and Robbins, 2012). Indeed, there was more research and policy debate on urban food insecurity in the 1990s, when the South was a lot less urbanized than it is today (Drakakis-Smith, 1991; Maxwell, 1999; Smith, 1998). The only aspect of urban food security that continues to command significant attention has been urban agriculture, which is widely but improbably seen as the key to cities feeding themselves (Badami and Ramankutty, 2015; Binns and Nel, 2020; Crush et al., 2011; Frayne et al., 2014; Lee-Smith, 2010).

5. CONTRIBUTIONS A number of themes run through the chapters of this edited volume. Six are highlighted here: scale and context; markets; governance; transitions; interconnectedness; and networks. As readers will observe, many of the chapters speak to more than one theme, while a number of chapters appear to take contradictory positions on key issues. This is a deliberate editorial strategy and the result of authors being asked to write to their own specific disciplines, viewpoints and areas of research. These tensions demonstrate the emerging and disputed nature of urban food system theorization and normative positioning in the Global South. To curate uniformity in positions and perspectives would have meant excising many important and critical voices within this contested domain. 5.1 Scale and Context The first theme pertains to questions of appropriate conceptual and methodological scale and context for addressing urban food security, and whether and how to link the global and the local. All of the contributors were asked to “think global” and produce overviews and syntheses that relate to more than one region of the world. As we have argued above, and the chapters by Cecilia Tacoli, James Tefft and Marketa Jonasova, and Tony Weis et al. confirm, the industrialization and globalization of food production, distribution and access provides essential context for understanding the general drivers of rapid urbanization and urban food security. That said, it is clear that food security challenges, outcomes and responses vary considerably from region to region, country to country, and city to city. The chapters in this volume take two approaches to the analysis of spatial variation: some, such as those by Reena das Nair, Jonathan

14  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Crush and Mary Caesar, and Daniel Warshawsky test global generalizations about the supermarket revolution, food remittances and food banking against case study evidence from Southern Africa. Others, such as those by Susan ­Horton, Piero Conforti et al., Carrie Mitchell et al. and Abel Chikanda et al., adopt a comparative approach to issues such as overnutrition, urban agriculture, climate change and migration to demonstrate the existence of considerable inter-country and inter-city heterogeneity. One of the most important scalar questions addressed here has arisen in response to the city-region approach advocated by the UN FAO, the Milan Urban Food Pact and the New Urban Agenda. Here there are clear tensions over the the role and importance of city regions and localism. The chapters by Tefft and Jonasova, and Felicity Proctor and Julio Berdegué suggest clear advantages in a City Region Food System (CRFS) approach. Others, such as Conforti et al. and Marie Ruel et al. foreground the importance of local production, specifically in peri-urban areas. However, other chapters, such as those by Jane Battersby and Vanessa Watson, and Gareth Haysom, historicize and explicitly challenge the universal applicability of the City Region approach. Tacoli, Liam Riley and Belinda Dodson, and Jodi Koberinski et al. are less direct in their challenge but caution against a production-dominated focus in urban food security responses. These tensions demonstrate the divergent positions in emerging scholarship in the field of urban food systems research. While there may be a measure of emerging consensus on issues pertaining to urban food system studies in the Global North, this is not as evident in the Global South and this book deliberately seeks out some of these contradictions. 5.2 Markets Reflecting the 1996 FAO definition of food security, this book explicitly focuses on the accessibility, utilization and stability dimensions of food and nutrition security. As a result, there is a clear focus on the role of the market, in all its forms. This includes supermarkets and the emerging “middle” in the works of Thomas Reardon on the quiet revolution in the midstream of agrifood value chains, and das Nair, who offers nuance to discussions of the supermarket “revolution” in the South. An additional area of focus is that of the informal food retailing economy whose importance to poor urban households as a source of income and food is increasingly recognized by researchers, and repudiated by national and local policy-makers. Here the contributions by Tacoli, Graeme Young and Jonathan Crush, and Ruel et al. offer important insights into the needs and challenges faced by the economy and how different conceptualizations of informality lead to very different policy and regulatory responses. These chapters also underscore the central role that urban governance plays

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  15

in urban food systems, even if indirectly through non-food-related governance actions imposed on food system actors. 5.3 Governance This book offers important new insights into urban food systems governance theorization in the Global South. Haysom, for example, argues that pluralistic “Northern” views and arguments about urban food governance are being uncritically inserted, or worse, imposed (and adopted) in cities and regions in the Global South. More problematic still, many cities in the South do nor recognize the importance of food system governance and lack the exemplars and resources to change this situation. SDG 11 provides little guidance or incentive to rectify this situation. Food banking has emerged as a significant policy “solution” to food system dysfunction but, argues Warshawsky, suffers from inappropriate placement in many parts of the Global South, and uncertain impacts on food insecurity and food waste levels over the long term. Tefft and Jonasova advocate an overall framework for urban food system governance in what they call TRANSFORM, which may command significant attention emerging, as it does, from World Bank thinking on the issues. Mitchell et al. examine the new era of governance hyper-experimentation and contend that it fails to address the important climate change–food security nexus and has the potential to exacerbate existing socio-economic inequality. A common thread in these chapters is the so-called absent urban mandate specific to food in cities of the South. By offering new insights into urban food governance questions and linking urban food system challenges to other urban governance mandates, they highlight the need for more Southern theorization that breaks with dominant Northern narratives of the city. 5.4 Transitions The overarching purpose of this volume is to situate the current urban food security challenge within a series of inter-related transitions that will define the quality of human existence in the 21st century. These transitions pre-date the SDGs and will persist long after the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda wraps up. Our concern is that the sidelining of the urban food security challenge, or its confinement within narrow production-oriented parameters, will inevitably mean that it does not receive the urgent research and policy attention it rightly should. Many of the chapters provide additional insights into the transitions identified at the outset of this chapter including rapid urbanization (Tacoli), the industrialization of the global food production and retail system (das Nair, Weiss et al.), climate change (Mitchell et al.), international mobility

16  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

(Chikanda et al.) and the transformation of rural–urban linkages (Crush and Caesar, Proctor and Berdegué, and Reardon). Three chapters (by Horton, Tacoli, and Ruel et al.) demonstrate the scale of the nutrition transition, but also the significant rise in non-communicable diseases and the double burden of disease experienced in Southern cities. The chapter by Riley and Dodson further demonstrates how gender and power impact nutrition outcomes and how “what people eat in cities of the Global South is a reflection of their intersecting identities, as urban, gendered, classed, and belonging to contextually specific religious, regional, or ethnic groups”. All of these chapters on transition highlight the fact that the urban food question is far more than a question of production and that urgent attention is required to address the inter-generational consequences that the development deficit of poor nutrition brings. 5.5 Interconnections A further theme that emerges in many of the contributions concerns linkages and connections and, in particular, the interconnected nature of the urban food challenge in cities of the South. Many chapters explicitly engage questions of the “nexus” or “interface” between food security and other processes. Mitchell et al. consider the climate change–food security nexus and the nature of experimentation taking place on this issue (together with some of the associated politics); Riley and Dodson focus on the “gender–urban-food” interface; and Koberinski et al. consider the food safety/food security nexus with specific reference to the impact of industrialization in Southern cities. Tefft and Jonasova position the urban food system at the heart of the food–water–energy nexus, while Chikanda et al. focus on the South–South migration and food security nexus, and Conforti et al. explore the urbanization-urban agriculture connection. Exploration of these interconnections demonstrates the nature and complexity of the urban food insecurity challenge and emphasizes the key point made in emerging Southern studies on urban food, namely that food and food insecurity intersects with a variety of other urban challenges and opportunities. A key contribution made by the chapters in this reader is that these intersections explicitly highlight the need for inter-, multi- and even trans-disciplinary research approaches. Additionally and importantly, food security questions in Southern cities raise critical governance and policy questions. Traditional Southern governance approaches, and often funding and development support, reinforce siloed governance systems and hierarchies. As a result, many Southern cities are stuck in outdated planning and governance regimes. This has a direct impact on urban food outcomes, something detailed throughout the volume.

Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  17

5.6 Networks Many chapters either directly focus on networks and their roles in the food system, across multiple scales. Some chapters, such as those by Tefft and Jonasova, Weis et al., Proctor and Berdegué, and Crush and Caesar speak to networks that span the urban and rural scales and define the food-related and other flows between them. Mitchell et al., as well as Warshawsky, and Battersby and Watson, highlight the positive and negative roles that international networks play in defining priorities and interventions for addressing perceived urban challenges. While readers may note additional common themes, the six identified demonstrate the scope of the work detailed in this volume. The contributions highlight the regional and contextual differences in urban food security drivers, outcomes and associated challenges. Generalizations are not always productive and nuance is required – the Global South is not a uniform landscape. These differences and tensions within and between the chapters, serve to demonstrate the importance of context, the centrality of scale and, perhaps most importantly, the importance of using evidence derived from Southern contexts to formulate and engage Southern urban food system responses and theorization. While this statement may appear self-evident, the work contained in the following chapters demonstrates not only the different viewpoints, but also significant areas for new research consistent with the forward-looking agenda identified by Ruel et al.

6. CONCLUSION Underlying the new international food security agenda are three propositions: first, the problem of food security is primarily one of inadequate national production and supply; second, the primary location of food insecurity is in the rural areas of the South; and, third, urbanization is an essentially problematic phenomenon which can be slowed and even halted by addressing the “root causes” of food insecurity (rural poverty and declining smallholder agriculture) (Crush and Frayne, 2011; Crush and Riley, 2018). Despite the current donor and philanthropic enthusiasm for further “green revolutions” in the countryside, such efforts are highly unlikely either to stem the migration of people to the cities or to feed these newly urbanized populations. The Global South faces an increasingly urban future and food insecurity will become a primarily urban challenge (Chmielewska and Souza, 2011; Crush et al., 2012; Graziano da Silva and Fan, 2017; Frayne et al., 2018; Steel, 2009; Tacoli, 2019; Teng et al., 2011; Zingel et al., 2011). The knowledge gaps are many and a wide-ranging programme of research is urgently needed to uncover the dimensions and complexities of the phenomenon. Out of this will emerge

18  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

policy responses that move beyond the pervasive idea that urban households can and will feed themselves or be fed by their impoverished elderly relatives on small plots in rural areas. Notwithstanding the explicit identification of food and nutrition security within the NUA, and the SDG commitment to ending poverty and hunger, a key challenge that the global community currently faces is how to integrate these food-oriented development objectives in the urbanizing Global South. Meeting these objectives will certainly remain central endeavours in achieving a sustainable future, both within the 2030 Agenda timeline and beyond. This reader serves as a foundation, offering multiple entry points for new work on food systems and food security in Southern cities. Despite food and cities being fundamental to our everyday lives, we often do not see the connection, but when the issues are considered in a more collective manner, as here, a remarkable relationship emerges (Steel, 2009, p. ix).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter includes material from Crush, Jonathan (2014). “Approaching food security in cities of the Global South.” In the Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, edited by Susan Parnell, Sophie Oldfield, 45(543–55). Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear, but has been revised and updated. We are particularly grateful to Mariella Salamone and Bronwen Dachs for their dedication and professionalism in bringing this volume to fruition. Funding for the preparation of this volume was provided by the Hungry Cities Partnership with an IPaSS grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

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Introduction to urban food security in the Global South  21 International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) (2013), ‘IFAD President’s statement on impacts of investment on African agriculture and the principals for responsible agricultural investment (PRAI)’, Yokohama, Japan, 2 June. Lee-Smith, D. (2010), ‘Cities feeding people: an update on urban agriculture in equatorial Africa’, Environment and Urbanization, 22, 483–99. Levasseur, P. (2019), ‘Can social programs break the vicious cycle between poverty and obesity? Evidence from urban Mexico’, World Development, 113, 143–56. M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and World Food Programme (WFP) (2010), The State of Food Insecurity in Urban India, Chennai, IN: M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and World Food Programme. Maxwell, D. (1999), ‘The political economy of urban food security in sub-Saharan Africa’, World Development, 27, 1939–53. Monteiro, C., W. Conde and B. Popkin (2007), ‘Income-specific trends in obesity in Brazil: 1975– 2003’, American Journal of Public Health, 97, 1808–12. Popkin, B. (2017), ‘Relationship between shifts in food system dynamics and acceleration of the global nutrition transition’, Nutrition Reviews, 75(2), 73–82. Popkin, B. and P. Gordon-Larsen (2004), ‘The nutrition transition: worldwide obesity dynamics and their determinants’, International Journal of Obesity, 28, S2–S9. Popkin, B., L. Afair and S. Ng (2012), ‘Global nutrition transition and the pandemic of obesity in developing countries’, Nutrition Review, 70, 3–21. Portes, A. and B. Roberts (2005), ‘The free-market city: Latin American urbanization in the years of the Neoliberal Experiment’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 40, 43–82. Reardon, T. and C. Timmer (2012), ‘The economics of the food system revolution’, Annual Review of Resource Economics, 4, 225–64. Roberts, B. (2005), ‘Globalization and Latin American cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 110–23. Rodgers, D., J. Beall and R. Kanbur (2011), ‘Latin American urban development into the twentyfirst century: towards a renewed perspective on the city’, European Journal of Development Research, 23(4), 550–68. Roemling, C. and M. Qaim (2013), ‘Dual burden households and intra-household nutritional inequality in Indonesia’, Economics & Human Biology, 11, 563–73. Rtveladze, K., T. Marsh, S. Barquera, L. Sanchez Romero, D. Levy, G. Melendez, L. Webber, F. Kilpi, K. McPherson and M. Brown (2013), ‘Obesity prevalence in Mexico: impact on health and economic burden’, Public Health Nutrition, 1, 1–7. Ruel, M., J. Garrett, S. Yosef and M. Olivier (2017), ‘Urbanization, food security and nutrition’, in S. de Pee, D. Taren and M. Bloem (eds), Nutrition and Health in a Developing World, Part VII, New York, NY, US: Humana Press, pp. 705–35. Satterthwaite, D., G. McGranahan and C. Tacoli (2010), ‘Urbanization and its implications for food and farming’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365, 2809–20. Saunders, D. (2010), Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, Toronto, ON, CA: Knopf Canada. Seto, K., J. Golden, M. Alberti and B. Turner (2017), ‘Sustainability in an urbanizing planet’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(34), 8935–38. Sgro, J., B. Frayne and C. McCordic (2019), ‘Linking the sustainable development goals through an investigation of urban household food security in Southern Africa’, Journal of Sustainability Research, 1(3), e190004. Smith, D. (1998), ‘Urban food systems and the poor in developing countries’, Transactions of Institute of British Geographers, 23(2), 207–19. Smith, D. (2019), Third World Cities in Global Perspective: The Political Economy of Uneven Urbanization, New York, NY, US: Routledge. Spoor, M. and M. Robbins (eds) (2012), Agriculture, Food Security and Inclusive Growth, The Hague, NL: Institute of Social Studies. Steel, C. (2008), Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, London, UK: Vintage. Subramanian, S. and G. Davey Smith (2006), ‘Patterns, distribution and determinants of under and over-nutrition: a population-based study of women in India’, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 84, 633–40.

22  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Swindale, A. and P. Bilinsky (2006), ‘Development of a universally applicable household food insecurity measurement tool: process, current status, and outstanding issues’, Journal of Nutrition, 136, 1449S–52S. Tacoli, C. (2019), ‘The urbanization of food insecurity and malnutrition’, Environment and Urbanization, 31(2). Teng, P. and M. Escaler (2010), ‘Food (in)security in urban populations’, Working Paper No. 5, Asia Security Initiative Policy Series: RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, Singapore. Teng, P., M. Escaler and M. Caballero-Anthony (2011), ‘Urban food security: feeding tomorrow’s cities’, Significance, 8, 57–60. Thurlow, J., P. Dorosh and B. Davis (2019), ‘Demographic change, agriculture, and rural poverty’, in C. Campanhola and S. Pandey (eds), Sustainable Food and Agriculture: An Integrated Approach, Section 1: Food and Agriculture at a Crossroads, Academic Press, Chapter 3, pp. 31–53. Tuholske, C., K. Andam, J. Blekking, T. Evans and K. Caylor (2020), ‘Comparing measures of urban food security in Accra, Ghana’, Food Security, accessed 3 March 2020 at https://doi. org/10.1007/s12571-020-01011-4. United Nations (UN) (2015), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, New York, NY, US: UN Population Division. United Nations (UN) (2017), The New Urban Agenda, Habitat III Secretariat, accessed 3 March 2020 at http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/NUA-English.pdf. United Nations (UN) (2018), The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2018, New York, NY, US: United Nations. United Nations (UN) (2019), World Urbanization Prospects: the 2018 Revision, New York, NY, US: UN Population Division. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) (2018), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, New York, NY, US: UNDESA Population Division. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2012), African Human Development Report 2012: Towards a Food Secure Future, New York, NY, US: UNDP. Van Hook, J., C. Altman and K. Balistreri (2013), ‘Global patterns in overweight among children and mothers in less developed countries’, Public Health Nutrition, 16, 573–81. Wiesmann, D., L. Bassett, T. Benson and J. Hoddinott (2009), Validation of the World Food Programme’s Food Consumption Score and Alternative Indicators of Household Food Security, Washington, DC, US: International Food Policy Research Institute. Zingel, W., M. Keck, B. Etzold and H. Bohle (2011), ‘Urban food security and health status of the poor in Dhaka, Bangladesh’, in A. Krämer, M. Khan and F. Kraas (eds), Health in Megacities and Urban Areas, London, UK: Springer, pp. 301–19. Ziraba, A., J. Fotso and R. Ochako (2009), ‘Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: a problem of the rich or the poor?’, BMC Public Health, 9, 465.

2.

Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts Cecilia Tacoli

1. INTRODUCTION Debates on food security and nutrition have shifted in the past decade or so, with growing attention to consumption and especially to access, affordability and utilization. This is due to interrelated factors that broadly reflect two transitions: the urban transition, with the majority of the world’s population now residing in urban centres (UNDESA, 2015), and the nutrition transition, with more overweight and obese individuals, often living in the same households as malnourished children (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2016). Notwithstanding this shift in focus, food production remains 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 people in low-income urbanizing regions face in securing adequate diets (Battersby, 2017; Crush and Riley, 2018). Yet the evidence is clear. In the next three decades, it is expected that virtually all population growth will concentrate in urban areas of Africa and Asia (UNDESA, 2015). Rapid urbanization will, therefore, take place mainly in regions where economic development and institutional capacity are generally weak. Hence, urban poverty is likely to become an increasingly pressing concern for national and local governments and for the global community. In this context, food security (or the lack of it) will be a key element of poverty and one that is likely to stoke conflict if not addressed (Hossain et al., 2014). Urban food security is intertwined with both income and non-income dimensions of poverty. For urban residents, access to food is primarily through market purchases, hence affordability and accessibility are key. Additionally, non-income factors such as inadequate infrastructure, housing and basic services, and exposure to environmental hazards are important, if typically overlooked, contributors to malnutrition and food insecurity. Space is increasingly recognized as central in the understanding of the challenges faced by the urban poor, from health issues (Ezeh et al., 2016) to gender relations (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). This chapter explores how a multiscale approach of household, neighbourhood and city – with particular attention to space, specifically urban slums – can provide an analytical lens that helps refine the understanding of the challenges 23

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faced by the urban poor in securing adequate diets. The next section briefly introduces the importance of space and of the non-income dimensions of poverty in urban areas. The chapter then describes how disaggregating data on urban food security and nutrition uncovers deep inequalities and disturbing levels of ill-health among the urban poor. Sections 4 and 5 describe respectively how food represents a very large proportion of the urban poor expenditure, and the equally important non-income dimensions of food insecurity and malnutrition. Section 6 describes the significant role that informal food retailers play in urban food systems of the poor. The concluding section considers how a multiscale approach to urban food security can help explain its complexity and develop better initiatives and policies.

2. URBANIZATION, URBAN SPACE AND URBAN POVERTY It is estimated that more than half the world’s population now live in urban centres. This is a relatively rapid transformation: only two centuries ago, this proportion was about five per cent of the world’s total population. Keeping in mind the rapid growth in the absolute size of the world’s population, the number of urban dwellers is also unprecedented. Based on current trends, it is estimated that by 2030 about 5 billion of the projected total of 8.1 billion people will live in urban areas (UN-Habitat, 2016). Urbanization is deeply influenced by the scale and nature of economic, social and political change. This, in turn, varies both between and within nations and regions, and helps explain why within a global process of urbanization there are often substantial local variations, including instances of de-urbanization that reflect economic decline or collapse, conflict and/or environmental disasters. So, while there is a growing recognition of the economic benefits of urbanization, there is also a need to understand the context-specific factors that influence it (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2014). This is especially important since economic growth alone does not necessarily result in inclusive urbanization, and in many instances entails risks of exclusion. In low and middle-income nations, urbanization is driven by net rural–urban migration responding to better economic opportunities in urban areas, or by the lack of opportunities in rural home areas. People’s movement reflects the spatial distribution of economic opportunities, and most of the economic growth in the past 60 years has been in urban centres. Today, around 97 per cent of the world’s GDP is generated by industry and services, and around 65 per cent of the world’s economically active population works in industry and services. Most of these activities are typically located in urban areas, where they can

Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts  25

benefit from economies of scale and agglomeration economies (Satterthwaite et al., 2010). In many low- and middle-income nations, urban growth has been accompanied by the rapid expansion of unplanned, under-served neighbourhoods with high concentrations of poor people, or “slums”. The term comes with heavy intellectual baggage and, while it has recently re-entered the terminology, is not necessarily here to stay (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). Its implicit illegality has more often than not resulted in the stigmatization and marginalization of its residents, including evictions and the denial of access to basic services and rights. In the UN-Habitat’s definition, slums consist of any households lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living space, durability of housing and secure tenure (UN-Habitat, 2003). This definition highlights the diversity and complexity of slums, which challenges unified descriptions, but at the same time it lacks the spatial dimension that is crucial for infrastructure and basic services. It does, however, go beyond the much simpler definition of “informal settlements”, which in many instances can also apply to high-income neighbourhoods in cities of the Global South. Several authors have recently highlighted how slums are spatial entities with specific characteristics that are distinct from but contribute to the understanding of urban poverty and its implications for key issues such as health and gender relations (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016; Ezeh et al., 2016). Global interest in slums, reflected in their inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 11) and in the New Urban Agenda, is also linked to the growing number of urban residents living in these settlements: recent estimates suggest that 881 million people lived in slums in 2014, an increase from 689 million in 1990, and a figure that is projected to reach 2 billion by 2030 (UN-Habitat, 2016). The lack of adequate, regular incomes is an important dimension of urban poverty as urban economies are essentially cash-based. There is also evidence that low-income consumers typically pay much more than wealthier groups for goods and services that are of inferior quality, in what can be termed a “poverty penalty”. However, income is not the only dimension of urban poverty. Living in slums creates additional, non-income deprivations. These include lack of policing, often resulting in high levels of violence and insecurity; lack of financial services and entitlement to vote, both of which usually require legal addresses and official land tenure documents; higher prices to purchase privately provided basic goods such as water and food, and services such as the use of latrines, school and health care – and also high costs of renting what is usually inadequate housing.

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3. THE URBANIZATION OF HUNGER AND MALNUTRITION The health outcomes of living in slum settlements are dramatic, and especially heavy for children. The still limited number of studies show that in many instances infant and child mortality rates can be higher than in rural areas, even when comparing children in slums with rural children in the lowest socioeconomic tercile (Ezeh et al., 2016). Infectious diseases are also especially prevalent in crowded slums and closely linked to lack of adequate water and sanitation, surface drainage and waste management (Kennedy, 2003). Slum neighbourhoods have been identified as the most frequent source of cholera epidemics in African cities (Ezeh et al., 2016). With the prevalence of contaminated water, recurrent diarrhoea is a key reason for the prevalence of under-nutrition and stunted growth among slum children (APHRC, 2002, 2014). In many low- and middle-income nations, a very high proportion of children – in several instances up to one-third – are stunted or chronically malnourished. In 2005, over half the children in the poorest income quartile of India’s urban population were stunted, and an even higher proportion in Delhi and Maharashtra (Agarwal, 2011), two of India’s wealthiest states. Such findings are especially disturbing because the deep inequalities that underpin them are likely to affect future generations as chronic malnutrition lays the foundations for lifelong disadvantage, hindering cognitive development and future employment opportunities. Malnutrition and stunting among children often goes hand in hand with overweight and obese adults in a most pernicious form of nutrition transition, which concentrates in urban slums. Research in slums in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi shows that 43 per cent of overweight mothers and 37 per cent of obese mothers have stunted children (Kimani-Murage et al., 2015). In Egypt, 16.2 per cent of urban children suffer from stunting and, at the same time, around 70 per cent of women and almost half of men are overweight or obese (Sabry, 2009). Research in Bogota, Colombia, shows that while children in low-income areas have high levels of wasting (12.6 per cent), almost 30 per cent are overweight (Prain, 2010). While this is a consequence of changes in lifestyle, with the reduction of physical exercise, it is also the result of dietary changes. There is a growing reliance on food with high levels of fats and sugar and a decline in consumption of nutrient-rich food, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, which are often unaffordable for the urban poor. Demographic and Health Survey data from sub-Saharan countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Niger and Tanzania) on the increase in urban overweight and obesity over a period of at least 10 years shows that the increase was highest among the poorest, at 50 per cent, compared to the wealthiest at only 7 per cent (Ziraba et al., 2009).

Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts  27

4. INCOME POVERTY AND FOOD INSECURITY While urban agriculture can help 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 (Battersby et al., 2015; Crush and Riley, 2018; Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010). Lack of sufficient and regular income is effectively the root cause of urban food insecurity. Urban residents rely primarily on food purchases and any decline in income and/or increase in food prices can have critical consequences. Research on how the food, fuel and financial shocks in the period 2008–2011 affected low-income groups showed food insecurity as the most severe cumulative impact (Heltberg et al., 2012). A large majority of low-income urban residents rely on informal sector activities and casual labour that provide low and irregular earnings. In low-income nations, it is estimated that informal employment accounts for half to three-quarters of all non-agricultural employment (Chen, 2010). Food accounts for an extremely large proportion of low-income households’ total expenditure. Research in 11 southern African cities showed that, albeit with great variations between cities, food purchase is the most important expenditure for most households, and that it is greater among poorer households (Crush and Frayne, 2010a,b). The same research suggests that four out of five poor urban households do not have enough to eat at any given time (Frayne et al., 2010). Research in one of Nairobi’s largest slum settlements, Mathare, suggests similar patterns. Food is the single largest expenditure for residents, accounting for nearly half of household expenses. The high rate of joblessness and low wages, and the unpredictable nature of casual labour within slum settlements, translate into generalized food insecurity for residents (Muungano Support Trust and Slum Dwellers International, 2012). Moreover, in all but one of the neighbourhoods in the settlement, overall expenditure is frequently much higher than incomes, suggesting high levels of indebtedness. Any shock such as a sudden illness or loss of assets has devastating impacts on such stretched budgets. Similarly, in low-income areas of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital city, and Kitwe in Zambia, 30 per cent and 20 per cent of households respectively report spending almost all their available income on food (Prain, 2010). The higher proportion of income spent on food by low-income households reflects their limited financial resources. It also reflects the fact that there can be considerable differences in prices within cities and between different types of retailers. In the South African city of Cape Town, the difference in prices between supermarkets and small shops can be as high as 20–26 per cent (battersby, 2012). In Egypt, most poverty line studies take regional food price differences into account but miss significant intra-city differences. The residents of Greater Cairo’s ashwa’iyyat (informal/slum settlements) can pay much more

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for food than the residents of wealthier neighbourhoods. In part, this is because markets and supermarkets, where prices are lower, are not usually located near low-income settlements. For low-income households depending on daily wages, food has to be bought daily in small quantities from local shops and street vendors, and is typically much more expensive. For example, a 2kg box of ghee costs EGP20, while a small 80-gram pack costs EGP1, or 20 per cent more (Sabry, 2009). In Madurai, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, residents of low-income settlements who rely on daily wages can afford significantly lower quality and smaller quantities of food than their neighbours who earn weekly wages and can buy food in bulk. They also rely mainly on local shops for their daily purchases because, although prices are higher, most offer credit facilities (Rengasamy et al., 2001). To cope with high food prices and income insecurity, the urban poor use a number of strategies. The most frequent is reducing the quality and quantity of food consumed, including reducing dietary diversity, while at the same time reducing non-food expenditure including on health care, and increasing work time (Cohen and Garrett, 2010; Frayne et al., 2014; Hadley et al., 2012; Heltberg et al,. 2012; Muungano Support Trust and Slum Dwellers International, 2012; Prain, 2010; Ruel et al., 2009). Reduced calorie intake combined with working longer hours can have long-term detrimental consequences, including increased micronutrient-deficiency disorders, higher incidence of disease, higher child and maternal mortality, poorer school performance and reduced worker productivity. It also disproportionately affects women, as they often eat last and tend to forego food to ensure children have enough.

5. THE NON-INCOME DIMENSIONS OF URBAN FOOD INSECURITY Slum conditions add another layer to the nature of urban food insecurity. Lack of adequate housing and sufficient living space are considerable obstacles to buying food in bulk and at lower cost. In Greater Cairo, where poverty is assumed to be negligible compared to other Egyptian governorates, the majority of households in low-income settlements are tenants. To keep rental costs at a manageable level, housing is often overcrowded, with shared bathrooms and residents forced to cook in the same room where they sleep (Sabry, 2009). Storage of food is extremely difficult and exacerbated by lack of refrigeration facilities, which are essential in Egypt’s hot climate. In Berta Gibi, a low-income community in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, all households are tenants living in dwelling units that belong to the state. Although rent is cheap, the 33 households share one latrine, one water tap and one kitchen. To bake injera, Ethiopia’s staple, women often have to queue for several hours (Tolossa, 2010).

Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts  29

Inadequate access to water and sanitation facilities also has a detrimental impact on health and nutrition, as described earlier in this chapter. Secure tenure also has important implications for food security. Access to social welfare benefits, including food rations, and eligibility for targeted poverty reduction programmes require a legal address in the city. Also, access to financial services such as loans requires official land tenure documents. Securing these documents is all but impossible for the residents of slums and informal settlements (Tacoli et al., 2015). Disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards is pervasive in slum settlements, which are in many cases built in typically unsuitable if not downright dangerous locations, such as waste-contaminated land and land prone to flooding and/or landslides. This is the combined result of the need for the urban poor to be close to employment opportunities and the limited availability of adequate land. These localized and everyday risks are exacerbated by the lack of basic infrastructure and services, exposing residents to water-borne, foodborne and vector-borne diseases. With climate change, the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods and heatwaves will also intensify health hazards and the loss of assets. These events also contribute to higher food prices as they affect different elements of food systems – from production to distribution and storage, retail and consumption. Inadequate diets in turn increase vulnerability to infectious diseases, while the higher incidence of ill-health contributes to malnutrition (Frayne and McCordic, 2015; Tacoli, 2013a). These impacts are also heavily gendered: women bear the primary responsibility for domestic and care work, and are disproportionately affected by the lack or inadequate provision of basic services and unsafe environmental conditions so widespread in slums. Engaging in paid work is in most cases a necessity for women in low-income households, but long hours, often made worse by long journeys to work, and time-consuming activities – including care for often-sick children, preparing food in inadequate housing with limited cooking space (Tolossa, 2010) – take a toll in what is best described as women’s time poverty (Tacoli, 2012).

6. INFORMAL FOOD RETAILERS Perhaps unsurprisingly, purchasing cooked food from street vendors is a widely adopted strategy by the poorest urban groups, whose incomes and living conditions make cooking their own food a challenge (Rengasamy et al., 2001). In Nigeria, urban residents spend up to half their food budget on street foods, while in Accra, Ghana, this accounts for 40 per cent of low-income families’ food purchases (Cohen and Garrett, 2010). In low-income settlements of Johannesburg,

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South Africa, over 80 per cent of households source food from informal vendors (Crush and Frayne, 2011). Consumption of street foods also tends to increase when food and cooking fuel costs rise because their price usually goes up more slowly as a result of economies of scale in production (Cohen and Garrett, 2010). A similar growing reliance on purchases from vendors is documented in Mathare (Ahmed et al., 2015; Githiri et al., 2016). A systematic review of the nutritional contribution of street foods to the diet of people in low and middleincome nations found that they contribute significantly to the daily intake of protein, although it also raised concerns over the assumed high contribution of street food to fat, sugar, salt and carbohydrate intake. Overall, from a public health perspective, the review concludes that the use of street foods should be encouraged (Steyn et al., 2013). This positive assessment is not reflected in practice. Exclusionary practices aimed at removing street vendors from public spaces are pervasive in cities of low and middle-income nations. They range from large-scale violent evictions in cities including Cairo, Harare (Zimbabwe) and Luanda (Angola), to relocations to marginal locations with low pedestrian footfall and inadequate facilities, to ongoing harassment by corrupt officials demanding bribes (Skinner, 2018). In addition, street vendors operating within slums are exposed to the same food safety hazards as their clients: limited storage facilities, inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure, and lack of solid waste collection. Long distances from food markets and the cost of transport also constrain their ability to sell fresh food. Recognizing the specific role of street vendors and supporting them to improve the safety and quality of their products are major opportunities for increasing the food security of the urban poor (Githri et al., 2016; Tacoli et al., 2013a,b).

7. CONCLUSION How we understand the food security and nutrition of the urban poor largely determines initiatives and policies that aim to address the challenges they face. The evidence shows that these challenges are considerable and that many are not directly related to food but rather to specific characteristics of urban poverty. These, in turn, tend to be spatially concentrated in slum settlements. A multiscale analytical approach, overlapping with a spatial lens, can help identify the specific opportunities and challenges at each level, and from there provide pointers for possible action. At the household level, access to food is determined largely by affordability, that is, by incomes. Equally important, however, are the availability of time to purchase and prepare food and of space to cook and store it, and the location of selling points. These non-monetary factors help explain the crucial role of informal street vendors. Additionally, living in slums has important implications for health, and

Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts  31

therefore for residents’ ability to engage in productive work. It also affects their rights and ability to access initiatives that include nutrition programmes. Finally, it dramatically increases exposure to environmental hazards that in turn affect food security and nutrition. These hazards and risks can also be understood at the neighbourhood level: lack of sanitation in crowded settlements clearly has impacts on the whole community. The lack of basic infrastructure also affects street vendors in several ways: food contamination is a constant concern, but so are violence and risk of theft. Hence, a power black-out means that street vendors close at dusk, leaving customers who work long hours and return home after dark with no way to buy what may well be the only meal of the day. When combined with environmental hazards such as floods, this has a cumulative, negative impact on local food security. Local governments have an important role to play in urban food systems. This includes the provision of reliable transport infrastructure to ensure that perishable foodstuffs reach markets quickly, and storage facilities to help reduce waste. It includes urban planning such as the location of food markets and regulations affecting opening times. It also includes land management, as this is the first step to limit environmental hazards. However, local governments need support from national governments if they are to fulfil their responsibility to provide the basic services and infrastructure needed for urban living. Foodspecific policies include giving adequate support to consumption rather than focusing solely on production, and recognizing that “consolidated” food systems that support switches to large private-sector actors and supermarkets do not necessarily benefit the poor. However, perhaps what is most necessary is acknowledging that urban food insecurity and poverty needs to be a central concern at all levels of governance, from the local to the global.

AUTHOR NOTE An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2017, 14(12), 1554.

REFERENCES Agarwal, S. (2011), ‘The state of urban health in India: comparing the poorest quartile to the rest of the population in selected states and cities’, Environment and Urbanization, 23(1), 13–28. Ahmed, S., E. Simiyu, G. Githiri, A. Sverdlik and S. Mbaka (2015), ‘Cooking up a storm: community-led mapping and advocacy with food vendors in Nairobi’s informal settlements’, Working Paper for IIED, London, UK. APHRC (African Population and Health Research Center) (2002), ‘Population and health dynamics in Nairobi’s informal settlements’, Report of the Nairobi Cross-sectional Slums Survey (NCSS) 2002, Nairobi, Kenya.

32  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South APHRC (African Population and Health Research Center) (2014), ‘Population and health dynamics in Nairobi’s informal settlements’, Report of the Nairobi Cross-sectional Slums Survey (NCSS) 2012, Nairobi, Kenya. Battersby, J. (2012), ‘Urban food security and climate change: a system of flows’, in B. Frayne, C. Moser and G. Ziervogel (eds), Climate Change, Assets and Food Security in Southern Africa, London, UK: Earthscan, pp. 35–56. Battersby, J. (2017), ‘MDGs to SDGs – new goals, same gaps: the continued absence of urban food security in the post-2015 global development agenda’, African Geographical Review, 36(1), 115–29. Battersby, J., G. Haysom, F. Kroll and G. Tawodzera (2015), ‘Looking beyond urban agriculture: extending urban food policy responses’, Sustainable Cities Policy Brief for South African Cities Network, Johannesburg, SA. Chant, S. and C. McIlwaine (2016), Slums and Gender in the Global South: Towards a Feminised Urban Future, London, UK and New York, NY, US: Routledge. Chen, M. (2010), ‘Informality, poverty and gender: evidence from the global south’, in S. Chant (ed.), The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, US: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 463–71. Cohen, M. and J. Garrett (2010), ‘The food price crisis and urban food (in) security’, Environment and Urbanization, 22(2), 467–82. Crush, J. and B. Frayne (2010a), ‘Pathways to insecurity: food supply and access in Southern African cities’, Urban Food Security Series No. 3. Kingston, ON and Cape Town: AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network). Crush, J. and B. Frayne (2010b), ‘The invisible crisis: urban food security in Southern Africa’, Urban Food Security Series No. 1. Kingston, ON and Cape Town: AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network). Crush, J. and B. Frayne (2011), ‘Supermarket expansion and the informal food economy in Southern African cities: implications for urban food security’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37(4), 781–807. Crush, J. and L. Riley (2018), ‘Rural bias and the absence of urban food security policy’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK and New York, NY, US: Routledge, pp. 42–55. Ezeh, A., O. Oyebode, D. Satterthwaite, Y. Chen, R. Ndugwa, J. Sartori, B. Mberu, G. MelendezTorres, T. Haregu, S. Watson, W. Caiaffa, A. Capon and R. Lilford (2016), ‘The health of people who live in slums 1: the history, geography and sociology of slums and the health problems of people who live in slums’, Lancet, 389(10068), 547–58. Frayne, B. and C. McCordic (2015), ‘Planning for food secure cities: measuring the influence of infrastructure and income on household food security in Southern African cities’, Geoforum, 65(12), 1–11. Frayne, B., W. Pendleton, J. Crush, B. Acquah, J. Battersby-Lennard, E. Bras, A. Chiweza, T. Dlamini, R. Fincham, F. Kroll, C. Leduka, A. Mosha, C. Mulenga, P. Mvula, A. Pomuti, I. Raimundo, M. Rudolph, S. Ruysenaar, N. Simelane, D. Tevera, M. Tsoka, G. Tawodzera and L. Zanamwe (2010), ‘The state of urban food insecurity in Southern Africa’, Urban Food Security Series No. 2, AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network), Cape Town, SA. Frayne, B., C. McCordic and H. Shilomboleni (2014), ‘Assessing contributions of urban agriculture to household food security in Southern African cities’, Urban Forum, 25(2), 177–98. Githiri, G., R. Ngugi, P. Njoroge and A. Sverdlik (2016), ‘Nourishing livelihoods: recognizing and supporting food vendors in Nairobi’s informal settlement’, Working Paper for IIED, London, UK. Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition (2016), ‘Food systems and diets: facing the challenges of the 21st century’, London, UK. Hadley, C., E. Geoffrey, J. Stevenson, Y. Tadesse and T. Belachew (2012), ‘Rapidly rising food prices and the experience of food security in urban Ethiopia: impacts on health and well-being’, Social Science & Medicine, 75(12), 2412–19. Heltberg, R., N. Hossain and A. Reva (2012), Living through Crises: How the Food, Fuel, and Financial Shocks Affect the Poor, Washington, DC, US: World Bank.

Food (in)security in rapidly urbanizing, low-income contexts  33 Hossain, N., L. Brito, F. Jahan, A. Joshi, C. Nyamu-Musembi, B. Patnaik, M. Sambo, A. Shankland, P. Scott-Villiers, D. Sinha, D. Kalita, N. Benequista V. Raaj, S. Bhattacharya, B. Omondi and L. Posse (2014), ‘“Them belly full (but we hungry)”: food rights struggles in Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique’, synthesis report from DFID-ESRC Research Project, Food Riots and Food Rights, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK. Kennedy, G. (2003), ‘Food security in the context of urban sub-Saharan Africa’, Food Africa, Internet Forum, 31 March–11 April. Kimani-Murage, E., S. Muthuri, S. Oti, M. Mutua, S. van de Vijver and C. Kyobutungi (2015), ‘Evidence of a double burden of malnutrition in urban poor settings in Nairobi, Kenya’, PLoS ONE, 10(6), e0129943. McGranahan, G. and D. Satterthwaite (2014), ‘Urbanisation concepts and trends’, Working Paper for IIED, London, UK. Muungano Support Trust, Slum Dwellers International (2012), Mathare Zonal Plan, Collaborative Plan for Informal Settlement Upgrading, Report for Centre for Urban Research and Innovations, Nairobi, Kenya. Prain, G. (2010), ‘Effects of the global financial crisis on the food security of poor urban households: synthesis report on 5 city case studies’, Report for RUAF Foundation, Leusden, Netherlands. Rengasamy, S., J. Devavaram, T. Marirajan, N. Ramavel, K. Rajadurai, M. Karuranidhi and N. Rajendra Prasad (2001), ‘Farmers’ markets in Tamil Nadu: increasing options for rural producers, improving access for urban consumers’, Working Paper 8 for IIED, London, UK. Ruel, M., J. Garrett, C. Hawkes and M. Cohen (2009), ‘The food, fuel and financial crises affect the urban and rural poor disproportionately: a review of the evidence’, Journal of Nutrition, 140(1), 170S–176S. Sabry, S. (2009), ‘Poverty lines in greater Cairo: underestimating and misrepresenting poverty, poverty reduction in urban areas’, Working Paper 21for IIED, London, UK. Satterthwaite, D., G. McGranahan and C. Tacoli (2010), ‘Urbanization and its implications for food and farming’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365(1554), 2809–20. Skinner, C. (2018), ‘Informal food retail in Africa cities: understanding contributions and exclusionary policy practice’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK and New York, NY, US: Routledge, pp. 104–15. Steyn, N., Z. Mchiza, J. Hill, Y. Davids, I. Venter, E. Hinrichsen, M. Opperman, J. Rumbelow and P. Jacobs (2013), ‘Nutritional contribution of street foods to the diet of people in developing countries: a systematic review’, Public Health Nutrition, 17(6), 1363–74. Tacoli, C. (2012), ‘Urbanisation, gender and urban poverty: paid work and unpaid care work in the city’, Working Paper for IIED, London, UK. Tacoli, C., B. Bukhari and S. Fisher (2013a), ‘Urban poverty, food security and climate change’, Working Paper for IIED, London, UK. Tacoli, C., X.T. Hoang, M. Owusu, L. Kigen and J. Padgham (2013b), ‘The role of local government in urban food security’, IIED Briefing Paper: London, UK. Tacoli, C., G. McGranahan and D. Satterthwaite (2015), ‘Urbanisation, rural–urban migration and urban poverty’, Working Paper for IIED, London, UK and IOM, Geneva, Switzerland. Tolossa, D. (2010), ‘Some realities of the urban poor and their food security situations: a case study of Berta Gibi and Gamachu Safar in the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’, Environment and Urbanization, 22(1), 179–98. UN-Habitat (2003), The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements, London, UK: Earthscan. UN-Habitat (2016), World Cities Report 2016: Urbanization and Development – Emerging Futures, Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations. UNDESA (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division) (2015), ‘World urbanization prospects: the 2014 revision’, Working Paper ST/ESA/SER.A/366 for UN Bureau of Economic and Social Affairs, New York, NY, US. Zezza, A. and L. Tasciotti (2010), ‘Urban agriculture, poverty, and food security: empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries’, Food Policy, 35(4), 265–73. Ziraba, A., J. Fotso and R. Ochako (2009), ‘Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: a problem of the rich or the poor?’, BMC Public Health, 9(1), 1–9.

3.

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world James Tefft and Marketa Jonasova

1. INTRODUCTION Rapid urbanization is changing the way we think about food systems. Two per cent of the global population lived in urban areas in 1900, 50 per cent in 2017 and a projected 67 per cent in 2050. No longer are we just concerned about feeding everyone in the world. The types of foods we eat, where we eat them and the way they are grown, processed and delivered to consumers has widereaching implications for the nutrition and health of people, for jobs that all societies need and for the sustainability of the planet. The food system’s ability to contribute to these broad societal and economic goals will depend on its adaptability and agility to improve in several areas: its long-term, agro-ecological sustainability; its resilience to shocks; its ability to assure access to affordable food for all people; the quality, safety and nutritional value of diets; and the agrifood sector’s capacity to create viable agribusinesses and decent jobs. Our urbanizing world carries tremendous implications for food systems and their evolution, management and performance. Urban food issues are a critical dimension of an integrated urban–rural development agenda, contributing to multiple outcomes that are key to meeting the World Bank Group’s twin goals of boosting shared prosperity and reducing extreme poverty. Specifically, what happens in the food system is increasingly understood as a key dimension of the challenges facing most governments: creating more and better jobs; addressing climate change and resource scarcity; ensuring food security and improving nutrition and health. Food system issues have historically been approached at national and provincial levels; to date, they have not figured prominently among the priorities addressed by municipalities and metropolitan districts. This is starting to change. Interest in urban food systems is growing and cities and metropolitan districts are increasing their engagement in food issues, largely because of the admission of the significant role cities play in the urban food production and consumption paradigm, where decentralized cooperation can help fight against urban poverty and hunger in a sustainable way. It is imperative to encourage a deeper and more systematic understanding of the needs arising from the shifting geography of the food system, with the supply and demand dimensions 34

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  35

of urban and peri-urban areas a critical component of the global rural–urban transformation. This chapter presents the salient findings of a broad survey piece, “Food systems for an urbanizing world”, produced by the World Bank and FAO, which initiated a process of reflection, analysis and discussion on how the World Bank, in partnership with others, can most effectively support diverse public, private and civil society actors to advance a transformative agenda in support of urban food systems. Based on a desk review of the wide range of literature related to urban food issues, food systems and urban and peri-urban agriculture, this chapter proposes a narrative, a conceptual framework and the broad parameters and priorities for efforts to improve urban food systems. It focuses on the urban or downstream dimension of food systems as an important complement to the agricultural and rural functions of agri-food systems, in the context of the ongoing rural–urban transformation and growing importance of territorial approaches and rural–urban linkages. It is organized in three sections: a discussion of the principal drivers of food systems in an urbanizing world; a discussion of the diversity and evolution of food systems; and the presentation of a conceptual framework with suggested entry points for addressing cities’ urban food needs.

2. URBAN FOOD TRENDS AND DRIVERS Several important trends have led to a new focus on the food system and its ability to adapt, improve and deliver on broad societal and economic goals. Very broadly, globalization, urbanization, a rising middle class, automation and rapid technological innovation have all contributed to strong economic growth in the service sector, but the world is also facing growing inequality, fragility, conflict and violence, and challenges to job creation and shared prosperity. These points underscore the importance of the following exogenous factors that are driving structural changes in the overall food system, affecting its response to the challenges of sustainability, affordability and inclusiveness: demographic changes and population movement; rising incomes but widening inequality; climate change and resource scarcity; evolving consumption preferences affecting nutrition and health; rapid technological change and innovation; localized development and strong stakeholder engagement (Figure 3.1). 2.1 Demographic Changes and Population Movements Cities are increasing in number and size globally, but smaller towns are growing faster (see Figure 3.2). Expansion of built-up urban areas is leading to lowdensity urban centres in some places. In others, cities are growing upward, not

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Figure 3.1  Driving forces shaping future food systems

Figure 3.2  Evolving global urban population by city type

outward. Population growth, urbanization, migration and youth bulges in several countries (and aging populations in others) are shaping global food systems. There will be a rise in the number of megacities and cities with between 1 and 10 million residents, which has implications for urban land areas. In certain regions, urban land areas are growing faster than the population, leading to rising levels of low-density urban centres (Angel et al., 2005, 2012; Roberts,

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2014; World Bank, 2016). Overall, this has promoted expansion into peri-urban areas, with faster population growth on the peripheries of major cities and higher population densities in the low-income settlements on the edges of larger urban centres. Today, an estimated 1 billion people globally live in informal settlements or slums. By 2030, this number will increase to 2 billion, with most in Africa and Asia (IFPRI, 2017; WHO, 2016). 2.2 Urbanization and Economic Growth Urbanization and economic growth are generally mutually reinforcing. Urbanization fosters innovation, economies of scale and agglomeration effects, including more efficient labour markets, lower transaction costs and knowledge spillovers that in turn lead to economic growth (Indrawati, 2014; Mathur, 2013; World Bank, 2009, 2014a). Living in an urban area is positively associated with economic well-being. Except in sub-Saharan Africa, overall poverty declines as the share of people living in cities rises (Ravallion, 2007). Yet the share of poor people living in urban areas has also been rising, often more rapidly than the overall population. Survey-based estimates of income inequality show that global inequality is very high (Gini coefficient 19 of 0.701), and this figure increases when adjusted for the top one per cent of household incomes. Small or medium-sized “secondary” towns and cities tend to contribute more to poverty reduction than larger cities, due to the generation of higher nonfarm employment for the poor and the lower cost of living (Christiaensen et al., 2013; Haggblade et al., 2007). A growing middle class and expanding labour force are driving changes in food markets that may further accelerate this trend. Growing labour forces, especially in Africa and Asia, and the potential demographic dividend, provide an ideal opportunity for inclusive growth. Cashing in on the demographic dividend will require considerable commitment and investment to establish the requisite conditions and incentives for employers to hire people who are joining the job market, especially as 75 per cent of jobs are created by the private sector and an estimated 80 per cent are found in cities (Allen et al., 2016). The food system currently employs or provides livelihoods for over 1.3 billion people in the world (not including the millions working in the informal urban food economy), representing one of the largest employers of men and women. Historical trends point to the potential for food systems to drive job growth in their agriculture, industry (processing) and service sector components (ILO, 2015). United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) analysis (see Figures 3.3 and 3.4) shows that the food and beverage industry is the only labour-intensive, low-tech industry that sustains value-added growth as countries develop to upper-middle and high incomes. This growth is attributable to

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low and lower middle income

upper middle income

high income

Figure 3.3  Changes in employment by income and manufacturing industries, 1963–2014

low and lower middle income

upper middle income

high income

Figure 3.4  Changes in value added by income and manufacturing industries, 1963–2014

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  39

the food industry’s relatively higher value added and sustained employment growth, resulting in sustained labour productivity gains at all income levels. At very low-income, pre-industrialization levels, food and beverage is among the few industries that dominate the manufacturing sector; it is largely labourintensive, with growth rates not much lower than those of emerging capitalintensive industries. As countries become richer, there is a shift from labourintensive to capital-intensive industries. At very high national income levels, when most labour-intensive industries have declined, the food and beverage industry remains a major source of manufacturing employment, with no other industries coming close to the peak employment levels at any income level. The immense potential impacts of technological advancement – both positive and negative – will need to be carefully analyzed as food systems evolve (UNIDO, 2013). Recent Tanzanian data confirm the potential for job growth in high-quality food manufacturing. Analysis shows that food manufacturing in Tanzania offers the highest output per worker and the second-highest rate of growth in output per worker, and accounts for five per cent of all new jobs. The strong job-creating function of the food system is further evident in the urban parts of East Africa, where approximately 60 per cent of all urban jobs are affiliated with the food sector (Allen et al., 2016). 2.3 Food Consumption, Nutrition and Health Over the last 50 years, the agriculture sector globally has done a tremendous job of making more food available to more people. However, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) projects that agriculture in 2050 will require up to 50 per cent more food, feed and biofuel than it did in 2012 (i.e. to feed 9.7 billion people in 2050) (FAO, 2017). This estimated need could be significantly lowered by reductions in food loss and waste. The socio-economic trends affecting consumer preferences and lifestyles are driving significant changes in dietary choices and food consumption. Although changing food consumption patterns are a global phenomenon, their origins are largely urban and most significant in urban areas. Despite progress, the diets of the urban poor can be deficient in terms of calories, diversity and nutrients. Poor households tend to prioritize calories over quality – spending scarce resources on more affordable, calorie-dense, micronutrient-poor food groups with high levels of fat, sugar and salt. As incomes rise, there is a general shift in consumption from carbohydrate-rich staples to a more energy-dense diet (Dong and Fuller, 2010). More disposable income, changing lifestyles and new consumer preferences are leading to a higher demand for convenience and a greater consumption of packaged and processed food. More frequent meals and snacking are common,

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along with a greater percentage of meals eaten outside the home – a large proportion of which is “fast food” and involves fried and processed food (Anand et al., 2015; Euromonitor, 2015; Gelhar and Regmi, 2005; Gibbon and Ponte, 2005). At the same time, consumption differences between urban and rural residents are narrowing (Lançon and Wade, 2016; Tschirley et al., 2015). While income level affects overall consumer demand for food, choosing what to buy is influenced by taste, price, convenience and consumer perceptions of product quality, which involves notions of safety, appearance, cleanliness and freshness (Ali et al., 2010; Dong and Fuller, 2010; McKinsey and Company, 2015; Nielson, 2010, 2015; Woolverton and Frimpong, 2013). A growing number of consumers – especially those with middle and higher incomes and those who use digital media – are giving greater importance to value-based and aspiration-driven preferences, including health and wellness, social impact, animal welfare and shopping experience (Ali et al., 2010). These dimensions relate to the increasing personalization of food consumption and purchasing behaviour, as consumers consider the nutrition, health and wellness, sustainability and equity impacts of their actions. In many countries, and among higher-income groups, these preferences are manifested through demand for local food and short value chains with direct contact with producers, including those who provide food through e-commerce (i.e. first-hand traceability). Consumption of packaged and processed products is growing up to five times faster in low-income than in high-income countries (Figure 3.5) and is higher in larger cities. This trend is partly due to the fact they are produced to be ­hyper-palatable, highly available through distribution outlets, widely advertised and convenient to consumers. Per capita retail sales (a proxy for consumption)

Figure 3.5 Growth in per capita consumption of processed food products in Asia: 1999–2017

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  41

of ultra-processed food in low and middle-income countries across the world grew at an annual rate of 5.45 per cent between 1998 and 2012, reaching 7.7 per cent and 9.9 per cent, respectively, for frozen products and soft drinks (Monteiro et al., 2013). In Africa, the trend towards increased consumer expenditure on processed food (i.e. consumption) is growing, with processed food accounting for between 27 per cent and 58 per cent of all food expenditure in seven African countries; mostly minimally processed food (NOVA food processing group 1) rather than ultra-processed products (Allen et al., 2016). City dwellers throughout the world are consuming an increasingly large share of their daily food intake away from home, especially as income rises. Food away from home (FAFH) refers to prepared food and beverages purchased for consumption outside the home, whether in informal, traditional or modern markets, stores or restaurants. Figure 3.6 presents household expenditure on FAFH of a broad cross-section of cities and countries. A large share of FAFH is processed food. Street food represents an important source of FAFH in many cities, particularly for low-income consumers. In Nigeria and Tanzania, FAFH generates the most rapid and largest growth of any type of food as well as the fastest growth in output per sector, suggesting more attractive wages or returns to self-employment. Further, continued growth in FAFH has strong employment implications, especially for women, who represent 90 per cent and 71 per cent of all full-time equivalent employment in the sector in Nigeria and Tanzania, respectively (Allen et al., 2016).

Figure 3.6  Share of household food expenditures on food consumed away from home

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These evolving consumption patterns have significant impacts on nutrition and health. Six of the top 11 risk factors driving the global burden of disease are related to diet. High levels of saturated fats, trans fats, refined carbohydrates, sugar-sweetened beverages and red or processed meats are established risk factors for cardiovascular disease (Anand et al., 2015; Reddy, 2002). Excessive salt or sodium consumption is even more telling. In a 2010 study representing almost three-quarters of adults in the world, average global sodium consumption averaged 3.95 grams per day, almost double the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended level of 2.0 grams per day. The quantity of food consumed is also a determining factor for nutrition and health outcomes. Per capita calorie consumption exceeds average daily energy requirements in regions containing half of the world’s population. Together with reduced physical activity, this excess calorie consumption means that the number of overweight and obese adults is projected to increase from 1.33 billion in 2005 to 3.28 billion in 2030 (Scott, 2016). Young adults in low-income countries are gaining weight faster on average than those in industrial countries (Poobalan and Aucott, 2016). The alarming speed of this “nutrition transition” has contributed to substantial increases in nutrition-related non-communicable diseases, which were estimated in 2010 to contribute to 3–4 million deaths (Ng et al., 2014). In non-high-income countries, these phenomena are particularly prominent among poorer segments of the population in urban areas where physical activity is limited because of unwalkable areas and there is more nonphysical work and out-of-home eating. At the same time, some 800 million people worldwide go to bed hungry each day and approximately one in every three stunted children live in urban areas, rising to 54 per cent of children in low-income communities (FAO, 2016). According to the FAO’s Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) (a direct measurement of people’s access to food derived from the widely used and validated experience-based food security scales in the United States of America and in Latin America and the Caribbean) survey in 146 countries, 50 per cent of urban populations in the least-developed countries are food-insecure, compared with 43 per cent in rural areas. Among informal urban settlements around the world, however, the prevalence of food insecurity reaches between 70 per cent and 95 per cent of the population. Food insecurity often particularly touches recent rural migrants and female-centred households. Unsafe food can also contribute to acute episodes of ill health. Every year 600 million people fall ill from eating contaminated food and 420,000 people die as a result (WHO, 2015). Food-borne diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins and chemicals represent growing public health burdens (Grace, 2015). In addition, the associated global costs are consequential. Over the last six decades, zoonotic pathogens caused more than 65 per cent of emerging infectious disease events, costing over USD20 billion and an additional

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  43

estimated USD200 billion in indirect losses to affected economies (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2009; World Bank, 2010a). In this context, the health sector bears the cost of (or benefits from, depending on one’s perspective) the negative nutrition and health externalities created by the food system. Annual direct costs for the treatment of overweight or obesity-related conditions and for undernutrition (including stunting, wasting and micronutrient deficiencies) are estimated to be USD1–2 trillion per year (Dobbs et al., 2014). Additional costs are borne by families in the form of high medical bills, lost income due to illness, reduced school performance and lower lifetime earnings due to cognitive impairment (Global Panel, 2016). Over the next 20 years, non-communicable diseases are expected to cost more than USD30 trillion (Bloom et al., 2011). 2.4 Rapid Technological Change and Innovation The exponential changes and innovations driven by cellular, digital, data and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are the “new normal”. They will need to be integrated for sustainable, diversified and resilient productivity growth to meet future food demands and to improve efficiency, food quality and safety both on-farm and off-farm. Six technologies appear positioned to shape urban food systems soon: continued ICT development and applications; automation and artificial intelligence; Smart Cities; agrifood technologies; renewable energy/water resources and other resource recycling; and Big Data and analytics. New technologies will potentially eliminate certain jobs or tasks, particularly low-skilled ones that use hands and muscle power, while at the same time creating new jobs or tasks at high skill levels reflecting cognitive ability. The relationship between technology needed for a productive and competitive food system and job creation represents both a major challenge and opportunity for countries. 2.5 Climate Change, Resource Scarcities and Shocks Production and consumption patterns are not climate-neutral. An estimated one-fifth of greenhouse-gas emissions are generated by agriculture, forestry and land use change (EPA, 2017), while urbanization accounts for about 80 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions and strongly influences demand for non-renewable resources such as land, water and energy (World Bank, 2010b, 2017a). The food system is at the heart of the food–water–energy nexus, confronted with a warming planet, more extreme weather events and sea level rise, thus requiring more systems and collaborative multisector and multistakeholder approaches. The impact on the production side of the food system has been relatively well analyzed, with agronomic yields projected to fall by

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approximately seven per cent and water scarcity resulting in less productive pastures (Zhao et al., 2017). Post-production functions of the food system represent approximately six per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions (Garnett et al., 2016; Vermeulen et al., 2012), with refrigeration being the largest energy-intensive component (Pelletier et al., 2011; Vermeulen et al., 2012). They also consume 21 per cent of the world’s available energy (CIHEAM and FAO, 2016). The carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent – a wasted resource from human consumption, environmental sustainability and economic efficiency perspectives. In high-income countries with highly developed cold chain, transport, processing and retailing systems, the downstream portion of the food system collectively emits as much greenhouse gas as the production stages; a worrying omen for middle- and lower-income countries with rapidly developing urban food systems (Garnett, 2011). To keep the increase in global temperature below the crucial ceiling of 2° Celsius, emissions must be reduced by as much as 70 per cent by 2050 (IRENA, 2017). Urban growth and expanding towns and cities strongly influence demand for limited or scarce resources such as land, water and energy. Urbanization contributes to climatic change, modifies hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles and changes precipitation patterns (Kaufmann et al., 2007), increases pollution (AfDB, 2016; World Bank, 2017b; Zheng and Khan, 2017) and reduces biodiversity (Seto et al., 2011). Direct loss in vegetation biomass from areas with high probability of urban expansion is predicted to contribute about five per cent of total emissions from tropical deforestation and land use change. These changes also have a strong influence on urban dwellers’ vulnerability to environmental stress, with many highly dependent on natural resources. Reduced freshwater availability and competition from energy and agriculture could reduce water availability in cities by two-thirds between 2015 and 2050. The problem will be exacerbated by water pollution, aging and inadequate water infrastructure and inadequate water regulation. Land represents another scarce resource in the urban and peri-urban areas of many city-regions and metropolitan districts. The massive need for housing, public and office spaces, and transport services over the next 40 years will challenge all actors to find innovative solutions. By 2030, built-up areas are forecast to nearly triple in size over the 2000 footprint, an increase of 1.2 million square kilometres (Roberts and Barton, 2015). Food is an equally important resource that should not be wasted. An estimated one-third of food produced for human consumption is never eaten (FAO, 2011). Food loss and waste (FLW) occurs along the entire food supply chain – from production and processing to transport and distribution, retail and

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  45

consumption (HLPE, 2014). Most FLW in lower-income countries occurs at production and post-harvest levels, while in middle- and high-income countries this is concentrated at distribution and consumption. In Australia, Europe, New Zealand and North America, more than 60 per cent of FLW occurs during the market and consumption stages – in supermarkets, food and drink retailers, households, restaurants and caterers (Buzby and Hyman, 2012; Parfitt et al., 2010; WRI and UN, 2013). FLW results in lost revenue of USD940 billion per year (FAO, 2015a) and accounts for nearly one-quarter of the water used for agriculture (Kummu et al., 2012) and an estimated 8 per cent of global anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions (FAO, 2015a). Each year, an estimated 30 per cent of cereals, 40–50 per cent of root crops, fruits and vegetables, 20 per cent of oil seeds, meat and dairy, and 35 per cent of fish are lost or wasted (FAO, 2015b; World Bank, 2014b). Animal diseases claim about 20 per cent of direct livestock losses globally – a significant contribution to FLW. Finally, food waste represents between 23 per cent and 67 per cent of municipal solid waste in regions across the world (Nakicenovic et al., 2000; World Bank, 2012). All these driving forces have the potential to increase the frequency of shocks to the overarching environment in which urban food systems develop. The risks include climate stress, economic factors, pandemics, political instability and civil conflict. As the poor are more vulnerable when exposed to these risks, there is greater threat to the disruption of their lives, leading to food insecurity and the loss of income, assets and opportunities (Goldin and Mariathasan, 2014). The climate change phenomenon of course has the potential to negatively affect producers, private companies, municipal and regional governments, and countries as well as the performance of the food system. It will be increasingly important to develop effective and predictable instruments to respond to these shocks and to address the needs of vulnerable communities and households without distorting incentives or increasing uncertainty in the economic environment required to achieve longer-term development goals. 2.6 Localized Development and Strong Stakeholder Engagement Local food initiatives by communities, towns and cities throughout the world have been supported by a rising number and diversity of non-state actors. This growing localization of food policies and grassroots nature of urban programmes addresses a variety of issues related to food, agriculture, environmental quality and sustainability, nutrition and employment in the communities. Some municipal initiatives have evolved from advocacy coalitions arising from diverse food movements; others are driven by political commitment or have been viewed as part of municipalities’ mandate to provide services to their citizens (Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015).

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The vibrant, highly innovative civil society sector is assuming a diversity of roles, ranging from facilitators, conveners and innovators to advocates, social change mobilizers and providers of services to producers and microentrepreneurs. Partnerships and alliances with government, business and other civil service organizations, combined with the strategic use of social media, are helping to redefine how business is conducted and information is shared. However, the spatial expansion of urban agglomerations beyond traditional municipal boundaries poses several challenges related to cross-jurisdictional governance, urban planning and service delivery across city-regions (World Bank, 2017a). While multicity agglomerations (continuous belts of urbanization) provide opportunities for greater agglomeration economies, they will need good city planning mechanisms, sound land policies and institutional coordination. The downsides of concentration include congestion, pollution and growth of slums.

3. DIVERSE FOOD SYSTEMS RESPONDING TO RISING GLOBAL FOOD DEMAND The external driving forces exert significant influence on the structure and performance of food systems and will continue to shape their evolution, particularly in urban areas. This complex set of forces presents food system actors with interconnected challenges and opportunities. First, food systems will be called on to produce and deliver significantly larger quantities of food to growing urban populations in various types of cities; to provide a growing diversity of food products available in increasingly convenient forms and places; and to assure that food is safe and nutritious for people of all incomes. Second, meeting this growing and increasingly diverse food demand must be done more efficiently, using scarce land, water and energy resources, while generating a smaller climate footprint. Innovation and new technology will be critical to improved food system productivity and competitiveness to provide more affordable healthy food, but not at the expense of employment in one of the biggest economic sectors. Finally, the groundswell of interest and initiative from municipal and metropolitan governments and diverse private and civil society stakeholders will drive local food policy and investment actions, for which strong capacity and coordination with national governments and multiple sectors will be required. This section discusses the organization of urban food systems and how their diverse components are responding to the challenges and opportunities.

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3.1 Sourcing Food To respond to the growing demand for food in urban areas, municipalities and metropolitan districts source food from a combination of long and short domestic supply chains and food imports. Sourcing strategies will be specifically determined by the composition and evolution of food consumption, the relative productivity and competitiveness of domestic, regional and global food systems, and national values and priorities articulated in strategies and policies that facilitate and/or impose costs on domestic production and import systems. In Asia and in West Africa, 95 per cent of the food consumed is domestically produced, and two-thirds to three-quarters of this demand is driven by urban needs (Hollinger and Staatz, 2015; Reardon and Timmer, 2014). Access to a diversity of food sources and supply chains enhances flexibility in responding to evolving and differentiated preferences by type of consumer and in maintaining a more resilient urban food system. Urbanization and changes in dietary patterns are contributing to major transformations in domestic value chains, particularly the midstream portions that include processing, storage, wholesaling and logistics. These changes have positively affected the rural non-farm economy, particularly in rural areas within a certain radius of cities where the urban demand pull is more pronounced (Deichmann et al., 2009; Reardon, 2015). Agricultural production is also becoming increasingly differentiated, with a large share of smallholder farmers who are net food buyers and only sell part of what they produce, while those closer to markets, along transport corridors and in agriculturally dynamic zones have become increasingly specialized and linked to agribusiness (FAO, 2013). Public investment in rural transport and wholesale market infrastructure has contributed to the spatial lengthening of food value chains that is needed to supply growing urban agglomerations in parts of the world. The midstream portions of food value chains have also contributed to an increase in food produced, processed and distributed in longer or more distant value chains. Improved transport systems extend market catchment areas that supply urban centres. Investment in larger-scale food processing plants has also enabled economies of scale and location of facilities further from cities and storage systems has helped to decentralize value chains (Armah et al., 2010; Das Gupta et al., 2010; FAO, 2013; IFAD, 2016; World Bank, 2008). 3.2 Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Despite the trend towards longer domestic value chains, agricultural production continues to be extensively practiced in urban and peri-urban areas throughout the world. Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) has historically taken place in relative proximity to or within urban areas, with cities historically sited in

48  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Figure 3.7  Share of urban and peri-urban cropland in total global agriculture land

areas with the highest-quality land. Urban agriculture accounts for 15 per cent of the total agricultural land in the world, although it extends to 40 per cent of all cropland when peri-urban production areas within 20 kilometres of cities are included (see Figure 3.7). Some 60 per cent of all irrigated cropland is located within this 20 km band while 35 per cent of rain-fed croplands are located within this 20 km urban periphery. Rain-fed systems predominate in sub-­Saharan Africa, while irrigated production is prevalent in the more densely populated or water-scarce areas of North Africa and South and East Asia (Armah et al., 2010; Das Gupta et al., 2010; FAO, 2013; IFAD, 2016; World Bank, 2008). Although rural production and food imports may provide the overwhelming quantity of food currently consumed by urban consumers, the groundswell of interest in and intensification of the various forms of UPA portend significant opportunities for its further expansion in a diversity of contexts, including for displaced people, humanitarian emergencies and protracted crises. In many cities throughout Asia, urban and peri-urban horticulture production supplies up to 90 per cent of the vegetables consumed in cities, particularly green leafy varieties. And recent technological innovations in UPA also suggest a growing role for UPA as a leader and an incubator of highly productive, more resourceefficient (i.e. water, energy and land) production. The types of UPA are diverse and ever-changing. Systems can be characterized in multiple ways, including by their growing medium (soil, soilless, pellets, gel-based), water source (rain-fed, irrigated, mist), natural or artificial light (LED, reflectors), outdoor or indoor systems, type of product(s) produced or animals raised, location (urban or peri-urban, rooftop, balcony, underground, vacant plots, in buildings), growing container (shipping container, burlap bag,

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  49

plastic bottles, reusable cloth, ground), degree of environmental control, ownership (individual, family, community, business), scale of operation, input use (compost, fertilizer, pesticide, nutrient solution) and system technology (hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, vertical). While UPA in low-income countries generally ranges from the more traditional small family plots to medium-sized community farms to even larger-scale commercial operations, technological applications are increasingly redefining UPA to meet competition for resources or address constraints related to scarce and high-priced land and more efficient water usage, leading to intensification and innovation. 3.3 Three Overlapping Channels in Urban Food Systems Three overlapping and rapidly evolving segments or channels of the food system can be identified worldwide (Figure 3.8): a traditional system featuring urban wholesale markets, open or wet retail markets and small, independent (family-run) retail stores; a modern channel characterized by modernized wholesale and food safety systems with capital-intensive food processing, among others; and an informal channel that caters to the urban poor through the use of informal food vendors and restaurants and a variety of formal and informal safety nets.

Figure 3.8  Evolving food systems: modern, traditional and informal

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Traditional urban food systems are characterized by vibrant urban wholesale markets connected to rural areas through a diverse group of rural-based traders (assemblers, aggregators, etc.) and various scales of wholesalers, including smaller operators in agriculture-based towns and small cities. Traditional urban food systems predominate in many cities in Africa and Asia but continue to thrive throughout the world despite the growing presence of diverse types of modern channels. Given all the variants and actors at play, modern urban food systems are characterized by modernized wholesale and food safety systems; capital-intensive food processing; integrated cold chains and food service firms; state-of-the-art logistics; private branding, labelling and packaging; modern retail and restaurants; and global integration. Wholesale operations may be more specialized than traditional food systems, operate at larger scales and make extensive use of supply contracts with larger commercial producers. They source food from both long and short domestic food supply chains and food imports as well as direct purchases between consumer and producer. Modern retail comes in a variety of forms and scales, including a rapidly growing segment that is responding to the demand of middle and high-income consumers for food products and experiences that address an evolving set of value-based preferences, including social impact and animal welfare (McKinsey and Company, 2015). This sector is also characterized by strong foreign direct investment and engagement of multinational food companies throughout all functions of the food system (wholesale, processing, retail, food service and restaurants). In fact, multinational food companies have achieved the same level of market penetration in middle-income countries as in high-income countries. Local government and institutional procurement (for example, schools, hospitals, offices and prisons) also plays a role in the modern food system that can represent a large share of the urban food market and influence various desired food system outcomes. The informal food system represents a third subsystem that caters predominantly to the urban poor through informal food vendors and restaurants that are not generally registered businesses. It is largely cash-based and characterized by small volume retail transactions involving both domestic and imported food products sourced from open or wet retail markets or wholesale markets in the traditional system. Some vendors extend credit to regular customers. It also includes informal safety nets that poor households use to secure food, including food transfers from family members in rural areas and through sharing with neighbours. All three systems exist to varying degrees in most types of cities, overlapping and sharing certain functions, each with value and responding to diverse

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  51

Figure 3.9  Food retail market shares: modern vs. traditional

aspects of consumer food demand. However, they are heterogeneous with respect to actors, organization and functioning. Food systems may vary considerably by crop or food product, country or city type and by the policies, institutions, technology, investment and capacities that shape actor incentives and determine performance. They are also challenged to evolve in ways that support many consumers’ continued preference for open markets, small retail stores, informal vendors and the integration of modern retail and e-commerce into their shopping experience. Investment, updated policy frameworks and institutional reorganization are needed to modernize and transform current critical food system functions into more competitive and resource-efficient (with low greenhouse-gas emissions) functions. Sourcing food from rural production areas and using imports and urban and peri-urban agriculture (horticulture) can strengthen food security and resilience to potential shocks. Most consumers at all income levels adopt a mixed or multichannel shopping strategy to meet their food needs (Figure 3.9). Higher-income urban households allocate a larger share to modern retail but still spend twice as much at traditional food outlets. Modern retail has not advanced as rapidly as some predicted. Open markets and small, independent retail stores in the traditional system continue to claim a large share of retail market.

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4. TRANSFORM: A FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT IMPACTFUL FOOD SYSTEMS FOR AN URBANIZING WORLD Climate change, food security, good nutrition and health, and inclusive economic growth and jobs represent the overarching challenges and opportunities that future food systems must address. Given their deep linkages to poverty reduction and shared prosperity, these challenges provide the basis for identifying a set of four interlinked outcomes to which food systems may aspire and future interventions can be viewed, analyzed, prioritized and ultimately designed, implemented and measured (Tefft et al., 2017): Remunerative jobs and better agribusinesses (R) refers to an inclusive food system that creates opportunity, employment and enterprise for all segments of the population, distributing equitably the dividends of increased prosperity. The first outcome area relates to the creation of more and better jobs and the development of agrifood businesses through support of the informal food sector, employment of women and young people, workforce development, and MSMEs and entrepreneurship. Affordability and accessibility for food security (A) relates to the ability of the food system to provide food such that it is accessible and obtainable at reasonable prices to an individual or family everywhere, every day. Improving food security via better affordability and accessibility of food will require policy, investments, innovations and capacity building for constructing efficient, modernized food supply chains, reducing FLW and establishing targeted, food-friendly social protection programmes for vulnerable urban populations. Nutritious, diverse, high-quality and safe food (N) refers to diverse and balanced diets and safe, good food that does not expose the consumer to any risk of illness and in fact provides the body with the necessary nutrients. Improving the availability of and access to nutritious, diverse, high-quality and safe food can be addressed by policies to promote the consumption of healthy foods, facilitating innovative partnerships (for example, with restaurants) and institutional procurement of nutritious food, strengthening food safety systems to prevent food-borne diseases, and increasing the availability and accessibility of fruits and vegetables through innovative supply sources. Sustainable, resilient agriculture and food systems (S) rest on the three prongs of sustainable productivity, resilience and emissions mitigation. It is the ability to continuously support productive, adaptive agriculture and food systems with a low/minimum carbon footprint. A sustainable, resilient agriculture and food system will need every function to significantly reduce its carbon footprint through adoption of new and improved methods, innovations and technologies, and innovations such as closed-loop urban food systems or urban forestry that help to reduce emissions and protect the land and water supply.

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  53

Figure 3.10  A food system framework

These four interlinked outcome areas represent the centre of the TRANSFORM framework (i.e. representing the letters “R A N S”) and a quadruple win for the food system. They designate a shift or a transformation in the food system focus from one that has been traditionally centred on producing and delivering a sufficient quantity of food for urban populations to one that underscores the growing and critical importance of these four critical dimensions. They also represent the vision and foundation on which to develop a food-smart city. Achieving progress in these outcome areas will be strongly contingent on the ability of countries and cities to establish a set of five enabling conditions that are essential for effectively prioritizing, planning, designing and assuring accountable implementation of policies, programmes and investment. Transformative institutions (the “T” in TRANSFORM) (Figure 3.10) represent the cornerstone of the enabling conditions. This enabler addresses the fundamental need to rethink and iteratively restructure the institutions, processes and mechanisms to effectively address the future food system challenges facing communities, municipalities, metropolitan districts and provincial and national governments. Transformative institutions, with their champions, commitment and facilitation, are key to leveraging the other four enablers (i.e. FORM), which in turn are central to delivering the four interlinked outcome areas (RANS). A fundamental transformation in how institutions, policies and investment are determined, prioritized, designed and accountably implemented is key to effective urban food interventions.

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Facilitating and progressive policies: Addressing food sector issues within decentralized levels of governance (e.g. municipal or metropolitan districts), combined with a competing number of technical sectors and diverse stakeholders, offers a formidable challenge to how policies and programmes will be designed and implemented. The development of facilitating and progressive policy and regulatory frameworks, including aspects related to urban planning with attention to food system needs, land use, tenure and technological innovation, is necessary. Open data, knowledge and evidence base: Investment in data and analysis and open and transparent processes to access information will be essential for improving the evidence base required to plan, prioritize, design and track interventions in these relatively new areas. Public, private and civil society actors need open access to accurate, reliable and timely data and knowledge; use of Big Data and citizen science will require enhanced capacities for processing, understanding and using information. Resources for effective public and private financing: The mobilization and commitment of public financing to fund key public goods at municipal, metropolitan, provincial and national levels must be complemented by policies and incentives to attract private capital towards financially viable investment opportunities. The effective mobilization and deployment of public and private resources, including fiscal decentralization, adherence to a transparent municipal budgetary process and prudent and accountable financial management are critical for supporting policies that work and financing programmes at scale. Multistakeholder governance mechanisms and capacity: The required transformation in institutions, policies and processes will require strong local leadership, the development of effective governance and accountability mechanisms, and strengthening human and institutional capacity at these levels of government and of the diverse local stakeholders. A locus in the form of a responsible authority, alongside mechanisms for multisectoral and stakeholders’ coordination and integration of food issues into urban development plans and budgets, are necessary in the new urban food space.

5.

AN EMERGING TYPOLOGY OF CITIES TO TAILOR FOOD SYSTEM RESPONSES

Addressing the different dimensions of the TRANSFORM Framework, both the outcomes and the enablers, will naturally differ by type of city. The following, provisional typology of cities (Figure 3.11), based largely on demographic data, represents a first attempt to help practitioners and policy-makers in tailoring programme and policy recommendations to types of cities with similar socio-economic, demographic and food system characteristics.

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  55

Figure 3.11  An emerging typology of city-regions to tailor food system interventions

Agricultural towns or cities (C1) have smaller but fast-growing populations and are in agricultural production areas with a key role in the rural economy. Type C2 groups medium and large secondary cities together, some densely populated while others are growing outward, both challenged to modernize food system architecture and strengthen food businesses to cater to the needs of diverse consumers. The global megacities (C3) generally have more mature economies, with larger numbers of both middle-class and low-income consumers, served by vibrant modern, traditional and informal food systems that are challenged to operate in congested environments, many in need of upgrading. Finally, as mentioned, the need for new neighbourhoods and cities to house expanding urban populations presents municipal governments and stakeholders with opportunities to plan, design and construct modern, food-smart cities (Cn) with food systems poised to achieve the four interlinked outcomes. In these diverse city types, the relative importance or prioritization of TRANSFORM outcomes may differ (e.g. affordability and accessibility may be a higher priority in large secondary cities and megacities). Further, priority interventions may also differ. For example, the integration of food system interventions in urban development projects may be suited to large secondary cities and megacities, while agriculture value chain projects may be appropriate for small agriculture cities (C1) (Tefft et al., 2017). An approach embracing both municipalities and their larger metropolitan districts also appears to offer a pragmatic way forward, combining municipal specificity, procedures and budget with the breadth and wider political mandate of a metropolitan or city-region perspective. This provisional typology recognizes that the structure and conduct of food systems are strongly influenced by overall city wealth, size and density in addition to the specific characteristics of

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the food system, including the relative importance of traditional, modern and informal food marketing channels. As the knowledge base is improved, a revised, more nuanced typology will help to orient policy, programmatic and investment interventions to the specific socio-economic, demographic and food system characteristics of different types of cities.

6. AN INDICATIVE SET OF KEY FOOD SYSTEM INTERVENTIONS In the context of the TRANSFORM framework and city typology, a select number of indicative policies, institutional, technological, investment and capacity-building measures and actions can be considered in programmes that contribute to the achievement of these food system outcomes. These intervention areas for each outcome are meant to provide an initial structure for thinking about support to public, private and civil society stakeholders. Subsequent phases will naturally require consultations with municipal and national government complemented by in-depth economic and financial analysis as the basis for formulating specific projects in these diverse areas. As governments and diverse stakeholders come together to develop programmes and prioritize actions to address problems and accomplish goals, it is important to underline that there are multiple angles, entry points and opportunities for addressing aspects of a problem; there is not one silver bullet, one sector, one programme or one level of government to address an issue and attain results. It is also neither a linear process nor a “one action, one outcome” process; a given intervention can contribute to multiple outcome areas within the TRANSFORM framework. The interventions are premised on strong collaboration and complementarity among public, private and civil society actors and recognize the interdependence of urban and rural areas as part of the same social and economic processes. Urban food issues are inherently multisectoral, thus requiring attention to inputs from multiple actors and ensuring they are properly prioritized, planned, financed and implemented. Opportunities for men and women, young and old, are critical to their success. Although the discussion is oriented towards municipal and metropolitan district actions, certain interventions may be more appropriate at community, national, sub-regional or global levels. The success of the suggested food interventions will often depend on their systematic integration into comprehensive urban planning and budgeting processes accompanied by relevant policy and investment actions in other sectors, particularly with respect to physical and financial infrastructure, and an enabling macroeconomic and business

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  57

environment. Attention to areas like labour, housing, health, education and social protection are also of paramount importance. Lessons learned by cities that have advanced in the design and implementation of food system interventions should guide other cities. City-to-city peer learning and capacity development for urban food practitioners will also be important. Partnership with existing global city food networks and their technical partners assures continuity, facilitates access to existing technical expertise and experienced practitioners, and keeps the process focused on citizens’ needs and priorities.

7. CONCLUSION Food is everyone’s business; it concerns all. More systematic consideration of the vital, dynamic and growing urban segment of food systems will naturally focus attention on the downstream portions of value chains, helping to enhance their productivity and competitiveness, which in turn will drive growth, incomes and poverty reduction in rural and urban areas. This will help revitalize rural, urban and peri-urban producers’ economic activity, giving greater attention to the important issues of changing consumer food demand, market access and value-chain competitiveness. An urban orientation will naturally push for a systems approach that integrates food issues into multisectoral and multi-actor actions. Partnerships are crucial at all levels between public sector institutions, the private sector and civil society. Tapping into the groundswell of stakeholder momentum, knowledge and local expertise and providing a space for their continued engagement and leadership will help to advance a transformative, pragmatic urban food agenda in support of more sustainable and resilient, more affordable and accessible, safer, nutritious and inclusive urban and peri-urban food systems.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We wish to thank Shunalini Sarkar for preparing the figures for this chapter.

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58  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Ali, Jabir, S. Kapoor and J. Moorthy (2010), ‘Buying behavior of consumers for food products in an emerging economy’, British Food Journal, 112(2), 109–24. Allen, A., J. Howard, A. Jamison, T. Jayne, J. Snyder, D. Tschirley and K. Yeboah (2016), ‘Agrifood youth employment and engagement study policy brief’, accessed 20 May 2017 at www. isp.msu.edu/files/6014/7248/3804/AgYees_Policy_Brief_FINAL.pdf. Anand, S., C. Hawkes, R. de Souza, A. Mente, M. Dehghan, R. Nugent, M. Zulyniak, T. Weis, A. Bernstein, R. Kraus, D. Kromhout, D. Jenkins, V. Malik, M. Martinez-Gonzalez, D. Mozafarrian, S. Yusuf, W. Willett and B. Popkin (2015), ‘Food consumption and its impact on cardiovascular disease: importance of solutions focused on the globalized food system: a report from the workshop convened by the World Heart Federation’, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 66(14), 1590–614. Angel, S., S. Sheppard, D. Civco, R. Buckley, A. Chabaeva, L. Gitlin, A. Kraley, J. Parent and M. Perlin (2005), The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion, Washington, DC, US: World Bank. Angel, S., A. Blei, D. Civco and J. Parent (2012), Atlas of Urban Expansion, Cambridge, MA, US: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Armah, J., K. Schneider, R. Plotnick and M. Gugerty (2010), ‘Smallholder contract farming in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia’, EPAR technical report, accessed 1 June 2017 at https:// d7stage.evans.uw.edu/sites/default/files/public/Evans%20UW_Request%2060_Contract%20 farming_5%20March%202010.pdf. Bloom, D., E. Cafiero, E. Jané-Llopis, S. Abrahams-Gessel, L. Bloom, S. Fathima, A. Feigl, T. Gaziano, M. Mowafi, A. Pandya, K. Prettner, L. Rosenberg, B. Seligman, A. Stein and C. Weinstein (2011), The Global Economic Burden of Noncommunicable Diseases, Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. Buzby, J. and J. Hyman (2012), ‘Total and per capita value of food loss in the United States’, Food Policy, 37(5), 561–70. Christiaensen, L., J. Weerdt and Y. Todo (2013), ‘Urbanization and poverty reduction: the role of rural diversification and secondary towns’, Agricultural Economics, 44(4–5), 435–47. CIHEAM (International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies) and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2016), Mediterra 2016: Zero Waste in the Mediterranean: Natural Resources, Food and Knowledge, Paris, France: Presses des Sciences Po. Das Gupta, S., T. Reardon, B. Minten and S. Singh (2010), ‘The transforming potato value chain in India: potato pathways from a commercialized-agriculture zone (Agra) to Delhi’, report of Value Chains Component of Asian Development Bank RETA (13th) IFPRI Project on Policies for Ensuring Food Security in South and Southeast Asia, October. Deichmann, U., F. Shilpi and R. Vakis (2009), ‘Urban proximity, agricultural potential and rural non-farm employment: evidence from Bangladesh’, World Development, 37(3), 645–60. Dobbs, R., C. Sawers, F. Thompson, J. Manyika, J. Woetzel, P. Child, S. McKenna and A. Spatharou (2014), Overcoming Obesity: An Initial Economic Analysis, Jakarta, Indonesia: ­McKinsey Global Institute. Dong, F. and F. Fuller (2010), ‘Dietary structural change in China’s cities: empirical fact or urban legend?’, Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 58(1), 73–91. EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) (2017), Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gasemissions-data. Euromonitor International (2015), ‘Passport: Nutrition’, Euromonitor International. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2011), Global Food Loss and Food Waste, Rome, Italy: FAO. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2013), Smallholder Integration in Changing Food Markets, Rome, Italy: FAO. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2015a), Food Wastage Footprint and Climate Change, Rome, Italy: FAO. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2015b), Global Initiative on Food Loss and Waste Reduction, Rome, Italy: FAO. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2016), The State of Food and Agriculture, Rome, Italy: FAO.

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  59 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2017), The Future of Food and Agriculture – Trends and Challenges, Rome, Italy: FAO. Garnett, T. (2011), ‘Where are the best opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the food system (including the food chain)?’, Food Policy, 36(1), 23–32. Garnett, T., P. Smith, W. Nicholson and J. Finch (2016), ‘Food Systems and Greenhouse Gas Emissions’, Foodsource Ch. 3, Food Climate Research Network, University of Oxford. Gelhar, M. and A. Regmi (2005), ‘Factors shaping global food markets’, in A. Regmi and M. Gelhar (eds), New Directions in Global Food Markets, Washington, DC, US: USDA Economic Research Service, pp. 5–17. Gibbon, P. and S. Ponte (2005), Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy, Philadelphia, PA, US: Temple University Press. Global Panel (2016), The Cost of Malnutrition: Why Policy Action is Urgent. Technical Brief No. 3, London, UK: Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition. Goldin, I. and M. Mariathasan (2014), ‘Future opportunities, future shocks: key trends shaping the global economy and society’, City GPS: Global Perspectives and Solutions at www.­ oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/Opportunities_Shocks_Citi_GPS.pdf. Grace, D. (2015), Food Safety in Developing Countries: An Overview, Hemel Hempstead, UK: Evidence on Demand. Haggblade, S., P. Hazell and T. Reardon (2007), Transforming the Rural Nonfarm Economy: Opportunities and Threats in the Developing World, Baltimore, MD, US: Johns Hopkins University Press. HLPE (High-Level Panel of Experts) (2014), Food Losses and Waste in the Context of Sustainable Food Systems, a report by the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome, Italy: FAO. Hollinger, F. and J. Staatz (eds) (2015), Agricultural Growth in West Africa: Market and Policy Drivers, Rome, Italy: African Development Bank and FAO. IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) (2016), Rural Development Report 2016: Agrifood Markets and Value Chains, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.ifad.org/documents/ 30600024/8f07f4f9-6a91-496a-89c1-d1b120f8de8b. IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) (2017), Global Food Policy Report: International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, US: International Food Policy Research Institute. ILO (International Labor Organization) (2015), Decent and Productive Work in Agriculture, accessed 30 June 2016 at www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---emp_policy/documents/publication/wcms_437173.pdf. Indrawati, S. (2014), ‘China’s “new urbanization” needs to be inclusive and sustainable’, accessed 20 May 2017 at www.huffpost.com/entry/china-urbanization_b_5035433. IOM (Institute of Medicine) and NRC (National Research Council) (2009), Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases, Washington, DC, US: National Academies Press. IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency) (2017), Perspectives for the Energy Transition: Investment Needs for a Low-Carbon Energy System, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.irena. org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2017/Mar/Perspectives_for_the_Energy_ Transition_2017.pdf. Kaufmann, R., K. Seto, A. Schneider, Z. Liu, L. Zhou and W. Wang (2007), ‘Climate response to rapid urban growth: evidence of a human-induced precipitation deficit’, Journal of Climate, 20(10), 2299–306. Kummu, M., H. de Moel, M. Porkka, S. Siebert, O. Varis and P. Ward (2012), ‘Lost food, wasted resources: global food supply chain losses and their impacts on freshwater, cropland, and fertiliser use’, Science of the Total Environment, 438(1), 477–89. Lançon, F. and I. Wade (2016), ‘Urbanisation, changing tastes and rural transformation in West Africa’, briefing paper, IIED, February. Mathur, O. (2013), Urban Poverty in Asia. Study Prepared for the Asian Development Bank, Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Asian Development Bank. McKinsey and Company (2015), Perspectives on Retail and Consumer Goods, accessed 2 June 2017at www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/ our-insights/perspectives-number-4.

60  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Monteiro, C., J. Moubarac, G. Cannon, S. Ng and B. Popkin (2013), ‘Ultra-processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system’, Obesity Reviews, 14(2), 21–8. Moragues-Faus, A. and K. Morgan (2015), ‘Reframing the foodscape: the emergent world of urban food policy’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 4(7), 1558–73. Nakicenovic, N., J. Alcamo, A. Grubler, K. Riahi, R. Roehrl, H. Rogner and N. Victor (2000), Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), A Special Report of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ng, M., T. Fleming, M. Robinson, B. Thomson, N. Graetz, C. Margono, E. Mullany, S. Biryukov, C. Abbafati and N. Stapelberg (2014), ‘Global, regional, and national prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adults during 1980–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013’, The Lancet, 384(9945), 766–81. Nielson (2010), Global Trends in Healthy Eating, accessed 2 June 2017 at www.nielsen.com/us/en/ insights/news/2010/global-trends-in-healthy-eating.html. Nielson (2015), We Are What We Eat: Healthy Eating Trends Around the World, accessed 2 June 2017 at www.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsenglobal/eu/nielseninsights/pdfs/Nielsen%20 Global%20Health%20and%20Wellness%20Report%20-%20January%202015.pdf. Parfitt, J., M. Barthel and S. Macnaughton (2010), ‘Food waste within food supply chains: quantification and potential for change to 2050’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 365(1554), 3065–81. Pelletier, N., E. Audsley, S. Brodt, T. Garnett, P. Henriksson, A. Kendall, K. Kramer, D. Murphy, T. Nemecek, and M. Troell (2011), ‘Energy intensity of agriculture and food systems’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 36, 223–46. Poobalan, A. and L. Aucott (2016), ‘Obesity among young adults in developing countries: a systematic overview’, Current Obesity Reports, 5(1), 2–13. Ravallion, M. (2007), ‘Urban poverty’, Finance and Development, 44(3), 15–17. Reardon, T. (2015), ‘The hidden middle: the quiet revolution in the mid- stream of agrifood value chains in developing countries’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 31(1), 45–63. Reardon, T. and C. Timmer (2014), ‘Five inter-linked transformations in the Asian agrifood economy: food security implications’, Global Food Security, 3(2), 108–17. Reddy, K. (2002), ‘Cardiovascular diseases in the developing countries: dimensions, determinants, dynamics and directions for public health action’, Public Health Nutrition, 5(1a), 231–37. Roberts, B. (2014), Managing Systems of Secondary Cities: Policy Reponses in International Development, Brussels, Belgium: Cities Alliance. Roberts, E. and B. Barton (2015), Feeding Ourselves Thirsty: How the Food Sector is Managing Global Water Risks, Boston, MA, US: Ceres. Scott, P. (2016), ‘Global Panel on agriculture and food systems for nutrition: food systems and diets: facing the challenges of the 21st century’, Food Security, 9(3), 653–4. Seto, K., M. Fragkias, B. Güneralp and M. Reilly (2011), ‘A meta-analysis of global urban land expansion’, PloS ONE, 6(8), e23777. Tefft, J., M. Jonasova, R. Adjao and A. Morgan (2017), Food Systems for an Urbanizing World: Knowledge Product (English), Washington, DC, US: World Bank Group. Tschirley, D., T. Reardon, M. Dolislager and J. Snyder (2015), ‘The rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa: implications for food system transformation’, Journal of International Development, 27(5), 628–46. UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) (2013), Industrial Development Report: Sustaining Employment Growth: The Role of Manufacturing and Structural Change, accessed 20 May 2017 www.unido.org/sites/default/files/2013-12/UNIDO_IDR_2013_main_ report_0.pdf. Vermeulen, S., B. Campbell and J. Ingram (2012), ‘Climate change and food systems’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 2012, 37(1), 195–222. WHO (World Health Organization) (2015), WHO’s First Ever Global Estimates of Foodborne Diseases Find Children Under 5 Account for Almost One Third of Deaths, accessed 2 June 2017 at www.who.int/news-room/detail/03-12-2015-who-s-first-ever-global-estimates-of-foodbornediseases-find-children-under-5-account-for-almost-one-third-of-deaths. WHO (World Health Organization) (2016), Global Report on Urban Health: Equitable, Healthier Cities for Sustainable Development, Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization.

Food systems transformation in an urbanizing world  61 Woolverton, A. and S. Frimpong (2013), ‘Consumer demand for domestic and imported broiler meat in urban Ghana: Bringing non-price effects into the equation’, British Journal of Marketing Studies, 1(3), 16–31. World Bank (2008), World Development Report 2008: Bringing Agriculture to the Market, accessed 1 June 2017 at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDRS/Resour ces/477365-1327599046334/8394679-1327606607122/WDR08_09_ch05.pdf. World Bank (2009), Scale Economies and Agglomeration, accessed 20 May 2017 at http://siteresources. worldbank.org/INTWDRS/Resources/477365-1327525347307/8392086-1327528510568/ WDR09_10_Ch04web.pdf. World Bank (2010a), People, Pathogens and Our Plant, Vol 1: Towards a One Health Approach for Controlling Zoonotic Disease, Washington, DC, US: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. World Bank (2010b), Cities and Climate Change: An Urgent Agenda, accessed 1 June 2017 at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTUWM/Resources/340232-1205330656272/ CitiesandClimateChange.pdf. World Bank (2012), What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management, accessed 1 June 2017 at https://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTURBANDEVELOPMENT/Resources/ 336387-1334852610766/ What_a_Waste2012_Final.pdf. World Bank (2014a), ‘Speech by World Bank managing director and COO Sri Mulyani Indrawati at the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council’, speech given at the U.S. – ASEAN Business Council, Washington, DC, US, 2 October. World Bank (2014b), Food Loss and Waste a Barrier to Poverty Reduction, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/02/27/food-loss-waste-barrier-povertyreduction. World Bank (2016), ‘6C Central America urbanization review: making cities work for Central America’, accessed 23 July 2017 at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/134151467994680764/6C-Central-America-urbanization-review-making-cities-work-forCentral-America. World Bank (2017a), Urban Development Overview, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.worldbank.org/ en/topic/urbandevelopment.overview. World Bank (2017b), Reducing Pollution, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.worldbank.org/en/topic/ environment/brief/pollution. WRI (World Resources Institute) and UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) (2013), Reducing Food Loss and Waste, accessed 1 June 2017 at www.wri.org/publication/ reducing-food-loss-and-waste. Zhao, C., B. Liu, S. Piao, X. Wang, D. Lobell, Y. Huang, M. Huang, Y. Yao, S. Bassu, P. Ciais, J. Durand, J. Elliott, F. Ewert, I. Janssens, T. Li, E. Lin, Q. Liu, P. Martre, C. Müller, S. Peng, J. Peñuelas, A. Ruane, D. Wallach, T. Wang, D. Wu, Z. Liu, Y. Zhu, Z. Zhu and S. Asseng (2017), ‘Temperature increase reduces global yields of major crops in four independent estimates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(35), 9326–31. Zheng, S. and M. Kahn (2017), ‘A new era of pollution progress in urban China?’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(1), 71–92.

4.

An impermanent subsidy: Cheap industrial food and the urban margins Tony Weis, Marylynn Steckley and Bruce Frayne

1. INTRODUCTION: CHEAP INDUSTRIAL FOOD IN PROMISES OF MODERNITY Development policy and planning have long assumed that agricultural industrialization, the demise of agrarian livelihoods, and increasing urbanization are inevitable and desirable in the course of modernization. The essential logic is that with fewer people producing more food, poor farmers are “liberated” from drudgery, poverty, and food insecurity, and freed to seek better paying work in cities, which will allow them to buy more food. This modernizing narrative has contributed to a durable urban bias in development policy and planning, with cities receiving a grossly disproportionate share of services and infrastructure spending, and food policies that have often favoured consumers over producers. More recently, urbanization has also been celebrated by some as necessary for biodiversity conservation, with the claim that humanity should urbanize and intensify agriculture and resource production as much as possible to make “human-dominated” landscapes as efficient as possible and thereby leave more space for self-organizing ecosystems. In agriculture, this case is frequently described in terms of sustainable intensification enabling greater land sparing, either taking land out of agriculture or de-pressurizing agricultural frontiers (Tilman et al., 2011). There are several reasons why these narratives of modernization can appear compelling. At the forefront of these is the fact that high-input, high-yield monocultures have brought tremendous productivity gains, playing a central role in tripling world agricultural production since 1960 and reducing hunger (FAO, 2015, 2017a). They have also driven the increasing meatification of diets – another powerful though underappreciated promise of modernity – as the average person in 2017 consumed nearly twice as much meat as the average person in 1961 (from 23 to 45 kg/year), despite the tremendous growth in the human population from 3 billion to 7.6 billion over this period (FAOSTAT, 2019; Weis, 2013). Second, hunger continues to have a strong rural–urban divide. Most of the world’s hungry and malnourished people live in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (FAO, 2015, 2017a), while urbanization everywhere 62

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is increasingly dependent on cheap agro-industrial surpluses and international trade. In short, food security at the household level is increasingly tied to money. Related to this, progress in reducing levels of hunger in recent decades has occurred in countries undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization, most notably China, and has been disproportionately concentrated in cities. It is also safe to assume that the rapid meatification of diets on a world scale is disproportionately occurring in cities, in inverse relation to how hunger and food insecurity have long been disproportionately concentrated in rural areas. Third, demographic history and projections suggest an inexorable trajectory. In 1900, less than one-tenth of all people lived in urban areas. By 1950 it was around one-third and today it is more than half. By 2050, roughly 70 per cent of the world’s population is projected to live in cities, with Africa and South and Southeast Asia expected to account for over 90 per cent of the world’s urban population growth (UNDESA, 2017; UN-Habitat, 2015, 2016). Between 1990 and 2015, the number of megacities increased threefold, as did global per capita income, from roughly USD5,500 to USD15,500 (PPP) (World Bank, 2017). Urban migration has been widely spurred by the disproportionate wealth of cities (the “pull”) and the combination of rural poverty and hunger (the “push”), both of which feed into powerful perceptions of cities as sites of opportunity. While some might interpret highly uneven patterns of hunger, poverty, and small farming to reflect incomplete agricultural and urban transformations, these trajectories must also be considered in light of the biological and physical problems posed by industrial agriculture, along with the resource budgets and pollution loads involved in overriding them (Carolan, 2016; Kimbrell, 2002; McIntyre et al., 2009; Sage, 2012). Through this lens, the productivity gains of industrial monocultures can be seen to rest upon a series of unvalued and undervalued environmental costs, which amount to great implicit subsidy and means that cheap industrial food is far from inevitable or benign. On the contrary, it appears as both a destabilizing force, exerting intense competitive pressures on farming livelihoods, while being highly unstable in the long term (Friedmann, 2004; Weis, 2010). As biophysical contradictions become more difficult to manage, or existing overrides break down, key resources become scarcer and more expensive, and pollution loads become more damaging to the productive basis of agriculture. This is bound to pose difficult questions for food security, starting with the poorest urban residents. It also raises profound questions about the interrelated trajectories of agro-industrialization and urbanization, and why it is necessary to consider how more labour-dense agricultural development – an anathema in many conceptions of modernization – is vital to feed cities and to slow what might otherwise be unsustainable levels of urbanization.

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2. DESTABILIZING AND UNSTABLE: THE PRODUCTIVITY GAINS OF AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRIALIZATION Production from industrial monocultures has a tremendous competitive advantage over production from low-input, labour-intensive small farms. This is often simply assumed to reflect superior efficiency, which it does in two basic terms: greater yields (per plant and animal) and vastly greater labour productivity. For instance, an industrial grain or oilseed producer can operate thousands of hectares with vast machines for seeding, fertilizing, spraying pesticides, and harvesting, and an industrial livestock producer can quickly turn over huge volumes of meat, eggs, and milk, in stark contrast to the majority of the world’s farming population, who cultivate a few hectares, rely on family labour, have limited external inputs, may or may not have a little livestock, and must increasingly seek out off-farm sources of income or remittances to pay for various expenses, including food. However, the matter of efficiency is far from straightforward. The competitive advantage of industrial agriculture has long been fortified by large subsidy regimes in some of the world’s leading surplus-­exporting countries, which have tended to be skewed towards the largest producers, most notably in the United States and the European Union (Clapp, 2016; Weis, 2007). Explicit subsidies are, however, only part of the story of the distorted competitive playing field of world agriculture. Even more important is the fact that industrial agricultural production is implicitly subsidized by a multidimensional environmental burden that is either undervalued or entirely uncounted (Carolan, 2016; D’Silva and Webster, 2010; Kimbrell, 2002; McIntyre et al., 2009; PCIFAP, 2008; Sage, 2012; Weis, 2013) – what might also be understood as the appropriation and long-term deterioration of ecological surpluses (Moore, 2015; Patel and Moore, 2017). This is at the heart of why relatively cheap surpluses might continue indefinitely, but cannot be assumed in the long run. To begin to appreciate the environmental burden – and fragility – of industrial agriculture, it is necessary to recognize the need for biological simplification and standardization. Machines demand uniformity and a high degree of control along with the separation of animals from fields into dense enclosures, with fields and animals re-articulated through immense flows of feed such that industrial livestock production commands close to one-third of the world’s arable land (Springmann et al., 2018; Steinfeld et al., 2006; Weis, 2013). The basic imperative of scale creates or exacerbates a series of biological and physical problems that systematically undermine the foundations of agriculture. The fundamental biophysical problems associated with the pursuit of scale are never resolved, but rather are met with a series of external inputs, or biophysical

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overrides, that enable continuing productivity while problems deepen (Weis, 2010). The health of soils is adversely affected by the combination of large machines, the planting of single crops (often reducing vegetative groundcover), and the rising use of pesticides (McIntyre et al., 2009; Pimentel, 2006; Rickson et al., 2015; Sage, 2012), which are a necessary to override the heightened risks of insects, weeds, and fungus upon biologically simplified landscapes. While the spread of no-till, precision seeding may have reduced the disturbance from tillage and problems of wind and water erosion, it does not reduce all pressures of compaction during seeding, spraying, and harvest, and heightens dependence on pesticides. Impoverished soil biota and the decline of natural controls, along with biological simplification, further increases risks of pests. The central override for nutrient-depleted soils is the use of inorganic fertilizers, principally nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. The demand for external energy is amplified by: the operation of large machinery and animal enclosures; the heightened reliance on manufactured inputs (including seeds which were previously saved and selected); and the need to move agricultural inputs and outputs further across simplified landscapes, which also ties to the increasing demand for packaging and its attendant materials, energy consumption, and pollution burden. Fertilizers are particularly significant here, owing to their bulk, energy-intensive manufacturing, and transport (McIntyre et al., 2009; Pimentel, 2006; Rickson et al., 2015). Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production is energy-intensive, requiring significant amounts of heat (mainly derived from natural gas), which enables production to be located closer to the land where it is applied, whereas phosphorous and potassium fertilizer are derived from mines and tend to be moved over greater distances. The demand for fresh water is amplified by the requirements of high-yielding seed varieties, the reduction of soil biota and groundcover where tillage is used, and the need to hydrate densely packed animal populations and wash biowastes out of enclosures (McIntyre et al. 2009; Sage, 2012). These demands make agriculture the biggest source of withdrawals from lakes, rivers, and aquifers. The proliferation of toxic chemicals and genetic engineering to control pests has engendered new long-term risks, with the use of genetically engineered seeds having increased dramatically since the 1990s, although this growth is heavily concentrated in a small number of countries (United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China) and crops (corn, soy, canola, cotton). These changes are contributing to the decline of soil health and natural controls, and increased pest resistance (e.g. the rise of weeds resistant to glyphosate, the world’s most commonly-used herbicide) (Benbrook, 2016). A similar dynamic is evident with the dependence on antibiotics in industrial livestock production, which poses severe public health risks as pathogens develop antibiotic resistance (Silbergeld et al. 2008; Wallace, 2016).

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A core element running through the pursuit of scale and the ensuing biophysical overrides is the dependence on fossil energy in machines, animal enclosures, the manufacture and movement of inputs, and the increasing distance and durability of outputs, which translates to carbon dioxide emissions at each turn. This atmospheric burden is augmented by nitrous oxide (especially from nitrogen fertilizer) and methane emissions (especially from livestock), and by the reduced capacity for carbon sequestration in monoculture fields relative to ecosystems and more biodiverse farms (Altieri, 1995; Altieri et al., 2015; Koohafkan et al., 2012; McIntyre et al., 2009). Industrial monocultures and livestock operations contribute to a range of other environmental and public health burdens beyond their impacts on climate change. For instance, runoff from industrial fertilizers is a major factor in algal blooms in lakes and coastal ocean regions in many parts of the world; persistent toxins, herbicide-resistant weeds, insecticide-resistant bugs, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria all present complex and diffuse risks for human and ecosystem health; and prolonged irrigation in semi-arid regions is a major cause of land degradation. The resource budgets and pollution loads of feed crop monocultures further expand as a result of the wastage of useable nutrition in cycling grains and oilseeds through animals (Carolan, 2016; D’Silva and Webster, 2010; McIntyre, 2009; PCIFAP, 2008; Weis, 2013). In sum, the comparative advantage of industrial agriculture is not because it is incontrovertibly more efficient. Rather, it is more efficient according to a particular logic of what counts (most of all, labour productivity) and what does not, including the unsustainable dependence on fossil energy, wide-­ranging greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduced biodiversity, and deteriorating biophysical conditions of agriculture. The failure to count environmental costs and long-term risks is a central reason that industrial food is so cheap (Carolan, 2016; McIntyre et al., 2009; Moore, 2015; Patel and Moore, 2017; Weis, 2010). The precarious nature of this cheapness is not only an agricultural or rural problem: it bears ominously on the urban poor and raises profound challenges for continuing urbanization.

3. DESTABILIZING RURAL LIVELIHOODS AND SUBSIDIZING URBAN GROWTH The role of cheap agro-industrial surpluses in world food security grew quickly in the 1950s and 1960s as productivity boomed with the development of highyielding seed varieties, and soaring levels of fertilizer and pesticide consumption. This course was led by the United States, which set out on an aggressive programme of surplus dumping through aid and subsidized trade, followed by Europe and some other temperate countries (Clapp, 2016; Cochrane, 2003;

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Friedmann, 1990, 2004). Governments in many low-income countries embraced food aid and cheap imports, in part to support urbanization and industrialization (containing wage costs) and help manage rapid population growth. Dependence on food imports deepened quickly. This was especially true in Sub-Saharan Africa, where food imports had been relatively small at the point of independence in the 1960s, but had become firmly embedded by the 1980s, particularly with wheat (Andrae and Beckman, 1985; Friedmann, 1990). The outcome of this transformation is that most of the world’s poorest and most agrarian countries (in terms of the share of their labour force in agriculture) are net food importers, which is clearly displayed in the FAO’s list of Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries. Cheap industrial food has had a two-fold impact on urbanization dynamics in the Global South. Firstly, the competitive discipline it brings has adversely affected the market conditions that small farmers face, having altered prices and dietary patterns – including among farmers themselves – over long periods. Low margins are an important factor in the declining viability of farming livelihoods and ensuing urban migration in search of work. Secondly, cheap industrial food has subsidized migration to the urban and peri-urban margins by helping poor households survive on low and often erratic incomes (Davis, 2006). The urban poor invariably spend very high proportions of their earnings on food purchases, sometimes half or more. Efforts to stretch food budgets often lead to the prioritization of quantity over quality, limited dietary diversity (pivoting on a few monoculture grains and oilseeds), and heavy reliance on unhealthy but calorie-dense processed foods that are high in salt, sugar, and fat (Baker and Friel, 2016; FAO, 2017b; Frayne et al., 2014; IFPRI, 2017; Ziraba et al., 2009). While the so-called “supermarket revolution” has transformed urban food environments in many parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, more so for the upper and middle classes than for the urban poor (for whom wet markets occupy a relatively more important role), the urban poor still have greater access to fast food, sugary drinks, and snack foods than poor rural communities (Singh et al., 2015), and greater exposure to the associated marketing that influences dietary aspirations. As noted earlier, the march towards wage labour in cities has long been celebrated in modernization narratives, while poverty, food insecurity, and hunger continue to be disproportionately concentrated in rural areas of the Global South. However, urban growth is commonly marked by worsening income inequality. Many poor rural migrants face job prospects that are far from promising, as industrial and service sector development has frequently failed to keep pace with the scale of urban migration, and public sector employment has been emaciated by debt and neoliberal policies (Davis, 2006; Marx et al., 2013; UN-Habitat, 2016). The challenge of labour absorption is further compounded by the fast-moving developments in labour-displacing automation

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that are expected to accelerate in the coming decades with the advance of artificial intelligence. The historically unprecedented scale and nature of urban marginality has been evocatively described by Davis (2006) as a growing “planet of slums”, characterized by a combination of low-quality housing stock, deficient public services and infrastructure (with public spending failing to keep up with growth), and precarious livelihoods. In these urban and peri-urban areas, access to basic needs is mediated by markets more so than in rural areas, while the ability to earn cash increasingly hinges on a combination of insecure and poorly paid jobs, petty trading, and various sorts of hustling in the informal sector. More concerning still is that the disjuncture between the rapid pace of migration and the capacity for labour absorption is greatest in regions expected to contain the lion’s share of urban growth: Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. As a result, it is expected that a rising share of the population living in poverty in these regions will soon reside in cities and towns (UN-Habitat, 2016; IFPRI, 2017; UNDESA, 2017). There is growing evidence that food insecurity in cities is strongly correlated with slum-dwelling, and that conditions of hunger, malnutrition, dietary narrowing (reflected in dietary diversity scores), and child stunting in slums are comparable to those in rural areas (Battersby et al., 2015; FAO, 2010; Frayne and McCordic, 2015; Frayne et al., 2018; Mohiddin et al., 2012). There is also growing evidence that the surge in ultra-processed foods, sugary drinks, snacks, and fast food plays a significant role in rising levels of obesity and non-communicable disease (e.g. cardiovascular disease) among people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in recent decades. The overreliance on industrial food has contributed to a new dietary-epidemiological condition – malnourished obesity – and, where prolonged among children, stunting with obesity (Adeboye et al., 2012; Baker and Friel, 2016; Hawkes, 2006; Lim et al., 2012; Lobstein et al., 2015; Mohiddin et al., 2012; Popkin et al., 2012; Ziraba et al., 2009).

4. THE PRECARITY OF CHEAP INDUSTRIAL FOOD If rising flows of cheap industrial food rest on a series of unaccounted environmental costs, and have inflated levels of urbanization and sustenance at its poorest margins, what happens when these costs become due and food stops being so cheap? One indication of the potential fallout can be seen in the food price volatility of 2007−2008, and to a lesser extent 2010−2011, when sudden spikes in world market prices of key staples sparked widespread food-related riots, mostly in cities of the Global South. While world food markets subsequently stabilized, these periods of volatility put the urban poor’s dependence on cheap industrial food into sharp contrast and highlighted why the impermanence of

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implicit environmental subsidies is poised to have highly regressive social impacts (Brown, 2011; Holt-Gimenez and Patel, 2010; Ruel et al., 2010). It is impossible to estimate timing, but the key matter to consider here is not precisely when this subsidy will begin to fade but how as the biophysical overrides that presently enable productivity of industrial agriculture are prone to become more expensive or break down. A basic way this can happen is that key resources composing or enabling the production of overrides become scarcer and more expensive. Much attention has been focused on the inevitable limits of fossil energy, especially oil, which is the largest source of net primary energy generation, accounts for virtually all the liquid fuel that powers global transport systems and trade, and faces more proximate limits than natural gas or coal. This threat has commonly been discussed in terms of “peak oil”, which conveys that sites where oil extraction is easiest and cheapest have long been exploited and new ones are bound to be more difficult, risky, and expensive to develop. However, recent technological innovations and discoveries of “extreme” fossil fuels (most notably the shale oil revolution in the United States) have pushed estimates of oil production declines farther into the future. The term “extreme” fossil fuels is intended to signal the heightened energy intensity and ecological risks associated with the extraction and processing of things like shale oil and bitumen. The conception of oil scarcity as an absolute material limit has, in some ways, been outmoded by a different challenge: the need to politically induce scarcity as an absolute necessity for mitigating the extent of climate change (Klein, 2015). In short, a large share of existing oil and other fossil energy reserves must be understood to be “unburnable” if there is any hope of reaching the targets for reduced CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations that climate scientists are advocating. If governments were ever to get serious about climate-change mitigation, it would mean finding policy mechanisms (e.g. quotas, extremely high carbon taxes) that ensure most of the carbon contained in the world’s fossil energy reserves stays in the ground rather than being combusted and ending up in the atmosphere. In the language of fossil energy corporations and finance capital, this means transforming existing reserves into “stranded assets” (Jakob and Hilaire, 2015; Klein, 2015). Whether materially-induced or politically-induced scarcity plays out entails very different scenarios for climate change, but both promise to bring rising oil prices that will increase the costs of industrial agricultural production, from running harvester-combines and industrial livestock operations, to manufacturing and applying fertilizers and pesticides, to processing, packaging, and transporting food over long distances. Despite this fossil-energy dependence, the pressure to find new sources of liquid fuel spurred the use of rising volumes of grain and oilseed production for ethanol and biodiesel fuel since the early 2000s, even as the biophysical and social illogic was becoming clearer

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(Righelato and Spracklen, 2007; Weis, 2010). In contrast to the green imaginary of agro-fuels (as if they entail a renewable cycle of sequestering and then releasing carbon), little more ethanol and biodiesel ultimately comes out than the fossil energy that goes into grain and oilseed production and processing. This poor energy return on investment is made worse by the vast land area needed, which has negative impacts on biodiversity, water, soils, and carbon dioxide sequestration, meaning that land could far better serve climate-change mitigation if put to other uses. The agro-fuel boom has slowed with the rise of extreme fossil fuels and may face future pressure from other technological innovations, such as the electrification of automobile fleets. However, the power of various interests promoting agro-fuel production (e.g. corporations involved in grain and oilseed processing, agro-inputs, energy, and automobile manufacturing; finance capital; and governments viewing it as a means to improved energy security) suggest it is unlikely to disappear soon. The demand for grains and oilseeds as fuels has inherently regressive dynamics, with more affluent car-drivers ultimately contributing to rising prices of food staples to the detriment of poorer consumers. Along with being a major contributor to climate change, industrial agriculture is extremely threatened by a series of vicissitudes. Since the 1990s, there has been a strong consensus among climate scientists that the worst and most immediate threats to agriculture reside in the tropics and semi-tropics, which are already home to many of the world’s poorest countries and large food-insecure populations. This includes negative impacts from heightened aridity, heat stress, drought, declining annual discharge from and low- and mid-latitude glaciers, intensifying storms, and coastal salinization. There are numerous indications that problems are intensifying, especially in hot and arid regions (IPCC, 2014, 2019), which is bound to worsen the conditions of food import dependence. In the past, there were suggestions that warmer average temperatures, longer growing seasons, and higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations might enhance agricultural productivity in some of the world’s temperate breadbaskets (e.g. United States, Canada, Ukraine, Russia, and Argentina), and thereby stabilize total world production. However, it has become increasingly evident that potential benefits for temperate productivity were exaggerated and that many risks loom. Hotter and drier conditions are expected to constrain productivity in parts of the temperate world, especially in semi-arid regions that rely heavily on irrigation, such as large areas of the United States, Australia, and the Eurasian Steppe, and changing ecological conditions are bound to raise other challenges like shifting distributions of pests and pathogens, increasing heat waves and seasonal variability, and rising evapotranspiration from plants and soils (IPCC, 2014, 2019). Essential biophysical overrides face mounting and interlocking stresses. The ability of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium fertilizers to continue

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overriding soil-nutrient depletion is problematized by the material or politically-induced limits to fossil energy, and the inevitable scarcity of high-grade phosphorous ore, which will reverberate first in rising costs before posing more intractable problems. In the meantime, fertilizer runoff remains a major force disrupting the health of many freshwater lakes and near-shore ocean environments. Pesticide and pharmaceutical overrides are threatened by the advance of herbicide, insecticide, and antibiotic resistance, which drive the perpetual search for new pesticides and animal pharmaceuticals and, in some cases, a return to older and more toxic pesticides. The diffuse toxic burden also connects to the declining health of many key pollinators, most worryingly bees. The irrigation override is threatened by the dangerous overdraft and desiccation of many rivers and underground aquifers, along with a series of climate-changerelated stressors including: diminishing annual cycles of glacial accumulation and runoff that feed many rivers; the growing demand for irrigation in warmer and drier conditions; and increasing levels of evapotranspiration, which raises long-term risks of salinization. Climate change and the extent of mitigation are the great variables overarching all questions about how long existing overrides can continue to function and subsidize cheap food (Altieri et al., 2015; IPCC, 2014, 2019; Springmann et al., 2018). Will urgent and drastic mitigation efforts be taken? Can average world temperatures be stabilized at 1.5°C or 2°C above pre-industrial levels (the common political aspiration, which many climate scientists say is too high and already impossible)? Or will average temperatures rise much higher before stabilizing? There is also tremendous uncertainty as to what technological innovations might emerge in efforts to override chronic or newly-established problems (e.g. solar-powered machinery and animal enclosures; large-scale biodigesters; moisture-sensing farm implements; genetically engineered plants, animals, and soil micro-organisms; drones for pollination and precision weed- and insect-killing), and how much these will cost in economic terms, to say nothing of the ecological risks. As with fossil energy, it is impossible to predict what steps governments might take to internalize other under-accounted environmental costs that would affect the cheapness of industrial food, such as the burden of persistent toxins, plastics, and declining antibiotic effectiveness. Dominant actors within industrial capitalism have long used the combination of complexity and uncertainty to sow doubt about the big picture and justify the status quo (Oreskes and Conway, 2010). But when industrial agriculture is understood in terms of its biophysical contradictions and overrides, there is little reason to think that it provides a durable basis for existing levels of urbanization, much less a world with roughly two billion more urban residents in the coming decades. To hold on to a faith in the permanence of cheap food is to do little more than wait for the social convulsions that will occur when it fades.

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5. RETHINKING AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT: AN URBAN IMPERATIVE TOO As a sector that is both a major contributor to climate change and exceptionally vulnerable to it, agriculture’s future pivots on the interwoven imperatives of mitigation and adaptation, which are interconnected with prospects for biodiversity conservation and challenges posed by impending resource limits (Altieri et al., 2015; Koohafkan et al., 2012). To limit atmospheric GHG concentration and associated warming, urgent and drastic efforts are needed to reduce GHG emissions, transition away from fossil fuel consumption, and enhance CO2 sequestration capacity. At the same time, efforts are needed to respond to the scale of climate change that is already in motion, irrespective of these responses, with mitigation efforts setting the parameters for adaptation possibilities. While the need for action on climate-change mitigation and adaptation is unassailable, competing visions of agricultural development conceive the challenges in diametrically opposed ways. For advocates of industrial agriculture, cheap food is a basic social necessity in an increasingly urbanized world, especially given the extent to which many of the world’s poorest people have come to depend on it, and it would not be possible without great increases in yield and labour productivity. From this vantage point, climate change and other biophysical problems associated with industrial production represent primarily technical challenges in need of innovations: more genetic engineering; more precision in applying inputs (e.g. seeding, chemicals, irrigation); more information (e.g. soil moisture and nutrients, pest threats); more sensing technologies from drones to tractors; more labour-saving technologies (e.g. advancing robotics for weeding, spraying, milking, animal handling and slaughter); and more efficient conversion of animal feed to meat, milk, and eggs. For some, the magnitude and urgency of the challenge also involves the even bigger-scale technological fix of geoengineering. For critics of industrial agriculture, however, high-tech responses fail to resolve fundamental problems, while heightening risks including the extreme narrowing of power in who determines and benefits from responses (Bonny, 2017; IPES, 2017). From this perspective, rather than technologically intensifying monocultures and livestock operations, there is a need to rethink the rationality of economies of scale that underpin cheap food at present but are irrational in many other ways. Instead, a different ecological rationality is needed to approach the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and impending resource limits, which prioritizes soil formation, nutrient cycling, species complementarity, natural pest-control, and carbon sequestration, and strives to minimize erosion, fossil fuel consumption, GHG emissions, toxicity, distance,

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and packaging (Altieri, 1995; Altieri et al., 2015; Koohafkan et al., 2012; McIntyre et al., 2009; Sage, 2012). An ecologically rational conception of agriculture must consider the need not only to contain agricultural frontiers, but also reduce the total land area presently devoted to agriculture to enable restoration – the essential kernel captured by the notion of land sparing. However, common narratives of land sparing (particularly those associated with sustainable intensification through high-input practices) contain a misleading assumption that redundant small farmers will mainly move away from agricultural areas, forests, and marginal lands towards urban areas. This disregards the expectation that, while cities will absorb almost all population growth, the world’s total rural population will remain constant in absolute terms. If rural populations do not decline, further industrialization can be expected to engender more pressure on forests and marginal lands, irrespective of productivity gains. At the same time, the nature of productivity needs to be problematized rather than taken for granted. There is considerable evidence that low-input, biodiverse small farms can generate more net nutritional output per land area compared with industrial agriculture, given the better use of space through intercropping, beneficial associations, and staggered planting cycles. Furthermore, small farms can widen possibilities for climate-change adaptation by increasing crop diversity and broadly dispersing the basis of innovation, grounding it in bioregions, farming cultures, and farmer-innovators, rather than narrowing the locus of innovation to laboratories, a few genetically engineered seed varieties, and a search for more sophisticated biophysical overrides. All of this points to the need to invert the modernizing conception of agricultural development as “freeing” people from the burden of farming. There is no escaping the fact that ecologically rational farming is skilful and laborious, and therefore vastly inferior to industrial agriculture in the pivotal economic metric of labour productivity. For some, the necessarily greater labour intensity of ecologically rational farming will seem like a step back in time, an anti-modern fantasy, but it could also be understood to converge with some pressing social concerns. In particular, it could help address the future of labour absorption and the strain of migration upon many cities, especially in the context of accelerating automation and artificial intelligence. To consider the case for more labour-intensive agricultural development it is important to avoid romanticizing it and to recognize the immense barriers. Replacing machines and inputs with people can unfold in many ways, including without changes to property relations. This is evident in contemporary large-scale organic monocultures, so-called “Big Organic”, where poorly paid, insecure wage labourers are needed to supplant chemical inputs (Guthman, 2004). Another barrier to questioning modernist assumptions about the nature of agricultural development lies in the pervasiveness of anti-agrarian attitudes

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among urban dwellers and within some rural households. Many urbanites feel too far removed from the land and knowledge of farming practices to imagine pursuing an agricultural livelihood. An even greater barrier lies in the aversion to farming among many rural youth who have only known poverty and food insecurity, and who are now exposed to much wider cultural influences than previous generations. Negative conceptions of farming livelihoods among young people are compounded when their autonomy is stifled by powerful generational hierarchies (White, 2011). In short, there are good reasons why the vision of industrial agriculture as freeing people from the land has had so much traction. It is also plausible that negative connotations of small farming are, to a significant extent, bound up in enduring contexts of inequality such as highly uneven distributions of land and capital, exploitative labour regimes, and unfair market conditions. This implies that the problem is not farming per se, but the social relations of farming, which are not inexorable; in fact, farming has the potential to be immensely rewarding, combining skill, continual learning and intellectual challenges, physical exertion, and a strong sense of meaning in meeting the most fundamental human needs (Friedmann, 2002; Holt-Gimenez and Patel, 2010; Ploeg, 2008). Such a hopeful vision of work not only contrasts with many agrarian livelihoods today (as modernization narratives fixate on), but also with the proliferation of poorly paid, highly alienating jobs in which tasks are continually broken into smaller pieces of the whole production process. To view the problems of industrial agriculture together with the problems of food insecurity, unhealthy diets, and precarious incomes on the fast-growing urban margins, can give a sense of foreboding and social volatility. But it is also possible to envision some hopeful synergies if ecologically rational small farms can be valorized and connections between cities and their foodsheds enhanced. Improved rural livelihoods could help to contain urban growth, while cities could be supplied with healthier, more culturally appropriate foods that are less prone to the vagaries of world markets (Altieri et al., 2015; Koohafkan et al., 2012; Ploeg, 2008). Almost everywhere, the valorization of small farms would have to start with redistributive land reform and be accompanied by major public investments in agro-ecological research, training, extension, and distribution networks, as well as policy mechanisms to ensure that healthier food is accessible to the urban poor and small farmers are better compensated for their labour. This presents immense political and economic challenges, particularly in confronting existing property relations. However, as this chapter has argued, the status quo is unstable for many reasons, and radical agricultural alternatives can have a vital role in addressing some of the most pressing challenges of the global urban transition that is underway.

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REFERENCES Adeboye, B., G. Bermano and C. Rolland (2012), ‘Obesity and its health impact in Africa: a systematic review’, Cardiovascular Journal of Africa, 23(9), 512–21. Altieri, M. (1995), Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture, Boulder, CO, USA: Westview Press. Altieri, M., C. Nicholls, A. Henao, and M. Lana (2015), ‘Agroecology and the design of climateresilient farming systems’, Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 35(3), 869–90. Andrae, G. and B. Beckman (1985), The Wheat Trap: Bread and Underdevelopment in Nigeria, London, UK: Zed Books. Baker, P. and S. Friel (2016), ‘Food systems transformations, ultra-processed food market and the nutrition transition in Asia’, Globalization and Health, 12(80), 1–15. Battersby, J., G. Haysom, F. Kroll and G. Tawodzera (2015), ‘Looking beyond urban agriculture: extending urban food policy responses’, South African Cities Network Policy Brief, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.afsun.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Web-Battersby-et-al-LookingBeyond-Urban-Agriculture.pdf. Benbrook, C. (2016), ‘Trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally’, Environmental Sciences Europe, 28(3), 1–15. Bonny, S. (2017), ‘Corporate concentration and technological change in the global seed industry’, Sustainability, 9 (9), 1–25. Brown, L. (2011), ‘The new geopolitics of food’, Foreign Policy, 186, 54–63. Carolan, M. (2016), The Real Cost of Cheap Food, London, UK: Routledge. Clapp, J. (2012), Food, (2nd edition reprinted 2016), London, UK: Polity Press. Cochrane, W. (2003), The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance: A Sustainable Solution, Lincoln, NE, US: University of Nebraska Press. D’Silva, J. and J. Webster (eds) (2010), The Meat Crisis: Developing More Sustainable Production and Consumption, London, UK: Earthscan. Davis, M. (2006), Planet of Slums, London, UK: Verso. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2009), How to Feed the World in 2050, Rome, IT: FAO, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/ docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_World_in_2050.pdf. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2010), Assessment of Nutritional Status in Urban Areas. Nutrition and Consumer Protection, Rome, IT: FAO, accessed 30 August at www.fao.org/ag/agn/nutrition/urban_assessment_en.stm. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2015), The State of Food Insecurity in the World, Rome, IT: FAO, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.fao.org/3/a-i4646e.pdf. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2017a), The Future of Food and Agriculture: Trends and Challenges, Rome, IT: FAO, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.fao. org/3/a-i6583e.pdf. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2017b), The State of Food and Agriculture: Leveraging Food Systems for Inclusive Rural Transformation, Rome, IT: FAO, accessed 14 October 2018 at www.fao.org/3/a-I7658e.pdf. FAOSTAT (Food and Agriculture Organization Statistics Division) (2019), Production and Resource STAT Calculators, Rome, IT: FAO. Foley, J., C. Monfreda, N. Ramankutty and D. Zaks (2007), ‘Our share of the planetary pie’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(31), 12585–6. Foley, J., N. Ramankutty, K. Brauman, E. Cassidy, J. Gerber, M. Johnston, N. Mueller, C. O’Connell, D. Ray, P. West, C. Balzer, E. Bennett, S. Carpenter, J. Hill, C. Monfreda, S. Polansky, J. Rockström, J. Sheehan, S. Siebert, D. Tilman and D. Zaks (2011), ‘Solutions for a cultivated planet’, Nature, 478(7369), 337–42. Frayne, B. and C. McCordic (2015), ‘Planning for food secure cities: measuring the influence of infrastructure and income on household food security in Southern African cities’, Geoforum, 65(12), 1–11.

76  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Frayne, B., J. Crush and M. McLachlan (2014), ‘Urbanization, nutrition and development in Southern African cities’, Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, 6(1), 101–12. Frayne, B., J. Crush and M. McLachlan (2018), ‘Nutrition, disease and development: long-wave impacts of urban food insecurity’, in B. Frayne, J. Crush and C. McCordic (eds), Food and Nutrition Security in Southern African Cities, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 118–34. Friedmann, H. (1990), ‘The origins of third world food dependence’, in H. Bernstein, B. Crow, M. Mackintosh and C. Martin (eds), The Food Question: Profits Versus People, New York, NY, US: Monthly Review Press, pp. 13–31. Friedmann, H. (2002), ‘Eating in the gardens of Gaia: envisioning polycultural communities’, in J. Adams (ed.), Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, Philadelphia, PA, US: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 252–73. Friedmann, H. (2004), ‘Feeding the empire: the pathologies of globalized agriculture’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds), The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register, New York, NY, US: Monthly Review Press, pp. 124–43. Gerben-Leenes, P. and S. Nonhebel (2002), ‘Consumption patterns and their effects on land required for food’, Ecological Economics, 42(1–2), 185–99. Guthman, J. (2004), Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, Berkeley, CA, US: University of California Press. Hawkes, C. (2006), ‘Uneven dietary development: linking the policies and processes of globalization with the nutrition transition, obesity and diet-related chronic diseases’, Globalization and Health, 2(4). Holt-Gimenez, E. and R. Patel (2010), Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, San Francisco, CA, US: FoodFirst Books. IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) (2017), Global Food Policy Report, Washington, DC, US: IFPRI. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2014), Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2019), Climate Change and Land: IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse gas fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems. Summary for Policymakers, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, accessed 15 December 2019 at www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/. IPES-Food (International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems) (2017), Too big to feed: Exploring the impacts of mega-mergers, concentration, concentration of power in the agrifood sector, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/Concentration_­ FullReport.pdf. Jakob, M. and J. Hilaire (2015), ‘Climate science: unburnable fossil-fuel reserves’, Nature, 517(7533), 510–12. Kimbrell, A. (ed.) (2002), The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, Washington, DC, US: Island Press. Klein, N. (2015), This Changes Everything: Climate vs. Capitalism, New York, NY, US: Simon and Schuster. Koohafkan, P., M.A. Altieri and E. Holt-Gimenez (2012), ‘Green Agriculture: foundations for biodiverse, resilient and productive agricultural systems’, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 10(1), 61–75. Lim, S., T. Vos, A. Flaxman, G. Danaei, K. Shibuya, H. Adair-Rohani, … and Z. Memish (2012), ‘A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010’, The Lancet, 380(9859), 2224–60. Lobstein, T., R. Jackson-Leach, M. Moodie, K. Hall, S. Gortmaker, B. Swinburn, W. James, Y. Wang and K. McPherson (2015), ‘Child and adolescent obesity: part of a bigger picture’, The Lancet, 385(9986), 2510–20.

An impermanent subsidy: Cheap industrial food and the urban margins  77 Marx, B., T. Stoker and S. Tavneet (2013), ‘The economics of slums in the developing world’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(4), 187–210. McIntyre, B., H. Herren, J. Wakhungu and R. Watson (2009), International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development: Agriculture at a Crossroads, Washington, DC, US: Island Press. McMichael, A., J. Powles, C. Butler and R. Uauy (2007), ‘Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health’, The Lancet, 370(9594), 1253–63. Mitlin, D. and D. Satterthwaite (2012), Urban Poverty in the Global South; Scale and Nature, London, UK: Routledge. Mohiddin, L., L. Phelps and T. Walters (2012), ‘Urban malnutrition: a review of food security and nutrition among the urban poor’, report commissioned from Save the Children UK to Nutrition Works, International Public Nutrition Resource Group, accessed 30 August 2018 at www.iufn. org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Nutrition-Works-2012-Urban-malnutrition.pdf. Moore, J. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London, UK: Verso. Oreskes, N. and E. Conway (2010), Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York, NY, US: Bloomsbury Press. Patel, R. and J. Moore (2017), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Berkeley, CA, US: University of California Press. PCIFAP (Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production) (2008), Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America, Washington, DC, US: The Pew Charitable Trusts and The John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Pimentel, D. (2006), ‘Soil erosion: a food and environmental threat’, Environment, Development and Sustainability, 8(1), 119–37. Ploeg, J. v.d. (2008), The New Peasantries. Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization, London, UK: Earthscan. Popkin, B. (2009), ‘Reducing meat consumption has multiple benefits for the world’s health’, Archives of Internal Medicine, 169(6), 543–45. Popkin, B., L. Adair and S. Ng (2012), ‘Now and then: the global nutrition transition: the pandemic of obesity in developing countries’, Nutrition Reviews, 70(1), 3–21. Ray, D., N. Mueller, P. West and J. Foley (2013), ‘Yield trends are insufficient to double crop production by 2050’, PLoS One, 8(6), e66428. Rickson R., L. Deeks, A. Graves, J. Harris, M. Kibblewhite and R. Sakrabani (2015), ‘Input constraints to food production: the impact of soil degradation’, Food Security, 7(2), 351–64. Righelato, R. and D. Spracklen (2007), ‘Carbon mitigation by biofuels or by saving and restoring forests?’, Science, 319(5840), 902. Ruel, M., J. Garrett, C. Hawkes and M. Cohen (2010), ‘The food, fuel, and financial crises affect the urban and rural poor disproportionately: a review of the evidence’, The Journal of Nutrition, 140(1), 170S-176S. Sage, C. (2012), Environment and Food, New York, NY, US: Routledge. Silbergeld, E., J. Graham and L. Price (2008), ‘Industrial food animal production, antibiotic resistance, and human health’, Annual Review of Public Health, 29(1), 151–69. Singh A., V. Gupta, A. Ghosh, K. Lock and G. Suparna (2015), ‘Quantitative estimates of dietary intake with special emphasis on snacking pattern and nutritional status of free-living adults in urban slums of Delhi: impact of nutrition transition’, BioMed Central Nutrition, 1(22), 1–11. Springmann, M., M. Clark, D. Mason-D’Croz, K. Wiebe, B.L. Bodirsky, L. Lassaletta, … and W. Willett (2018), ‘Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits’, Nature, 562(7728), 519–25. Steinfeld, H., P. Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M. Rosales and C. de Haan (2006), Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, Rome, IT: FAO. Tilman, D., C. Balzer, J. Hill and B. Befort (2011), ‘Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20260–64. UN-Habitat (United Nations-Habitat) (2015), World Cities Report, accessed 30 August 2018 at https://unhabitat.org/world-cities-report-2015-nearing-completion/.

78  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South UN-Habitat (United Nations-Habitat) (2016), Slum Almanac 2015–2016, accessed 30 August 2018 at https://unhabitat.org/slum-almanac-2015-2016/. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) (2017), ‘World Urbanization Prospects’, accessed 30 August 2018 at https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/DataQuery/. Wallace, R. (2016), Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, New York: Monthly Review Press. Weis, T. (2007), The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming, London, UK: Zed Books. Weis, T. (2010), ‘The accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(3), 315–41. Weis, T. (2013), The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock, London, UK: Zed Books. White, B. (2011), ‘Who will own the countryside: dispossession, rural youth, and the future of farming’, International Institute of Social Sciences Valedictory Lecture, 13 October. World Bank (2017), GDP Per Capita, PPP (Current International $), The World Bank International Comparison Program Database, accessed 30 August 2018 at http://data.worldbank.org/­ indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?end=2015&start=1961&view=chart. Ziraba, A., J. Fotso and R. Ochako (2009), ‘Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: the poor?’, BioMed Central Public Health, 9(1), 465.

5.

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity: Trends for low-income and middle-income countries Susan Horton

1. INTRODUCTION Urban–rural differences in health and nutrition are long-standing and pervasive. Urban residents on average have higher socioeconomic status and better access to health care and infrastructure such as water and sanitation, although this may be partially offset by some threats such as industrial pollution. Although urban areas on average are wealthier and urban residents live longer, within urban areas there can be great disparities. Those living in urban slums may be as badly or even worse off than many households in rural areas. A large body of literature looks at urban–rural health and nutrition differentials in industrialized countries (for the United States, see systematic reviews by Cheung et al., 2016; Johnson and Johnson, 2015). This chapter focuses on differences in nutritional status between urban and rural areas in low and m ­ iddle-income countries (LMICs). We first briefly survey previous literature on this topic (focusing on studies across a range of countries, rather than studies focusing on individual countries), and then use publicly available DHS/MICS data to update previous work on two specific nutritional outcomes, namely, stunting in children under five years old and obesity in women of reproductive age. We use the useful compilation of these data from the World Health Organization (2018) which contains survey results for childhood stunting for 97 countries, and on obesity in women of reproductive age for 65 countries, for various years ranging from 1991 to 2015. We use simple descriptive statistics as well as ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and present results as to how urban–rural nutrition differentials within countries vary by region, over time and with per capita income. Finally, we discuss factors that may explain the observed results and draw some policy conclusions.

79

80  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

2. PREVIOUS FINDINGS Previous cross-country studies of rural–urban differences in stunting have found that the gap generally narrows and eventually disappears as incomes increase (Paciorek et al., 2013). This is associated with rising incomes and a greater variety and volume of food availability, as well as the spread of social infrastructure into rural areas (such as health facilities, water and sanitation and women’s education, all associated with improved nutritional status in children). At the same time, greater food availability and reduced energy expenditure associated with changing technology, which is linked with increased income, are also associated with increases in obesity. While this initially affects urban areas, it subsequently spreads to rural areas. Obesity initially rises fastest in the highest socioeconomic groups; however, at around USD2500 in per capita GDP (as measured in dollars of 1980 to 2000), according to Ruel et al. (2015) there is a crossover point, at which the highest socioeconomic groups modify their behaviour and obesity begins to increase faster in lower socioeconomic groups. This effect is significant for women but not men (Newton et al., 2017). Thus, although the urban–rural gap in obesity among adult women initially increases with rising incomes, it subsequently starts to narrow in some countries (Jaacks et al., 2015; Popkin et al., 2013). The effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on nutrition is very important and may outweigh that of rural/urban status (Ruel et al., 2017). An early study using DHS data for 11 countries (Menon et al., 2000) compared the bottom and top SES quintiles and found that the median odds ratio for stunting in children within rural areas by SES was 1.8, compared to 4.0 within urban areas. This overshadowed the rural:urban odds ratio (median 2.05). A later study with updated data for 47 LMICs came to similar conclusions (Van de Poel et al., 2007). Both studies concluded that focusing on the nutrition (and health) status of the urban poor is extremely important. The DOHaD (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease) hypothesis (Barker, 2004) adds another twist to the impact of urbanization and SES. The DOHaD approach hypothesizes that children with low birthweight (frequently the result of in utero exposure to adverse conditions) are more susceptible to adult chronic diseases. A simplistic explanation is that their bodies are “programmed” for a life of scarcity. If, instead, they move from a rural area to an urban area in a rapidly industrializing country such as India, their bodies are ill-equipped to address much richer urban diets and their chances of developing metabolic syndrome increase. Metabolic syndrome comprises increased blood pressure, increased blood sugar, increased abdominal fat and abnormal cholesterol and triglycerides, which in turn are precursors of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. This phenomenon has been used to try to explain burgeoning rates of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes in urban India, for example

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity  81

(Popkin et al., 2001). Subsequent work has shown that it is not only privation in utero and in early infancy that transfers these risks intergenerationally, but also maternal obesity and diabetes (Boney et al., 2005). The underlying biological explanations for this syndrome include epigenetic changes, whereby the environment facing the fetus or infant affects the expression of genes. In addition, changes in the gut microbiota in mothers who are obese or diabetic can directly affect her infant’s microbiome, with implications for that infant’s long-term health. In the DOHaD world, stunting and obesity are interrelated, and those who migrate from rural to urban areas and/or experience rapid socioeconomic upward mobility are particularly vulnerable, as are their children.

3. METHODS AND RESULTS This study updates the results of two earlier studies, using a comprehensive set of online DHS (Demographic and Health Surveys) and MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys) for a large number of low and lower-middle-income countries. Only a few upper-middle-income countries are included, some of the largest countries are excluded (e.g. China, Indonesia, South Africa) and only one survey is available for each of India, Mexico and Brazil. The methodology for these surveys is described in detail in Corsi et al. (2012). These data are available through the WHO Global Health Observatory (WHO, 2018), which has pre-coded queries for health equity topics. Relevant data are available on stunting prevalence in children under five years old and obesity in non-pregnant women aged 15–49 for selected years from 1991 to 2015. Data on one or other (or both) of these outcomes are available for 102 countries. Stunting is a good measure of chronic undernutrition, and children under five are the most vulnerable to infections and mortality associated with undernutrition. Obesity data are less readily available across countries: data in women aged 15–49 are valuable both as an indicator of women’s own nutritional status, and also because there are known interactions between a mother’s nutritional status prior to and during pregnancy, and that of her children, under the DOHaD hypothesis. One of the two previous cross-country studies of nutritional status, Paciorek et al. (2013), uses the WHO (2018) data to examine child height (stunting) and weight for the period 1985–2011 by urban/rural status, and augments the WHO (2018) data by including other national surveys. The other previous study, Jaacks et al. (2013) examines obesity in non-pregnant women aged 15–49 by urban/rural status, also augmenting the WHO (2018) data by including national surveys for five large countries excluded from the WHO (2018) database. This

82  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

chapter presents updated analyses (however, without adding in countries excluded from the WHO database) and presents simple regression results that help to organize the findings. Two sets of analyses are conducted: descriptive statistics from a cross-section analysis (one data point per country) and then regression analysis from a pooled time-series cross-section dataset. Figures 5.1 to 5.7 provide a cross-section snapshot of rural–urban differences in nutrition status for one year as close as possible to 2010, organized by per capita GDP. (A key to country names in Figures 5.1–5.7 is given in Table 5.1.) Where a survey was not available for 2010, the closest year in the interval 2008–2012 was used. The data were restricted to as short a time interval as possible because it was hypothesized (and subsequently confirmed using the data) that there are time trends in both stunting and obesity. This improves on the methodology of the Jaacks et al. (2013) study where the initial year included in the analysis came from as early as 1989 and as late as 2000, depending on the country, which therefore potentially confounds cross-section findings with time trends. Stunting prevalence is measured as the percentage of the sampled children who are below two standard deviations below the median height. Obesity prevalence is measured as the percentage of the sampled women whose BMI is 30 or above. Since stunting and obesity are both related to income, we use per capita GDP (2011, using purchasing power parity – PPP – exchange rate) as an explanatory variable, obtained from the World Bank (2018). Because of the curvilinear relationship of nutrition with income, the natural logarithm of income is used. Regional differences were also controlled for, since there are regional variations in both food consumption practices and physical activity patterns. The World Bank regional classification was used. Regional and overall averages are presented weighted by 2010 country population, obtained from the World Bank (2018). Since upper-income and large countries are under-­ represented, the averages give broad indications of regional differences, but are not fully representative of the global population. Figures 5.1 to 5.6 show that urban–rural differences in stunting are larger at lower levels of per capita income and diminish as per capita GDP increases (one figure is provided for each of the six World Bank LMIC regions). There are only four cases (out of 70 countries) where stunting is higher in urban than rural areas, namely Albania (2008), Barbados (2012), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011) and St Lucia (2012), i.e. all relatively small (less than 4 million population) upper-middle-income countries. Within regions there are countries that are somewhat outliers to the regional trend. Pakistan is not merely an outlier in South Asia but also ranks very low globally in nutrition (despite being a lowermiddle-income country) (Raju and D’Souza, 2017) with unusually high levels of stunting in both urban and rural areas. Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru are somewhat outliers in Latin America, with particularly large rural–urban gaps,

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity  83

possibly associated with large indigenous populations concentrated in rural areas. In the case of Peru and Bolivia, there are substantial rural populations at high altitude facing higher metabolic demands. Table 5.1  Key to country names in Figures 5.1–5.7 Code

Full country name

Code

Full country name

ALB ALG ARM BGD BLZ BEN BOL BIH BFA KHM CMR TCH COL COM COG CIV COD EGY SLV ETH GAB GHA GTM GIN GUY HTI HND IRQ JOR KAZ KEN KGZ LAO

Albania Algeria Armenia Bangladesh Belize Benin Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Burkina Faso Cambodia Cameroon Chad Colombia Comoros Congo, Republic of Côte d’Ivoire Congo, Democratic Republic of the Egypt El Salvador Ethiopia Gabon Ghana Guatemala Guinea Guyana Haiti Honduras Iraq Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kyrgyzstan Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic

LSO MDG MWI MLI MRT MDA MOZ NPL NER NGA PAK PER RWA LCA STP SEN SRB SLE SSD SDN SUR SWZ TJK THA MKD

Lesotho Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritania Moldova Mozambique Nepal Niger Nigeria Pakistan Peru Rwanda Saint Lucia Sao Tome and Principe Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone South Sudan Sudan Suriname Swaziland Tajikistan Thailand The former Republic of Macedonia Timor-Leste Togo Tunisia Uganda Tanzania, United Republic of Vietnam Zimbabwe

TLS TGO TUN UGA TZA VNM ZWE

Note: Other countries included in the overall dataset for regression analysis, but not included in the analysis for 2008–2012, are: Angola, Brazil, Cuba, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, The Gambia, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, India, Liberia, Mexico, Montenegro, Myanmar, Namibia, Nicaragua, Somalia, Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vanautu and Zambia. Source: Codes used are those from World Bank Open Data http://data.worldbank.org.

84  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Percentage stunted urban versus rural

70

East Asia

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Country

TLS

KHM

VNM

LAO

MNG

THA

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names: countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.1 Stunting of children under five years old, urban and rural areas, countries in East Asia (2010 ± 2 years)

Obesity by comparison is generally higher in urban areas than rural areas. There are only three exceptions to this out of 44 countries, namely Albania (2008), Jordan (2012) and Kyrgyzstan (2012). Obesity increases with per capita GDP (Figure 5.7 plots the data for sub-Saharan Africa: there are insufficient data points for the other countries to plot figures). Within sub-Saharan Africa, there is no clear pattern evident in Figure 5.7 as to how the urban–rural gap in obesity evolves with per capita income. Table 5.2 provides regional averages that show that the stunting gap between rural and urban areas almost disappears (and even reverses) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia where per capita GDP is highest. Rural–urban differences in obesity are only about half as large (in terms of number of percentage points difference) as in stunting. OLS regressions for stunting and obesity (Table 5.3) confirm the patterns observed from the figures/descriptive statistics. The sample is larger (255 observations) since we are able to include additional countries for which no data were available between 2008 and 2012, and also there are multiple rounds of data for most of the countries. Stunting decreases significantly with per capita GDP and with time, in both cases with a larger coefficient in rural areas, implying that the rural–urban gap diminishes both with GDP and with time. There are also notable regional effects. Compared to the omitted region (sub-Saharan Africa), stunting in both

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity  85 Table 5.2  M  ean percentage stunted (children under five years old) and obese (women 15–49) in rural and urban areas, by region, 2010 (± two years) Region

Stunted rural

Stunted urban

n

Obese rural

Obese urban

n

East Asia Eastern Europe/ Central Asia Latin America & Caribbean Middle East/ North Africa South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa All LMICs

25.6 14.8

14.4 13.1

6 9

n/a n/a

n/a n/a

2 3

30.0

15.7

12

12.8

16.8

8

25.6

22.8

6

n/a

n/a

2

45.2 40.6

35.9 26.8

5 32

6.3 2.9

14.2 9.5

4 25

37.1

25.8

70

7.4

13.8

44

Note: N/a = not available: too few observations/too limited regional population coverage to calculate. Source: Data are from 2010 survey (or, if not available, from closest survey between 2008 and 2012).

Percentage stunted urban versus rural

Europe and Central Asia* 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

TJK

KGZ

MDA

ARM

ALB

BIH

MKD

SRB

KAZ

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names; countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.2 Stunting of children under five years old, urban and rural areas, countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (2010 ± 2 years)

86  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 5.3 Regression results for child stunting in urban and rural areas, and obesity in women in urban and rural areas; data from 1991 to 2015 Independent variable

Rural stunting

Ln (per capita −6.734** GDP) (0.868) East Asia 0.128 (dummy) (2.632) Europe & Central −14.804** Asia (dummy) (2.117) Latin America −2.335 & Caribbean (1.890) (dummy) Middle East −5.071 North Africa (3.001) (dummy) South Asia 7.049** (dummy) (2.422) Time −0.594** (0.109) Constant 99.113** (6.438) F statistic 48.55** F(7,247) Adjusted R 0.567 squared

Urban stunting

Rural obesity

Urban obesity

−5.410** (0.662) 1.144 (2.020) −7.446** (1.624) −5.380** (1.450)

3.0119** (0.507) −3.709* (1.717) 8.807** (1.376) 3.588** (0.992)

3.452** (0.570) −8.864** (1.931) 2.424 (1.548) 2.802* (1.116)

−0.800 (2.304)

24.698** (1.543)

22.627** (1.736)

−1.800 (1.167) 0.272** (0.504) 0.273** (0.050) 91.91** F(7,171) 0.781

−4.220** (1.313) 0.362** (0.057) −12.715** (4.416) 71.04** F(7,171) 0.734

8.076** (1.859) −0.390** (0.083) 74.046** (4.941) 45.27** F(7,247) 0.550

Notes: Standard errors in parentheses; * denotes significant at 5% level; ** denotes significant at 1% level; omitted dummy is sub-Saharan Africa.

urban and rural areas is significantly lower in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, significantly higher in both urban and rural areas in South Asia, and significantly lower in urban areas in Latin America. Obesity increases significantly with per capita GDP and with time, in both cases with a larger coefficient in urban areas, implying that the gap increases over time and with per capita GDP. The regional patterns are different than for stunting. Obesity is significantly higher in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the Middle East and North Africa (both rural and urban areas in both regions), and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (rural areas only), compared to sub-Saharan Africa. Obesity is significantly lower in East Asia (both rural and urban areas) and South Asia (urban areas only) compared to sub-Saharan Africa.

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity  87

Percentage stunted urban versus rural

Latin America & Caribbean* 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

HTI

HND

BOL

GUY

GTM

SLV

BLZ

PER

COL

LCA

SUR

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names: countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.3 Stunting of children under five years old, urban and rural areas, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (2010 ± 2 years)

Percentage stunted urban versus rural

Middle East & North Africa* 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

JOR

EGY

TUN

IRQ

ALG

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names: countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.4 Stunting of children under five years old, urban and rural areas, countries in Middle East/North Africa region (2010 ± 2 years)

88  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 5.4 Regression results for urban/rural gaps in child stunting and obesity in women, data from 1991 to 2015 Independent variable

Stunting gap

Obesity gap

Obesity gap

Ln (per capita GDP)

−1.324* (0.525)

0.441 (0.417)

−1.016 (1.592) −7.358 (1.281)** 3.045 (1.144)** −4.271* (1.816)* −1.027 (1.466) −0.204** (0.066) 25.067** 3.896 18.18** F(7,247) 0.321

−5.155** (1.413) −6.383** (1.133) −0.786 (0.817) −2.071 (1.270) −2.149 (0.961) 0.089* (0.041) 3.924 (3.231) 8.35** F(7,171) 0.255

16.497** (5.587) −1.003** (0.348) −5.608** (1.393) −6.110** (1.113) −0.770 (0.800) −1.816 (1.237) −2.777** (0.949) 0.090* (0.040) −59.610** (22.273) 8.66 F(8,170) 0.256

Ln (per capita GDP) squared East Asia (dummy) Europe & Central Asia (dummy) Latin America & Caribbean (dummy) Middle East North Africa (dummy) South Asia (dummy) Time Constant F statistic Adjusted R squared

Notes: Standard errors in parentheses; * denotes significant at 5% level; ** denotes significant at 1% level; omitted dummy is sub-Saharan Africa.

If we use the gap between rural and urban areas as the dependent variable, we confirm that the gap in stunting diminishes significantly both with per capita GDP and over time (Table 5.4). There are also regional differences in the size of the gap. For obesity, the gap widens with time, but the effect of per capita GDP is not significant and the size of the time coefficient is smaller than that for the urban–rural stunting gap. If we use instead a more flexible specification and add a squared term for log of per capita GDP (Table 5.4), we see that the obesity gap between rural and urban areas first widens as per capita GDP increases, and then narrows.

4. DISCUSSION The results here are consistent with those of Paciorek et al. (2013), who found that the urban–rural gap in stunting diminished in the majority of countries over time and disappeared in a handful of countries, which they characterize as

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity  89

Percentage stunted urban versus rural

South Asia 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

NPL

BGD

PAK

BTN

MDV

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names: countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.5 Stunting of children under five years old, urban and rural areas, countries in South Asia (2010 ± 2 years)

largely urban. Masters (2016) similarly found that national stunting prevalence decreases with (natural logarithm of) per capita GDP, and that the relationship has shifted downwards over time, consistent with the results of our analysis. He attributes this to “new programs, policy changes and innovations in foodsystem innovations of all kinds”. However, he does not disaggregate urban and rural areas. It is also likely that changes outside the food system have served to reduce stunting. Ruel et al. (2016) note that urban areas have advantages in maternal education and access to health services that can lead to an urban advantage in stunting reduction and cite studies to support this. Although they do not specifically mention improved availability of clean water and sanitation, this is likely also an important factor. While such benefits at first accrue primarily in urban areas, they subsequently spread to rural areas and help to reduce the stunting gap as GDP per capita increases, and over time. Our results showing higher levels of stunting in South Asia compared to subSaharan Africa (controlling for per capita GDP) are consistent with a large previous literature on “the Asian enigma” (Ramalingaswami et al., 1997). Similarly, the findings of lower levels of stunting in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and urban Latin America, have a plausible biological explanation. These are regions that have had many years of better food intake compared to sub-­ Saharan Africa, and several generations in which children have grown taller.

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Even if food intake increases dramatically, it does not lead to a concomitant increase in child height in a single generation (otherwise stunted mothers would be at greater risk of birth complications). The finding that obesity in women aged 15–49 is higher in urban areas is consistent with Jaacks et al. (2015) and Popkin et al. (2012) who use similar data but from a slightly earlier period. The findings that obesity increases with (natural log of) per capita GDP, and that the relationship is shifting up over time, is consistent with similar analysis by Masters (2016). Masters (2016) provides national data but does not disaggregate by urban and rural status). Our finding of the quadratic relationship of the obesity gap with GDP helps to explain the regional patterns observed by Jaacks et al. (2015) and Popkin et al. (2012) who noted the urban–rural gap was widening more frequently in subSaharan Africa but narrowing in some countries in other regions. The reasons for increased obesity – better and more varied diets but also increased consumption of dietary fats and added sugars, associated with declines in physical activity – are well known. Within countries, urban areas tend to see these changes earlier than rural areas, hence the obesity gap initially rises. However, behaviour changes matter, and Ruel et al. (2016) citing Monteiro et al. (2004) note that there is a crossover point at which increasing obesity ceases to be led by higher socioeconomic status groups, who are overtaken by lower socioeconomic status groups as the effects of education cause lifestyle modification. This occurs for women around the mid-point of the lowermiddle-income country range (Monteiro et al., 2004). This is consistent with a similar finding in our study that the rural–urban obesity gap for women initially increases with per capita GDP but then starts to narrow around a per capita GDP of USD3733 (2011, PPP). The regional differences we observe in obesity levels (controlling for per capita GDP and time trends) are consistent with systematic differences in food and physical activity habits. Galal (2003) notes for the Middle East that dietary abundance “coupled with physical and cultural barriers to physical activity” (p. 343) are contributors to obesity. Popkin et al. (2001) note a low consumption of added sugar in China compared to India, and Singh et al. (2015) note in a global study that intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and fruit juices is particularly low in East Asia. Low intake of added sugar may help explain why obesity is lower in East Asia, controlling for per capita GDP and time trends. Our analysis has some limitations. There are fewer data for obesity than for stunting, since countries have some discretion as to what data are collected, depending on their priorities. The data focus on low and lower-middle-income countries with more limited representation of upper-middle-income countries, and with the caveat that the largest countries are under-represented. The subSaharan African countries are more heavily represented in the data as compared to other regions. Thus, the data are not fully representative of regions,

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60 50 40 30 20 10 0 COD BDI NER CAR MOZ MWI ETH TGO SLE RWA COM BFA ZWE MDG GIN UGA MLI TCH TZA SEN LSO KEN CIV STP CMR MRT GHA SSD SDN COG

Percentage stunted urban versus rural

Sub-Saharan Africa 70

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names: countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.6 Stunting of children under five years old, urban and rural areas, countries in sub-Saharan Africa (2010 ± 2 years)

30 25 20 15 10 5 0 BDI NER MOZ MWI SLE ETH RWA COM BFA ZWE MDG GIN UGA MLI BEN TZA SEN LSO CIV STP GHA CAM NGA COG GAB

Percentage obese urban versus rural

Sub-Saharan Africa*

Note: * See Table 5.1 for key to country names: countries are ranked in order of ascending per capita GDP (measured using 2011 PPP dollars).

Figure 5.7 Obesity prevalence (BMI >30) in non-pregnant women aged 15–49, urban and rural areas, countries in sub-Saharan Africa (2010 ± 2 years)

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and incorporating national survey data into the dataset, in particular for Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa, would be desirable. There are no cross-country data for LMICs for obesity in adult men, which does not necessarily follow the same patterns as obesity for adult women.

5. CONCLUSION There are inexorable forces affecting both stunting and obesity, namely, increasing per capita income and time trends. At the same time, the regional variations and individual country outliers suggest that there is room for policy intervention to improve outcomes, for example, the rural–urban gap in stunting is higher in Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru (for 2010), but Peru has been focusing on nutrition programming and has had some success in reducing stunting overall and in particular rural–urban disparities. Other countries (e.g. Pakistan) have underemphasized nutrition and show up as negative outliers. There is even more opportunity (and need) for policy efforts regarding obesity. The data suggest that regional differences in dietary and exercise patterns can cause regional effects on obesity to be larger than those for stunting. The fact that the urban–rural gap first widens but then narrows, which is explained by behaviour change, suggests that there is even more room for changing behaviour and hence affecting obesity, than for affecting stunting. The DOHaD hypothesis underscores that rapidity of economic growth in some regions is causing nutritional problems that can be compounded by rural– urban migration. Obesity and stunting are interrelated problems, making policy action more difficult but also more urgent. Finally, one cautionary note is that the literature suggests that geographic targeting aimed at poor rural areas may need to be augmented by specific efforts to support the nutrition of the urban poor. There is also a need for more research on patterns in obesity in LMICs, including obesity in men.

REFERENCES Barker, D. (2004), ‘Developmental origins of adult health and disease’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 58(2), 114–15. Boney, C., A. Verma, R. Tucker, R. and B. Vohr (2005), ‘Metabolic syndrome in childhood: association with birth weight, maternal obesity, and gestational diabetes mellitus’, Pediatrics, 115(3), e290–96. Cheung, P., S. Cunningham, K. Narayan and M. Kramer (2016), ‘Childhood obesity incidence in the United States: a systematic review’, Childhood Obesity, 12(1), 1–11. Corsi, D., M. Neuman, J. Finlay and S. Subramanian (2012), ‘Demographic and health surveys: a profile’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 41(1), 602–13.

Urban/rural differences in stunting and obesity  93 Galal, O. (2003), ‘Nutrition-related health patterns in the Middle East’, Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 12(3), 337–43. Jaacks, L., M. Slining and B. Popkin (2015), ‘Recent underweight and overweight trends by rural– urban residence among women in low- and middle-income countries’, Journal of Nutrition, 145(2), 352–7. Johnson, J. and A. Johnson (2015), ‘Urban–rural differences in childhood and adolescent obesity in the United States: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, Childhood Obesity, 11(3), 233–41. Masters, W. (2016), ‘Assessment of current diets: recent trends by income and region’, Working Paper 4 for Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, London, UK. Menon, P., M. Ruel and S. Morris (2000), ‘Socio-economic differentials in child stunting are consistently larger in urban than in rural areas’, Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 21(3), 282–9. Monteiro, C., E. Moura, W. Conde and B. Popkin (2004), ‘Socioeconomic status and obesity in adult populations of developing countries: a review’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization: The International Journal of Public Health, 82(12), 940–46. Newton, S., D. Braithwaite and T. Akinyemiju (2017), ‘Socio-economic status over the life course and obesity: systematic review and meta-analysis’, PLoS ONE, 12(5), e0177151. Paciorek, C., G. Stevens, M. Finucane, M. Ezzati and Nutrition Impact Model Study Group (Child Growth) (2013), ‘Children’s height and weight in rural and urban populations in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic analysis of population-representative data’, The Lancet. Global Health, 1(5), pp. e300–e309. Popkin, B., S. Horton, S. Kim, A. Mahal and J. Shuigao (2001), ‘Trends in diet, nutritional status, and diet-related noncommunicable diseases in China and India: the economic costs of the nutrition transition’, Nutrition Reviews, 59(12), 379–90. Popkin, B., L. Adair and S. Ng (2013), ‘Global nutrition transition: the pandemic of obesity in developing countries’, Nutrition Reviews, 70(1), 3–21. Raju, D. and R. D’Souza (2017), ‘Child undernutrition in Pakistan: what do we know?’, Policy Research Working Paper 8049 for World Bank Organization. Ramalingaswami, V., U. Jonsson and J. Rohde (1996), The Asian Enigma. In the Progress of Nations, New York, NY, USA: UNICEF. Ruel, M., J. Garrett, S. Yosef and M. Olivier (2017), ‘Urbanization, food security and nutrition’, in S. de Pee et al. (eds), Nutrition and Health in a Developing World, New York, NY, US: Springer, pp. 705–35. Singh, G., R. Micha, S. Khatibzadeh, P. Shi, S. Lim, K. Andrews, R. Engell, M. Ezzati and D. Mozaffarian (2015), ‘Global, regional, and national consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, fruit juices, and milk: a systematic assessment of beverage intake in 187 countries’, PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0124845. van de Poel, E., O. O’Donnell and E. van Doorslaer (2007), ‘Are urban children really healthier?’, Working Paper 07-035/3 for Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. World Bank (2018), Open Data, accessed 19 June 2018 at http://data.worldbank.org. World Health Organization (WHO) (2018), Global Health Observatory Data: Health Equity Monitor, accessed 20 June 2018 at www.who.int/gho/health_equity/en/.

6.

Scales of (in)action at the climate change– food security nexus in cities Carrie L. Mitchell, Joanne Fitzgibbons, Kristen Regier and Siya Agarwal

1. INTRODUCTION The challenge of feeding a population of nine billion people is, as readers of this book are well aware, a critical global issue. One in every seven people do not have access to sufficient caloric requirements to meet their daily needs (Godfray et al., 2010). The reasons for food insecurity are multifaceted but have been attributed primarily to three reasons: increasing instability in ­conflict-ridden r­ egions, economic challenges and climate change. Climate change, in particular, is impacting all four dimensions of food security: the physical availability of food, economic and physical access to food, food utilization and food stability (Upton et al., 2016). Limited attention has been given to the climate change–food security nexus until recently (Rasul and Sharma, 2015). Using a nexus approach to understand global problems, and potential solutions, is helpful for academics and practitioners as it allows us to think through potential synergies and trade-offs between various actions. Yet, our primary and secondary research suggests that we have neglected to understand and respond to these interlinked issues at various institutional scales. This chapter details this trend. Overall, we argue that a lack of international coordination and consensus on issues of food security and climate change has catalysed the formation of city-based networks and programmes, and popularized renewed interest in urban experimentation, or interventions in the processes of city building at the local level taken by state and non-state actors. Exploring urban experimentation in the context of historical and contemporary planning practice, we contend that contemporary urban experimentation creates new challenges for planning practice by way of the scale of interventions and the speed of interventions. We refer to this as “hyper-experimentation”. Moreover, using primary and secondary data from three urban experiments currently underway – namely, the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient City global programme, India’s Smart Cities Mission and Infrastructure Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge – we find that there is a heterogeneity of approaches 94

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used in tackling food security and climate change underway in cities globally. We also discuss other contemporary challenges with hyper-experimentation, namely, a lack of attention to socio-economic equity and a privileging of the entrepreneurial, competitive city. The issues raised in this chapter have serious implications for coordinated efforts to solve the key global challenges of food insecurity and climate change. We conclude with suggestions on how to move forward in this era of hyper-experimentation.

2. GLOBAL (IN)ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND FOOD SECURITY 2.1 Food Security: From Global to Local Food security is most commonly defined as existing when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). While there is enough food produced worldwide to feed our global population, it is estimated (2015) that approximately 815 million people are food insecure. The FAO attributes the rise in the number of food insecure people worldwide year-to-year to violent conflict, exacerbated by climate-related shocks (FAO et al., 2017). The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) echoes this linkage and clearly articulates the climate change–food security nexus in its Fifth Assessment report. Authors state with confidence that “all aspects of food security are potentially affected by climate change, including food access, utilization, and price stability” (Porter et al., 2014, p. 488). However, effective global action on food security at the international level has been severely hampered by competing institutional objectives and national priorities. Jarosz (2009) argues that tensions between responses that prioritize economic growth and agricultural productivity versus food as a human right have plagued the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) since its inception in 1945. These internal tensions, fuelled by competing national economic interests, have resulted in the dwindling leadership and influence of the organization over time. The power and authority of the FAO and other intra-governmental organizations has been further eroded by the plethora of new actors on the food security scene. In the 1960s and 1970s, the FAO’s sole authority to tackle global food security was challenged by the UN World Food Programme, which was charged with emergency food aid delivery, and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), which was created to fund rural development (Jarosz, 2009). The global governance of food security has shifted again in the

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last few decades, this time towards more participatory and decentralized processes, fuelled by a variety of public and private actors at multiple institutional scales. The participatory and decentralized evolution of global food security governance, along with concurrent growth in urban populations, has arguably led to increased focus on the local scale of food security. Calls for cities to help tackle food security have proliferated. For example, a recent International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) briefing note argues that “local governments’ support to community-led initiatives to improve food access and safety can greatly reduce food insecurity and contribute to greater resilience to the impacts of climate change” (Tacoli et al., 2013, p. 1). Concurrent to the rise in grassroots, decentralized food security governance, there has been an increase in city-driven efforts to address food security. The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, for example, is an international pact signed by 180 cities. In it, signatory cities acknowledge that they have a “strategic role to play in developing sustainable food systems and promoting healthy diets” (Milan Urban Food Policy, n.d.). Regional food security networks are also on the rise. The African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) was founded in 2008 to tackle food insecurity in Africa’s urbanizing towns and cities (AFSUN, 2018). Yet, despite efforts at reform of the global governance of food security, this new decentralized model remains fragmented, with overlapping mandates and limited policy and planning coordination between countries and cities. Moreover, we see limited action regarding adapting food production systems to deal with the effects of climate change, as this is often beyond the scope of intervention for local governments. We discuss this in Section 3, after a short history of climate change governance from the global to local scales of intervention. 2.2 Climate Change: From Global to Local International action on climate change began in earnest in 1988, when the IPCC was formed to collate and assess evidence on climate change. Two years later, the panel produced its first assessment report on global climate change, yet a definitive statement that humans are responsible for climate change did not materialize until the second assessment report in 1995. Concurrently, during the 1990s, state governments focused on creating systems to monitor (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: UN, 1992) and limit (Kyoto Protocol: UNFCCC, 1997) emissions. In the 2000s, the perceived economic consequences of placing limits on emissions led a few prominent signatories to withdraw from Kyoto, including the United States (2001) and Canada (2011).

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Global action on climate change lagged in the early 2000s. In 2009, the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord was the resulting compromise to tense negotiations at the United Nations Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. One of the outcomes of the accord was a three-year deal on “fast-start financing” for developing countries. Over USD30 billion in additional climate finance has been provided to developing countries since Copenhagen, but there remains no clear path to the USD100 billion target. Moreover, another concern is that meeting the target so far has involved the reclassification of some existing aid flows. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement offered some hope for the future of global climate action. At the United Nations Conference of the Parties held in France, 195 states agreed to tackle climate change and make economic investments towards a low-carbon future. Yet, in 2017 the United States withdrew from the agreement, leaving the international community’s vision for mitigating climate change in a state of flux once again. While action on climate change is slowly gaining ground globally, the US federal government notwithstanding, research suggests that there remains a lack of coordination across sectors, particularly among water, energy and food (Rasul and Sharma, 2015). Indeed, most National Adaptation Plans of Action have been prepared to meet sector-specific goals, not to address a nexus of interrelated issues. This can result in competing and counterproductive adaptation actions (Rasul and Sharma, 2015). The gap created by faltering global action on climate change has been, to some extent, filled by regional non-governmental actors. For example, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group connects more than 90 of the world’s biggest cities, representing over 650 million people and one-quarter of the global economy (C40 Cities, n.d.). The Global Covenant of Mayors works to mobilize cities and local governments to contribute to a global climate solution. It includes 9000 cities and local governments from six continents and 127 countries, representing more than 770 million residents (C40 Cities, n.d.). These initiatives suggest that, in the absence of coordinated and consistent efforts to address climate change at the international and state levels, municipal governments are stepping in to fill the gap. The challenge with this trend, as we will explore in subsequent sections, is that cities have not responded uniformly to climate change. Additionally, like their national and international counterparts, local governments have generally ignored the intersectionality of climate change and food security. Before delving into this issue, we discuss urban experimentation, detailing its academic lineage and applications in historical planning practice.

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3. URBAN EXPERIMENTATION IN CITIES: PAST AND PRESENT 3.1 History of Urban Experimentation Urban experimentation can be broadly explained as an intervention in city building, or the urban application of “learning by doing” (Caprotti and Cowley, 2017). The initial description of the term can be traced back to Geels’ (2005) literature on multi-level perspectives and technological transitions theory, although there is a long history of experimentation within the field of urban planning. “The city has, arguably, always been experimental insofar as urban knowledge has, throughout the history of urbanization, routinely been ‘tested’ by authorities as part of ongoing efforts to improve the city” (Evans, 2016, p. 429). Urban experiments were born out of the desire to improve cities and enact lasting, radical change (Caprotti and Cowley, 2017; Evans, 2016; Karvonen and van Heur, 2014). Raven et al. (2017) describe this urban experimentation as “an actionable form of government” (p. 1). Urban experimentation can be classified in three broad overlapping forms: policy and governance, socio-technical transitions, and living laboratories (Bulkeley and Broto, 2013). Policy and governance experiments can be described as interventions that take place outside the conventional channels of state authority and hence reposition the state within urban processes (McLean et al., 2016). An example of this is the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, spearheaded by The Rockefeller Foundation, a US-based private philanthropic foundation that has, through this initiative, positioned itself in municipal government affairs. As part of acceptance into the 100 Resilient Cities network, each participating city must draft a city resilience strategy, which is the output of a collaborative planning process led by a “chief resilience officer” hired with funds from The Rockefeller Foundation and situated just below the mayor in terms of authority. In doing so, the foundation is running a real-time experiment in its participating cities, attempting to restructure traditional hierarchies within city governments. Socio-technical experiments are characterized by the experimentation taking place in defined niches, in relative safety from outside judgement or influence. These act as launching grounds to expand ideas if proven successful (McLean et al., 2016). For example, the city of Austin tested new sustainable technologies on the existing energy grid. The technologies used in Pecan Street Project were created in an effort to make the city a low-carbon community (McLean et al., 2016). The experiment was piloted in Austin’s Mueller district before trying to scale the initiative to a larger network (McLean et al., 2016). Lastly, urban living labs are differentiated by their focus on knowledge production and their ongoing use of partnerships between public and private

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sectors (McLean et al., 2016). An example can be seen in the development of Toronto’s Quayside, made possible through a private–public partnership between the City of Toronto, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs. The community is planned to be completely “smart”, utilizing urban forms and regulations in an experimental way (Sidewalk Labs, n.d.; Woyke, 2018). 3.2 Urban Experimentation in Planning: The Garden City Within planning, the roots of urban experimentation can be seen at the end of the 19th century when experiments centred on utopian visions of the city and monumental change (Caprotti and Cowley, 2017). The first example of urban experimentation can be seen in the Garden City movement, spearheaded by Ebenezer Howard (1868). This movement was positioned as a response to the environmental and health problems of the industrial city, such as overcrowding, pollution and the rapid spread of disease. Howard sought to create a community that incorporated the progressive elements of the city with the perceived health benefits of rural living. He envisioned a network of “garden” communities with exactly 32,000 people each, whereby the community would be self-sufficient, connected by canals and rail lines. Each city would be surrounded by greenbelt and would thus have easy access to the countryside, enabling its citizens to live healthy and happy lives, in harmony with their environment. At the core of Howard’s vision was a community where working-class citizens could have an elevated quality of life. He presented the Garden City movement as a solution to the capitalist, industrial society (Monclús and Díez Medina, 2018). The implementation of the garden city model was slow compared to today’s standards. Howard detailed the model in 1898 in a book, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. In 1902, he re-published it as Garden Cities of Tomorrow. The following year, he created an association to raise funds for the purchase of land and development of the first garden city. Howard was only able to gain funding from wealthy investors and, in 1904, architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker won the bid to plan and design the City of Letchworth. This experimental city revealed challenges for the implementation of Howard’s vision, as Unwin and Parker’s construction resulted in housing far more expensive than the average working-class citizen could afford, and a design less connected and compact than originally planned (Clevenger and Andrews, 2017). What was conceptualized as a liberal, reformist movement transformed into a development for the wealthy, and an unintended model for future suburban developments (Monclus et al., 2018). The second garden city was not built until 1919, with the purchase of Welwyn. These two garden cities remained the only examples of Howard’s vision until the end of the 1930s, when the ideals started to infiltrate more broadly into

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city planning. There are now garden cities worldwide, however, like Letchworth, the reality is far from Howard’s original vision. 3.3 Urban Experimentation in Planning: Towers in the Park Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse (1933), also known as Towers in the Park, is another historical example of urban experimentation. The ideology behind this plan was similar to Howard’s garden city, with both experiments attempting to solve the problems of the industrial city, including pollution, crime and overcrowding. Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by Howard and believed that the best way to improve the health and well-being of the population was to allow them access to affordable housing and green space (Vitaliev, 2015). For Le Corbusier, this meant replacing unsuitable dwellings with skyscrapers and situating them in a dispersed manner, with open green space shared between the towers. The buildings were designed to hold high volumes of people, while also providing access to green space (Jabareen, 2006). Further, the community was planned to be self-contained, with shops and transportation within the development. This was Corbusier’s vision of the ideal living environment (Le Corbusier, 1933). Much like the Garden City movement, the speed of implementation spanned several decades. Corbusier originally showcased his vision for Paris in 1933 at the Congress Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne meeting. He then published a refined version in 1935. His modernist intervention was not accepted by the committee as a suitable plan for Paris. The most realized vision of Le Corbusier was the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France, completed in 1952, nearly two decades after the debut of his initial vision. In the following decades, his design influenced developments worldwide. A famous example of this experimental architectural style is the Pruitt-Igoe social housing project in St Louis, which opened in 1954 as one of the first experiments in social housing in the United States, with mostly low-income African American residents. Pruitt-Igoe was planned to be a solution to the so-called slums of St Louis. However, instead of being a utopian dream, Pruitt-Igoe became riddled with crime, fell into disrepair and was demolished between 1972 and 1975 (Birmingham, 1999). Le Corbusier’s idea of a compact, self-contained community, when applied within a context of racial and socio-economic inequality had the unintended consequence of isolating the community both socially and economically. Not all of the problems associated with the social housing complex can be attributed to the experimental design; socio-economic trends, systemic racism and the city’s lack of experience in managing social housing projects largely contributed to the problems (Heathcott, 2012). However, this is a vivid example of the dark side of urban experimentation; a reminder that

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experimenting with urban structures and land use means experimenting with people’s lives and livelihoods. 3.4 Contemporary Urban Experimentation: What’s New? While urban experimentation is a long-standing tradition in the field of planning, contemporary iterations present new opportunities and challenges for cities, as well as the climate change and food security agendas of international, national and regional agencies. While early experiments, such as Howard’s garden cities or Le Corbusier’s Towers in the Park, mainly responded to localized challenges relating to industrial land use, contemporary urban experiments seek to address complex global challenges. Accordingly, the scale of urban experimentation has also changed, with many initiatives bypassing the conventional state and intergovernmental hierarchies to forge their own networks across city governments. As we discuss in this section, this may have the unintended consequence of hindering coordinated action toward common global issues, such as the nexus of climate change and food security. We explore this through three key characteristics of contemporary urban experimentation: the scale of interventions, the speed of implementation and the heterogeneity of interventions. 3.5 Scale of Urban Experimentation One of the major shifts in contemporary urban experimentation is the scale of interventions. Previous attempts at urban experimentation were small in scale by today’s standards. Howard’s vision was primarily concerned with creating a singular city at a time. His original garden city, the City of Letchworth, remained the only example of experimentation until 1919, when he purchased land to create the second garden city (Welwyn, UK). The small, one-city-at-atime progress continued well into the 1930s. It was not until after the Second World War that the movement spread within and beyond the United Kingdom. In contrast, contemporary urban experimentation takes place at much larger scales within and across countries. For example, when The Rockefeller Foundation pioneered 100 Resilient Cities in 2013, it proposed constructing a network of 100 cities dedicated to building resilience to chronic and acute economic, social and physical urban challenges. Three years later, the foundation announced it had reached its “100 city milestone” with 100 cities spanning five continents participating in its USD164 million global initiative to catalyse urban resilience (The Rockefeller Foundation, 2016). This rapid scaling of experimentation is also true for urban experiments within countries. India and Canada have used a similar competitive model to spark urban experimentation in their respective cities. India’s Ministry of

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Housing and Urban Affairs, in 2015, challenged its cities to compete for municipal funding through its Smart Cities Mission. In 2018, Infrastructure Canada launched the Smart Cities Challenge, with a top prize of CAD50 million to the winning municipality. While these competitions provide no definition of what a “smart city” entails, they do offer cities some general guidelines on smart city features. Infrastructure Canada “encourages communities to adopt a smart cities approach to improve the lives of their residents through innovation, data and connected technology” (Infrastructure Canada, 2018). For India’s Ministry of Housing, smart cities mean housing for all, walkability, mixed-use land developments, preserving and promoting open space, and promoting a variety of transit options. More lofty goals are also included, such as citizen-friendly governance and giving an identity to the city. The Government of India used its competition to scale the smart cities concept across the subcontinent at a rapid pace. In 2016, 20 cities were chosen for funding and by December 2018 another 80 cities had been selected, bringing the number to 100 winning proposals. The initiative is said to have impacted almost 100 million people across India (National Institute of Urban Affairs, 2018). Canada’s competition attracted 130 entries from communities across the country (Infrastructure Canada, 2018). 3.6 Speed of Urban Experimentation The Garden City movement evolved over decades, eventually making its way across Europe to influence planning practice globally. Other attempts at urban experimentation occurred along similar timelines. Slow implementation means, practically speaking, that cities have a chance to learn-by-doing and are able to correct missteps along the way before implementing on a larger scale. Conversely, today’s urban experiments take place fast. The Rockefeller Foundation’s programme reached its goal of a 100-city network in three years. As part of acceptance into the 100 Resilient Cities network, each participating city is allocated funds to hire a chief resilience officer responsible for leading the collaborative development of a city resilience strategy over a period of less than one year. Smart city competitions in India and Canada also moved quickly. On one hand, this faster turn-around time of contemporary urban experiments allows cities to be responsive to changing contexts and problems. On the other, a consequence of this preoccupation with speed is a lack of critical reflection into the processes of creating resilient, smart, sustainable cities. Within contemporary urban experimentation, there is no time afforded to learn from failure, or to adjust and revise. Instead, time, or lack thereof, is seen as an impetus for action: “people can’t afford to wait for digital advances to transform the urban environment. So we’re creating a new type of place to accelerate

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urban innovation and serve as a beacon for cities around the world” (Sidewalk Labs, 2019). The Rockefeller Foundation draws upon fears of precarious urban futures to justify its speed of implementation: “Cities face an uncertain future, and we’re helping them prepare” (Rockefeller Foundation, n.d.). The impact and possible consequences of this are yet to be seen. 3.7 Heterogeneity of Urban Experiments These contemporary examples of urban experimentation, despite all having the stated purpose of improving sustainability of the region and the lives of residents, have deployed vastly different interventions. While diversity was also characteristic of historical attempts at urban experimentation, those experiments dealt explicitly with local issues of sustainability, whereas today’s experiments trend towards global issues. This heterogeneity can be observed both across and within urban experiments, with 100 Resilient Cities, Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge and India’s Smart Cities Mission each taking a different overall view and approach to what constitutes an improved, forward-thinking city. Furthermore, each participating city in their respective programmes applies the initiative within the context of localized issues, adding to the heterogeneity of urban experimentation. This has profound implications for important global issues, such as climate change and food security, which may not be locally popular but require collective and sustained local action. Neither issue has been explicitly prioritized by the respective platforms, although some competing cities have independently taken the initiative to focus on them based on their own local-level needs. Furthermore, our evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the nexus of climate change and food security is ignored in these examples. For example, in a manifest content analysis of 31 strategies produced by cities participating in The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities network, we found that only seven cities (7 per cent) mentioned food security in their strategy document. Of those, just two (Bristol, UK, and Dallas, US) discussed food security in relation to climate change. Both cities only mentioned food security and climate change together once. This suggests that not only is food security low on cities’ agendas, but that very few cities in the 100 Resilient Cities network view food (in)security as a problem associated with climate change. Climate change was mentioned in every strategy with the exception of Norfolk, US. However, the number of times it was mentioned varied, suggesting that not all cities perceived climate change to be a pressing concern for urban resilience. This is surprising given the recent IPCC reports that state there are approximately 12 years left before we reach the anthropogenic induced 1.5 degree Celsius threshold (IPCC, 2018).

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In Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge, four of the 20 finalists (20 per cent) used the opportunity to focus primarily on food security. However, among both the finalists and unsuccessful applicants that focused on food security, none described the relationship of food security to climate change; indeed, none of the finalists, and only four of the 130 applicants, mentioned climate change in their proposals at all. Further exemplifying the heterogeneity in urban experimentation, India has interpreted the parameters of a smart city quite differently. India’s Smart City Mission focuses mainly on issues of urban services provision and infrastructure. Indian cities were evaluated on the basis of existing service levels and capacities, credibility of proposal, self-financing and cities’ overall track record in terms of innovation and implementation. Applicants were asked to report on their cities’ recent progress on issues such as transportation, housing, water availability, energy availability and outages, solid waste management, safety and security. Notably, food security or access to food does not appear in the evaluation criteria for the competition and we found no evidence that any of the 100 winning cities were awarded funding dedicated to solving issues of food security. This heterogeneity also sheds light on one of the governance challenges associated with a movement toward urban policy and governance experiments: as we previously suggested, city governments are not responding uniformly to issues like climate change and food security, nor are they even defining and interpreting shared nomenclature (e.g. resilience, smart cities) in the same way. Larger-scale coordinated intergovernmental initiatives such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on the other hand, provide some degree of assurance that participating governments interpret terminology similarly and work toward similar objectives. Each of the SDGs comes with embedded targets and key performance indicators, whereas 100 Resilient Cities and the Smart Cities Challenge, in particular, encourage participating cities to focus on locally defined issues and do not require participants to report on standardized key performance indicators. In terms of advancing sustainability, this heterogeneity of approaches represents a double-edged sword. On one hand, local governments arguably understand the particular issues facing their communities better than intergovernmental or state bodies. Accordingly, the resultant actions may be more locally relevant and more feasibly implemented because cities can adapt their approaches to the capabilities and challenges they face in their daily governance activities. On the other hand, this very phenomenon also ensures that actions taken will not be directly comparable across cities or states due to the diversity of local contexts. This approach has the potential to stall the already-deficient coordination of government action toward sustainability at the global scale

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and hence potentially promote small-scale, locally specific changes rather than global transformative change.

4. FURTHER ISSUES FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER HYPER-EXPERIMENTATION Urban experimentation and the trend toward both smart cities and resilience in urban planning may also be cause for concern in detracting attention from socio-economic inequality. Evans (2016) and Caprotti and Cowley (2017) point out that the urban experimentation literature has been problematically silent on equity-related questions such as, “on whose behalf do urban experiments seek to make change?” (Evans, 2016, p. 439), “on whom is the experiment carried out?” (Caprotti and Cowley, 2017, p. 5) and, similarly, “if the city is a laboratory, then are its inhabitants lab rats?” (Evans, 2011, p. 231). These scholars have argued that the exploration of urban experimentation as a concept has neglected to attend to equity and justice. We further contend that the same is true of in-situ instances of urban experimentation, which largely treat inhabitants as subjects rather than individuals with a “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996). In many cases, as previously discussed with the case of Pruitt-Igoe, the subjects of urban experiments are not afforded an opportunity to voice their free and informed consent. Certainly, this is true in the case of 100 Resilient Cities – while 82 per cent of city resilience strategies described specific projects that sought to improve the wellbeing of marginalized residents, only 23 per cent described having consulted those marginalized people when the strategy was being developed (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell, 2019). This finding corroborates the theoretical claims made by critical scholars who have cautioned that the language of “resilience”, when used as a platform for planning and development work, may be negligent to issues of justice and social equity (Brown, 2012; Friend and Moench, 2013, 2015; Gillard, 2016; Gillard et al., 2016; Joseph, 2013; Meerow and Newell, 2016; Vale, 2014). Bahadur et al. (2013) point out that resilience is increasingly being used as a catch-all term by international and government agencies to describe approaches taken to combat a wide range of social and environmental problems, ranging from poverty to security to economic development (Bahadur et al., 2013; Coaffee and Fussey, 2015). While this flexibility makes the concept valuable as an orienting point across disciplines and actors, it also means that the term can be applied to suit nearly any scale and agenda, causing critical scholars to warn that the application of resilience by powerful actors and institutions could worsen existing systemic vulnerabilities and actually preserve the status quo (Archer and Dodman, 2015; Béné et al., 2018; Cote and Nightingale, 2012;

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Fainstein, 2015; Friend and Moench, 2013; Gillard, 2016; Gillard et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2016; Vale, 2014; Ziervogel et al., 2016, 2017). More simply put, these scholars have argued that “resilience” is not inclusive or transformative in practice, but instead serves as a vehicle for business as usual and, indeed, builds the capacity of the business-as-usual system to resist change. To this end, Kaika (2017) argues that the resilience rhetoric represents an attempt to pacify marginalized people into accepting and internalizing preventable hardship. Kaika (2017) is also critical of the smart cities movement. She contends that the smart city rhetoric promises technological solutions to socio-environmental problems and is increasingly entrenched in equity-focused narratives globally, such as the quest to advance human development. She argues, however, that this logic is circular, because many smart technologies are figuratively built on the backs of the world’s most marginalized residents. As an example, she explains that the metallic ore coltan is an essential component in circuit boards and hence makes its way into the majority of communication technologies. Kaika notes that over 19 per cent of the world’s supply of coltan comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “and is mined by hand under what the UN repeatedly reports to be a highly organized and systematic exploitation of both nature and local people” (Kaika, 2017, p. 90). Evidently, then, the “smart” and “sustainable” technologies being used to advance quality of life in privileged “smart cities” are simultaneously reproducing unsustainable, violent and oppressive practices in corrupt and abjectly poor communities in the Global South. These and other criticisms of smart cities are clearly reflected in our case study urban experiments. For example, our analysis found that none of the 130 applicants in Canada’s Smart City Challenge used the words “unequal” or “inequality” in their proposals. Only three used the word “equality” and three different applicants used the word “equity”, suggesting that the quest for smart cities is largely viewed by Infrastructure Canada, and the 130 competing applicants, as being separate from the quest for social equity. Chakrabarty (2018) tells the stories of various smart city initiatives he has interacted with in India – through his role at the Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (an Indian NGO) – explaining that they have largely taken the form of gated communities and/or necessitated the privatization of large tracts of public land in cities. Accordingly, he argues that India’s Smart City Mission is a thinly veiled perpetuation of neoliberal urbanism, rather than a potentially transformative framework for advancing equitable sustainability. Kaika (2017) similarly accuses the Smart City Mission of being a form of “entrepreneurial urbanization” (Datta, 2015, as cited in Kaika, 2017, p. 91) that neglects to address issues relating to India’s colonial history. Datta (2018) argues that India’s smart city movements have delegitimized marginalized members of society by endorsing a form of evidence-based decision-making and tech-focused citizen engagement that is

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inaccessible to the poor. She asserts that “the ‘smart citizen’ thus becomes a euphemism for an elite citizenship built on class, religious, and caste privilege. The subaltern citizen can now no longer make straightforward moral rights claims through political society. Rather they must now find new ways to breach the boundaries between digital and urban publics that define their exclusion from the future city” (Datta, 2018, p. 414). Several scholars have argued that the rhetoric of urban experimentation (Evans, 2016; Haughton and McManus, 2012; Haughton et al., 2013; Oosterlyn and Gonzalez, 2013), smart cities (Chakrabarty, 2018; Datta, 2018; Krivý, 2018; Wiig, 2016), and urban resilience (e.g. Davoudi and Porter, 2012; Gillard, 2016; Joseph, 2013; Kaika, 2016; Vale, 2014; Ziervogel et al., 2017) all represent a perpetuation of neoliberal governance styles. Resilience scholars have argued that the narrative is inherently conservative and focuses on selfreliance (Davoudi and Porter, 2012; Gillard, 2016). Smart cities critics have argued that the movement has largely been used to further economic interests and prioritized industry partnerships at the expense of meaningfully redistributive or equitable change (Hollands, 2008; Wiig, 2016). This idea of the “entrepreneurial city” similarly places the impetus on individuals to own and address their own marginality, rather than acknowledging structural dimensions of inequality. Increasingly, then, these rhetorics conflate wellbeing with competition (Hollands, 2008). We see this reflected in the competitive application process deployed by each of our three case study experiments. No longer the sole domain of the professional planner, city planning is now in the hands of a diverse group of actors, tasked with the responsibility of place-making and place-shaping. One of the drawbacks to this approach, which is not acknowledged by any of the cases, is that the cities capable of crafting the strongest and most competitive applications are most likely not the cities that need the support the most. Cities with significant access to human and financial resources both to craft the proposal and to serve as insurance that the applicant is reliable and that the work will be completed are more likely to succeed in their applications. Six of the twenty finalists (30 per cent) in Canada’s Smart City Challenge were from First Nations, Inuit or Metis communities, a marginalized demographic in the Canadian context, although none were in the CAD50 million grand prize category. Given the small sample size, this may suggest that Infrastructure Canada considered issues of equity and inclusion during their selection process in an attempt to mitigate the aforementioned drawback. In the case of 100 Resilient Cities, however, this has manifested as unequal representation of cities across the Global North and South, with 75 per cent of participating cities being in countries with very high human development and nearly onequarter being from the United States (Fitzgibbons and Mitchell, 2019).

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Apart from the competitive dimensions, neoliberalism also manifests in the case studies through the use of private partnerships. The participating 100 Resilient Cities work with what The Rockefeller Foundation calls a “platform of partners”, from the private, public, academic and non-profit sectors (The Rockefeller Foundation, 2015). The foundation claims that this makes the market more responsive to the needs of cities, hence conflating the quest for community resilience with the quest for a thriving free market economy. This also has the potential to disrupt existing planning and governance processes, as specialized private actors exert themselves financially and conceptually into city planning mechanisms. This could have the effect of reorienting, or delegitimizing, existing policy programmes and institutions. Empirical research is not yet available to ascertain the quality of the new partnerships arising from urban experimentation initiatives across the globe, but within resilience and smart city initiatives there appears to be uncritical acceptance of partnerships (private–public partnerships in particular) and no real mechanism to access the long-term social, economic or environmental value of such collaborations. These new governance arrangements also raise questions as to whether the neoliberal logic of competition is the most appropriate method for sustainable and equitable planning.

5. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we explore scales of (in)action with respect to the food security– climate change nexus. Our review of the history of food security and climate change at various institutional scales showcases the challenges of intergovernmental action on both global issues. As a result of challenges of coordination and collaboration across nation states, and the growing importance of cities in our global political economy, we have seen a resurgence of urban experimentation. However, unlike historical experiments focused on more localized urban issues, contemporary experimentation tinkers with issues of global importance. Moreover, contemporary urbanization does so at a speed and scale we have not seen in planning history. Unfortunately, this trend towards hyper-experimentation is not a benign process of change. In this chapter we note several challenges: the heterogeneity of responses to the climate change–food security nexus, concerns with social equity across scales, and trends toward competitive urban governance. We contend that hyper-experimentation not only fails to address the important climate change–food security nexus, but also has the potential to exacerbate existing socio-economic inequality through reliance on a neoliberal model of city planning.

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The metaphorical gates have been opened, so what can we do to minimize the damage caused by undoubtedly well-intentioned organizations and governments in their quest to experiment at a speed and scale previously unseen? First, any organization or government that wishes to experiment in cities (and with citizens’ lives and livelihoods) must reflect critically on the ethical implications of their interventions. Failure will be part of the process of change, but how organizations and governments respond to failure is critical to the future of our cities. There must be evaluation of plan quality and monitoring of shortterm and long-term planning outcomes built into the design (and funding) of programmes. There must be checks and balances of planning power, with external evaluation of partnerships and open discussion of the varied (positive and negative) implications of urban experiments for citizens. Time must be allocated to revise plans. Also, there is an important role for intergovernmental organizations in this new world of hyper-experimentation. We have shown in this chapter how concepts like resilient and smart manifest within and across cities. While flexibility is necessary to facilitate effective implementation across varied social, political and economic landscapes, some degree of consistency is important if we intend for these city networks to make any significant contribution to global issues, such as climate change and food security. Intergovernmental organizations are facing a crisis of relevance in this new urban world. However, they could play a fundamental role in guiding and mentoring cities, setting international policy targets and championing scalable solutions that address the complexity of interconnected global issues, such as the climate change–food security nexus.

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Scales of (in)action at the climate change–food security nexus in cities  111 Howard, E. (1898), To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, London, UK: S. Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd. Howard, E. (1902), Garden Cities of To-morrow, London, UK: S. Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd. Infrastructure Canada (2018), Smart Cities Challenge, accessed 23 April 2019 at www.­infrastructure. gc.ca/cities-villes/index-eng.html. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2018), Global Warming of 1.5 Degree Celsius: Summary for Policymakers, accessed 23 April 2019 at www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/ summary-for-policy-makers/. Jabareen, Y. (2006), ‘Sustainable urban forms: their typologies, models, and concepts’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 26(1), 38–52. Jarosz, L. (2009), ‘The political economy of global governance and the world food crisis: the case of the FAO’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 32(1), 37–60. Joseph, J. (2013), ‘Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach’, Resilience, 1(1), 38–52. Kaika, M. (2017), ‘“Don’t call me resilient again!”: the New Urban Agenda as immunology … or … what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with “smart cities” and indicators’, Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), 89–102. Karvonen, A. and B. Van Heur (2014), ‘Urban laboratories: experiments in reworking cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(2), 379–92. Krivý, M. (2018), ‘Towards a critique of cybernetic urbanism: the smart city and the society of control’, Planning Theory, 17(1), 8–30. Le Corbusier, A. (1933), La Ville Radieuse: Éléments d’une Doctrine d’Urbanisme pour l’Équipement de la Civilization Machiniste (Collection de l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste), Boulogne, FR: Editions de L’architecture d’aujourd’hui. Lefebvre, H. (1996). The right to the city. Writings on cities. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, UK. McLean, A., H. Bulkeley and M. Crang (2016), ‘Negotiating the urban smart grid: socio-technical experimentation in the city of Austin’, Urban Studies, 53(15), 3246–63. Meerow, S. and J. Newell (2016), ‘Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?’, Urban Geography, 0(0), 1–21. Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (n.d.), History, accessed 23 April 2019 at www.­ milanurbanfoodpolicypact.org/history/. Monclús, J. and C. Díez Medina (2018), ‘Garden cities and garden suburbs (1898–1930)’, in C. Díez Medina and J. Monclús (eds), Urban Visions: From Planning Culture to Landscape Urbanism, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 13–22. National Institute of Urban Affairs (2018), Smart Cities Mission Dashboard, accessed 23 April 2019 at https://smartnet.niua.org/smart-cities-network. Oosterlyn, S. and S. Gonzalez (2013), ‘Don’t waste a crisis’: opening up the city yet again for neoliberal experimentation’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(3), 1075–82. Page, H. (2013), Global Governance and Food Security as Global Public Good, New York, NY, US: Centre on International Cooperation, New York University. Porter, J., L. Xie, A. Challinor, K. Cochrane, S. Howden, M. Iqbal, D. Lobell and M. Travasso (2014), ‘Food security and food production systems’, in C. Field, V. Barros, D. Dokken, K. Mach, M. Mastrandrea, T. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K. Ebi, Y. Estrada, R. Genova, B. Girma, E. Kissel, A. Levy, S. MacCracken, P. Mastrandrea and L. White (eds), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, pp. 485–533. Rasul, G. and B. Sharma (2015), ‘The nexus approach to water–energy–food security: an option for adaptation to climate change’, Climate Policy, 16(6), 682–702. Raven, R., F. Sengers, P. Spaeth, L. Xie, A. Cheshmehzangi and M. de Jong (2019), ‘Urban experimentation and institutional arrangements’, European Planning Studies, 27(2), 258–81. Shi, L., E. Chu, I. Anguelovski, A. Aylett, J. Debats, K. Goh, T. Schenk, K. Seto, D. Dodman, D. Roberts, J. Timmons Roberts and S. Van Deveer (2016), ‘Roadmap towards justice in urban climate adaptation research’, Nature Climate Change, 6(2), 131–7. Sidewalk Labs (2019), About, accessed 23 April 2019 at https://sidewalktoronto.com/.

112  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Tacoli, C., H. Thanh, M. Owusu, L. Kigen and P. Padgham (2013), ‘The role of local government in urban food security’, IIED Briefing Note, IIED, London, UK. The Rockefeller Foundation (2015), What Is The 100 Resilient Cities Platform of Partners, accessed 23 April 2019 at www.100resilientcities.org/what-is-the-100-resilient-cities-platform-ofpartners/. The Rockefeller Foundation (2016), 100 Resilient Cities and The Rockefeller Foundation: 37 New Member Cities, Reaching 100 City Milestone, accessed 23 April 2019 at http://100resilientcities. org/100-resilient-cities-the-rockefeller-foundation-37-new-member-cities-reaching-100-citymilestone/. The Rockefeller Foundation (n.d.), About, accessed 2 September 2019 at www.100resilientcities. org/our-impact/. UNFCCC (1998), Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Accessed 9 December 2019 at https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf. United Nations (1992), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, New York, NY, US: United Nations, General Assembly. Accessed December 9, 2019 at https://unfccc.int/ resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf. Upton, J., J. Cissé and C. Barrett (2016), ‘Food security as resilience: reconciling definition and measurement’, Agricultural Economics, 47(S1), 135–47. Vale, L. (2014), ‘The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city?’, Building Research and Information, 42(2), 191–201. Vitaliev, B. (2015), ‘Inside the “machine for living” [built environment architecture]’, Engineering and Technology, 10(9), 48–51. Wiig, A. (2016), ‘The empty rhetoric of the smart city: from digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia’, Urban Geography, 37(4), 535–53. Woyke, E. (2018), ‘A smarter smart city’, MIT Business Review, 21 February, accessed 23 April 2019 at www.technologyreview.com/s/610249/a-smarter-smart-city/. Ziervogel, G., A. Cowen and J. Ziniades (2016), ‘Moving from adaptive to transformative capacity: building foundations for inclusive, thriving, and regenerative urban settlements’, Sustainability, 8(9), 955. Ziervogel, G., M. Pelling, A. Cartwright, E. Chu, T. Deshpande, L. Harris, K. Hyams, J. Kaunda, B. Klaus, K. Michael, L. Pasquini, R. Pharoah, L. Rodina, D. Scott and P. Zweig (2017), ‘Inserting rights and justice into urban resilience: a focus on everyday risk’, Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), 123–38.

7.

The “supermarket revolution” in the South Reena das Nair

1. INTRODUCTION The growth and spread of supermarket chains globally over the past three decades has transformed the way consumers purchase groceries and household consumable products. The “supermarket revolution”, or “supermarketization”, is when a growing share of food products are sold through supermarkets. Combined with supermarketization, the internationalization of supermarkets through foreign direct investment (FDI) outside the countries in which they were established has been characterized in the literature as occurring in “waves”. Various studies have documented these waves, starting in the early 1990s. These waves saw the rapid catch-up of several developing countries and regions to countries in Western Europe and North America that had supermarketized earlier and over a much longer period. In these regions, the supermarket share of food retail increased sharply over a relatively short period of time (Reardon et al., 2004, 2005, 2007; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Traill, 2006). The supermarket revolution in the South has included alternative formats and moving to different locations – away from serving only affluent consumers in urban areas and penetrating lower-income peri-urban and rural areas (Reardon and Berdegué, 2002; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003). The revolution has had important implications for consumers and suppliers. For consumers, supermarkets supply a basket of daily food and non-food products in a convenient setting and location, providing an overall customer experience (Basker and Noel, 2013; Betancourt, 2006; Betancourt and Malanoski, 1999). Sometimes referred to as a price–quality–range-service (PQRS) package, it can reduce overall costs for consumers, including transport, time, search, information, and storage costs (Dobson, 2015). Competition among supermarkets as they spread into new areas can improve these offerings to consumers. For suppliers, the spread of supermarkets opens up larger markets in order to attain the scale needed to become competitive in national, regional, and international markets. It creates opportunities for food processors and light manufacturers, stimulating these industries. The modernization of procurement methods, escalating requirements, and private standards require suppliers to invest in developing their capabilities to meet these requirements. As a final 113

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link between suppliers and consumers, supermarkets play an important role in driving the development of supplier capabilities and facilitating their movement up the ladder of regional or global value chains (Boselie et al., 2003). Large supermarket chains therefore have significant power and influence over suppliers and their development trajectory. A lack of competitive rivalry in concentrated markets can lead to abuses of buyer power by supermarkets towards suppliers, and can hinder their growth and development (Clarke et al., 2002; Dobson, 2015; Dobson et al., 1998; OECD, 2015). Modernization of procurement systems, such as developments in sophisticated distribution centres, has further enabled suppliers to export their products through regional or global supermarket chain store networks. This has impacted trade patterns, especially regional trade, and has raised political sensitivities about the displacement of local suppliers (das Nair, 2019; das Nair et al., 2018; Reardon et al., 2007). Section 2 of this chapter provides an overview of the spread of supermarkets globally and its broad implications for the retail landscape and suppliers. It reviews the patterns and drivers of the spread of supermarket chains globally; the characteristics that affect their spread; the implications for the retail landscape; the impact on trade; and the effects on suppliers. Although the literature has also evaluated the implications of the growth and spread of supermarket chains on diets (Asfaw, 2008; Tschirley et al., 2015), food security (Crush and Caesar, 2016; Crush and Frayne, 2011; Nickanor et. al., 2017; Peyton et al., 2015), and concerns around the displacement of traditional wet markets or independent retailers (Abrahams, 2009; Berdegué and Reardon, 2016; Huang et al., 2015), these issues are not addressed in this chapter. Section 3 evaluates the experiences and extent of supermarketization and internationalization using Southern Africa as a case study, and their implications for the competitive landscape and suppliers. In the region, this has largely occurred through the spread of South African-owned supermarket chains in the context of the opening up of South African markets after the end of apartheid, and, increased intra-regional FDI following liberalization in Southern African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s, including through the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Despite the growth and spread of supermarket chains in Southern Africa, this has not necessarily occurred to the extent or pace that was expected or predicted. The spread of large supermarkets chains has nonetheless had important implications for the competitive landscape and for suppliers in the Southern African region. This section evaluates these implications, highlighting the role that supermarket chains have played in driving investments to develop supplier capabilities on one hand, and the competition concerns arising from the conduct of a few large chains dominating markets on the other hand. The buyer power of supermarket chains has resulted in surpluses being extracted by supermarkets at the expense of suppliers, squeezing their margins. The long-term effects of buyer power can lead to reduced competition

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at the supplier level and reduced investments and innovation, leading to poorer product quality, less choice, and higher prices for consumers. These impacts are evaluated through a combination of a global value chain (GVC) framework, tailored for regional dynamics, and an industrial organization approach to buyer power. The competition concerns that have arisen in the Southern African region also extend to locking in retail spaces in shopping malls, preventing the entry and expansion of new retailers.

2. THE IMPLICATIONS OF GLOBAL SUPERMARKET EXPANSION There is no single definition of internationalization but, in the case of retailers, it can be viewed as the extent to which they operate outside their home country. International retail operations have been defined as the operation, by a firm or alliance, of shops or other forms of retail distribution in more than one country (Dawson, 1994). This has been measured by different metrics – for instance, by the value or volume of total sales or profits generated internationally relative to total sales/volumes, or by the growth in the number of stores and the number of countries that a retailer operates in (geographical spread) (Coe and Hess, 2005; Coe and Wrigley, 2018; Ietto-Gillies, 1998; Stopford and Dunning, 1983; Sullivan, 1994; Wrigley and Lowe, 2010). Linked to the internationalization of supermarkets are the terms “supermarketization” or “supermarket revolution”, which broadly describe the trend in which retail food sales in a given country or region are increasingly happening through supermarket chains (Reardon et al., 2004; Traill, 2006), marking a shift away of food sales from independent retailers and traditional wet markets. 2.1 Patterns of Supermarketization and Internationalization of Supermarket Chains The supermarket revolution in the global South has happened in a number of waves. The first wave occurred in the early 1990s in South American countries (Brazil, Argentina and Chile), East Asia (excluding Japan and China), and South Africa (as the only African country towards the end of the first wave). This period saw a rapid catch-up of these regions with Western Europe and North America that had supermarketized earlier and over a much longer period. In these regions, the food retail share of supermarkets increased sharply from 10–20 per cent in the early 1990s to 50–60 per cent in 2004, and to as high as 80 per cent in some countries. The second wave covered the spread in Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia, although some studies also place South Africa as part of the second wave. The share of food retailing through

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supermarkets in these regions grew from 5–10 per cent in the 1990s to 30−50 per cent in 2004. The third wave hit India, China, poorer Latin and Central American countries, and Kenya in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with a share of food retailing through supermarkets growing rapidly from 10 to 20 per cent. The last formally documented fourth wave in the South was in Southern and East African countries in the mid-2000s, affecting countries in Sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa and Kenya, and South Asia outside India (Reardon et al., 2005, 2007; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003). Several demand-side and supply-side factors spurred the spread of supermarkets in developing countries. Demand-side factors include increasing urbanization, growing population, increased per capita income, the rise of the middle class, and the entry of women into the workforce (Reardon et al., 2004; Tschirley, 2010). On the supply side, a major driving force has been the increase in FDI given saturation of home markets and greater profitability opportunities in developing countries (Bartels et al., 2009; Humphrey, 2007). FDI was further fuelled by retail sector and trade liberalization in the 1990s. Lower unit costs due to economies of scale and scope, as well as transport economies, also spurred the spread. This was coupled with the modernization of procurement systems, including centralized distribution, and increasing efficiency in logistics and inventory management that resulted in more efficient operations and lower product costs (Reardon et al., 2004). There were predictions in the early 2000s that supermarketization and internationalization in developing countries would continue to be significant. On the African continent, supermarkets were forecast to take off rapidly on a large scale in the mid- to late 2000s as global multinational or transnational chains (such as Walmart, Carrefour and Metro) would enter Africa, repeating patterns evidenced in Latin America and East and Southeast Asia (Reardon et al., 2004; Traill, 2006; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003). The infiltration of multinationals and transnational retail chains has not been significant in Africa, however. Only three of the top 20 global grocery retailers – Walmart, Carrefour and Casino – were present in Africa in 2018, with only Walmart in Southern Africa (Coe and Wrigley, 2018). Walmart acquired an existing store network through its takeover of South Africa’s Massmart in 2011. The number of Walmart grocery retail outlets is still much lower than those of the South African chains and in fewer countries in Africa. Instead, a handful of supermarket chains from South Africa and Kenya have spread in the Southern and East African regions respectively.

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2.2 Levels of Concentration and Market Power The spread of supermarkets internationally has led to high levels of concentration in markets. At a global level, the share of the global market accounted for by the 100 largest retail firms has been steadily increasing (Dawson, 2007). The same small group of grocery retail chains are globally dominant, and have been for many years. The top 20 transnational retail chains (dominated by grocery retailers) in terms of revenues earned in international markets has been the same for the past decade, although their relative positions have changed (Coe and Wrigley, 2018). This concentration is reinforced by the high barriers to entry given large economies of scale and scope, and other high sunk costs (Dobson, 2015; Ellickson, 2004). These high levels of concentration in many markets and high barriers to entry are reflective of the oligopolistic nature of supermarket chains. In 2015, the International League of Competition Law highlighted the degree of concentration in the grocery retail sector in different countries. In Australia, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, and Belgium, the two- and three-firm concentration ratios (CRs) in the grocery retail sector were between 55 and 87 per cent. In other words, two or three firms held between 55 and 87 per cent of the defined markets. The four-firm CRs in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (UK) were 85, 80, and 85 per cent respectively (Jenny, 2015). The levels of concentration in Europe more broadly have also been increasing. In 2000, the top 10 European retailers accounted for 26 per cent of retail sales, and this increased to 30.7 per cent in 2011 (European Commission, 2014). Theories of imperfect competition predict that high levels of market concentration reduce effective competition and can allow sellers (or buyers) with market power to increase (or reduce) prices. This raises concerns about firms possibly abusing this market power, not just in terms of raising prices, but also through strategic behaviour that can exclude rivals. This can have negative effects on both consumers and suppliers. A type of strategic behaviour prevalent in the retail sector in several countries is restrictive vertical agreements between mall owners, landlords or property developers, and supermarket chains as anchor tenants. Exclusivity clauses in leases grant anchor tenants the right to operate as the sole supermarket in the mall/shopping centre. Property owners or landlords then require permission from them if they wish to rent space to other ancillary tenants who overlap with the incumbent supermarket’s offering. If new entrants are refused, competition is stifled in that location. By their very nature, leases with such clauses are exclusionary. With fewer competing supermarkets in a given location, customers are left with reduced choice in terms of product range, pricing, and quality. While there could be efficiency justifications for exclusive leases, those that span long periods are more likely to be anticompetitive. The Australian

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Competition and Consumer Commission, the UK Competition Commission and the Competition Commission of South Africa have found exclusive leases to be an impediment to competition (Competition Commission, 2015). Another key area of concern in several countries with the growth of a few, large supermarket chains is the potential impact of buyer power. This is when a firm or a group of firms, either because it has a dominant position as a purchaser of a product or a service, or because it has strategic or leverage advantages as a result of its size or other characteristics, is able to obtain from a supplier more favourable terms than those available to other buyers (OECD, 2013, p. 23). It has also been defined as a situation where a firm or a group of firms obtains from suppliers more favourable terms than those available to other buyers or those that would otherwise be expected under normal competitive conditions (Dobson et al., 1998, p. 5). Concerns about the buyer power of large supermarket chains and the impact this has on suppliers have emerged in many countries including the UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria, and Romania (Dobson et al., 1998; OECD, 2015). This can negatively impact supplier participation and the development of their capabilities, thus hindering upgrading efforts into higher-value products or into GVCs. Buyer power is exerted mainly through price control, by dictating elements such as listing fees, rebates, advertising allowances, promotion fees, payment period terms, settlement discounts, and new store opening fees, among others (Clarke et al., 2002; OECD, 2015; Reardon and Gulati, 2008). Supermarkets can also charge slotting allowances that food processors or other suppliers have to pay for access to shelf space or specific placements. Slotting allowances may help retailers screen products and determine which ones are more likely to sell, but they can also be a means by which retailers can extract rents from processors (OECD, 2013). This unilateral control of trading terms can be a way of extracting a greater share of the surplus in a value chain. A combination of increasing retail concentration and significant barriers to entry limits the choices that suppliers have in terms of the competing means of distributing their goods in many countries (Dobson, 2015). In several countries, market inquiries or studies are initiated by competition authorities concerned about buyer power (Kobel et al., 2015). 2.3 The Unique Characteristics of Supermarkets that Affect Spread The characteristics of supermarket chains are unique and not well explained by most of the literature on internationalization, which has largely focused on the primary sector or manufacturing (Jenkins, 2013). The differences between the internationalization of retailers and manufacturing firms provides useful insights into factors that facilitate or hinder the spread of supermarkets in host countries. Retailer internationalization is conceptually and theoretically

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different from manufacturer-driven internationalization in several respects (Burt et al., 2002; Dawson, 2007). Retailer internationalization involves a process for the growth and decline of firms, and for the diffusion of managerial knowledge through economic and social systems. This “process view” is supported by the fact that internationalization affects all levels of a supermarket value chain – from sourcing, logistics, and operations, to property management and customer relationships (Dawson and Mukoyama, 2006). The differences with manufacturing internationalization stem from the inherent characteristics of supermarkets, which result in fundamentally different business models. The business model of retailers is driven by the primary objective of increasing sales growth, while manufacturing internationalization is often driven by cost-reduction considerations. While it can be argued that the debate is circular – a reduction in costs could lead to a reduction in price, which could result in an increase in sales – Dawson (2007) suggests that the difference in the primary objective drives different strategies in these sectors. For instance, the expansion and retrenchment/recovery strategies of retailers are different to those of manufacturing firms. Retailers essentially expand to increase their sales and, when they decide to scale back or retrench, they typically close foreign operations first to focus on home markets. In manufacturing, retrenchments are mainly to cut back on costs, and the home country may be where costs are higher (Burt et al., 2002). Exchange rate fluctuations also significantly impact costs and expansion strategies of retailers in host countries given large stock holdings. Market dynamics are different between manufacturing and retailing. Supermarkets are essentially “local” from the customer’s point of view, irrespective of whether they are part of large multinationals. This requires retailers to understand and adapt to, or even create, local cultures, and patterns of consumption and consumer attributes if they are to be successful. This is not the case for manufacturers. Customers of manufacturers can be global. There is no requirement for customers to be in the locality of manufacture. In fact, manufacturing internationalization is often focused on production for export markets (Dawson, 2007). Further, the package offered by the retailer is more complex than just a physical product and often incorporates a bundle of services. As Dawson (2007, p. 384) notes, “in an international context, the product of the retailer is anchored in a specific social, economic and political environment with the implication of considerable cultural inputs into the product design and operation.” The network of relationships with suppliers and customers is also different. Retailers have an intimate relationship with suppliers to ensure efficiencies and on-time deliveries, along with constant monitoring of off-the-shelf sales. These “network” efficiencies are integral to retailer operations. In manufacturing, on the other hand, “operational” efficiencies are often more important (Dawson, 2007), again emphasizing the cost-reduction objective of manufacturing

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internationalization. However, this is not to say that retailers do not place a strong emphasis on lowering costs from suppliers (see Section 3). The different approaches are also seen in the management of suppliers. In retail, the links and interactions with head office are important for corporate stores in terms of supplier management, while for production, control is usually at local management levels (Jonsson and Elg, 2006). The value-add of retailing comes from managing relationships with suppliers and creating a range of items for sale. Manufacturers, by comparison, add value by transforming physical items procured from suppliers. The relationship with customers is also very different between the two. The volume of customers is much larger for retailers, and close contact with customers requires a degree of cultural responsiveness to be successful in international markets. Retailers also face costs based on spatial variations, given that demand is often location-specific. Spatially related costs include property costs, which are highly location-specific. The significance of location for supermarkets in Southern Africa has led to competition concerns about the “tying-up” of desirable retail sites in long-term exclusive leases with property developers. Retail firms’ financial structures are also often characterized by negative working capital, where current liabilities exceed current assets since retailers tend to lag payments by different degrees to different suppliers. This is typically different from manufacturing and effectively is a source of free capital that provides finance for international growth. Based on these differences, retail internationalization is said to involve four different and unique types of “transfers”: the transfer of culture, the capability to adapt, the transfer of operational capabilities, and the ability to create new consumption behaviours in host markets (Dawson, 2007).The full transfer of culture can be part of a chain’s core strategy. Examples of retailers that have followed this strategy include Carrefour, Tesco, Mercator, and DSG International (and IKEA and The Body Shop for non-grocery retailers). While domestic operations are still the most important, firms also transfer varying degrees of their culture and business model to the foreign market. In contrast, Marks and Spencer’s strategy was to not transfer its culture into foreign markets at all (and many suggest this was the reason why it failed). With full culture transfer, the influence of senior management is significant, and the internationalization process fully transfers strategy, business models, corporate values, and operations to host countries (Burt et al., 2002; Dawson, 2007). The ability to adapt and respond to the host market is critical. No matter how strongly retailers hold on to their home-country culture, some degree of adaptation to local markets in host countries is necessary to be successful. The adaptation may be small if cultures are similar, which might be the case for immediate cross-border internationalization, or very large when trying to succeed in very different markets. There is much less requirement for manufacturers to adapt

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to local cultures. Lack of adaptation may explain why South African retailers have been less successful in other parts of Africa and beyond. Success hinges on the managerial ability to adapt to the market (Dawson, 2007; Wrigley and Currah, 2003, 2004). The third type transfer that occurs is operational, where the retail “formula” is transferred to the host country. This formula includes how the retailer operates, formats, brand, and loyalty programmes. If successful, other retailers may copy this formula. The last type of transfer is that of consumer values and expectations. In addition to adaptation to host-market cultures, retailers also create consumption by bringing in new consumer demands. This forms part of the retail formula. These could include new offerings (such as delis and coffee shops in supermarkets), new items in a range, delivery options, recycling, and other innovative initiatives, which can help shape consumer culture (Dawson and Henley, 1999). While these four different types of transfer apply to all retailers, the characteristics of supermarkets further set them apart. Given the perishability of certain food products, such as fresh produce and dairy, supermarkets typically have to engage local suppliers in host countries. This requires establishing relationships and transferring supply standards to local farmers and producers. Compared to supermarket chains, other retailers or manufacturers usually do not have such vast differences in product portfolios across thousands of widely different suppliers. 2.4 Changes in Procurement Methods A defining characteristic of modern supermarket chains is heavy investment in infrastructure and supply chain. Large investments to get a wide range of products on shelves at the lowest possible cost include distribution centres (DCs), advanced internet technology systems, logistics and inventory management, transport fleets, and warehouses. Supermarkets in many parts of the world have switched to centralized DCs instead of store-to-store procurement (Reardon and Hopkins, 2006). Since Sam Walton started the concept of building distribution centres to service Walmart stores in villages and small towns in the US in the 1960s (Reardon and Gulati, 2008), supermarket investments in DCs have been a key pathway to retail modernization. DCs reduce transaction costs, coordination costs, and congestion diseconomies. These advantages can outweigh the transport costs to and from DCs located in more remote parts of the city (Reardon and Hopkins, 2006). The perishable nature of food requires investment in appropriate storage facilities, and supermarkets are increasingly investing in cold storage DCs that can handle perishables. While DCs can also reduce costs for suppliers, small suppliers that only have the scale to supply some stores through localized procurement under a store-to-store model may

122  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

be excluded. This is also driven by supermarket chains’ requirements to maintain consistency across store outlets nationally. Supermarkets have also moved away from spot purchases to adopting specialized procurement agents, dedicated wholesalers, or procuring directly from farmers and processors. Specialized agents and wholesalers can act as “channel captains” and enter into relationships (formal contracts, including contract farming or verbal agreements) on behalf of supermarkets with processors and farmers to ensure quality and consistency. Dedicated procurement agents and wholesalers are usually efficient as they reduce search, transaction, and coordination costs. They also assist in maintaining private standards and contract terms between supermarkets and suppliers. However, this has shifted power away from small farmers and processors to supermarket chains, and gives supermarkets more direct influence over pricing, quantities, terms of delivery, and product quality. It has the adverse effect of shrinking the supply base by using only preferred suppliers (Altenburg et al., 2016) and bypassing traditional wholesale markets (Humphrey, 2007). Key reasons for increased pressure on the supply value chain are the risks faced by supermarkets and increased competition to access shelf space. Humphrey and Schmitz (2002) emphasize the importance of supply continuity and consistency in terms of non-price competition parameters, such as quality, response time, and delivery – all of which affect the reputation of supermarkets. Leading UK supermarkets, for instance, control many of their major fresh vegetable supply chains by specifying product, processing, and packaging requirements, as well as the quality assurance systems that need to be in place as a response to legislation that made supermarkets liable for food safety in the UK. Procurement trends vary for different categories of products. Supermarkets tend to source from medium-to-large suppliers of meat and dairy and processed food companies. Fresh produce also tends to be sourced from medium-to-large farmers (Reardon et al., 2007), which presents difficulties for small-scale farmers in developing countries, especially if they do not supply export markets. Supermarkets tend to only source indirectly from smaller farmers, through wholesalers and processors, but even these farmers tend to have better capital assets and equipment, access to infrastructure, and are more commercially oriented through their use of hired labour and chemical inputs, and training advantages (Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Reardon and Timmer, 2007). Supermarkets typically prefer to reduce transaction costs by procuring from large suppliers that have the capacity to supply all their outlets, thus ensuring sufficient volumes, consistency, and quality of products. The modernization of procurement systems has therefore placed considerable pressure on suppliers in terms of their ability to supply the required volumes, maintain consistency, ensure quality, and contain the cost of supplying products (Dakora, 2012).

The “supermarket revolution” in the South  123

2.5 Escalating Legal and Private Standards Large global supermarket chains are further imposing escalating private quality and processing standards on suppliers (Barrientos and Visser, 2012; Boselie et al., 2003). This allows them to compete with and create points of differentiation from rivals. These standards are over and above the country-specific and basic legal standards that suppliers have to adhere to. In the case of multinational retailers, international standards are often applied in all their operations (Coe and Hess, 2005; Gibbon and Ponte, 2005). However, some of these standards are not triggered by supermarkets, but by collective consumer and social movements. These include sustainability goals, responsible environmental practices, ethical sourcing requirements, fair labour practices, and corporate social responsibility, which may lead to conventions shaped by social movements (Dallas et al., 2018). The ability of local suppliers (particularly small-scale farmers, small food processors, and producers of household consumable goods) to meet these standards and reach the scale required to compete with imports is important for their sustainability. This can make it difficult for them to integrate into supermarket value chains as they often require significant capital, technological, managerial, organizational, and financial investments and upgrades to meet requirements. Marketing fresh food produce to supermarkets has been particularly difficult for suppliers in developing countries as the institutional, physical, and financial infrastructure support systems are often weak (including bar coding, packing houses, cold chains, shipping equipment, credit facilities, standards, and certification processes). Sanitary and phytosanitary protocols are extremely important for fresh fruits and vegetables (Tschirley, 2010). Typically, suppliers are responsible for all activities up until the product is delivered to a DC or a supermarket, and solely responsible for the costs of escalating private standards and the accompanying audits by supermarkets (Coe and Hess, 2005). 2.6 Impact on Trade Supermarkets have evolved to become “global sourcing companies”, which has important implications for regional sourcing – a potentially powerful avenue for growth in agro-processing and manufacturing value chains. But to be able to supply regional or global markets through supermarkets, suppliers first need to develop the required capabilities. Supermarkets are more likely to source their products via imports if they are foreign-owned chains (Altenburg et al., 2016). Importation is facilitated by a range of factors including lower relative costs of sea and air freight, tariff reductions, trade liberalization, innovations in communications, improved transport systems, and increased capital

124  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

mobility (Brown and Sander, 2007). However, regional sourcing often involves lower transport costs than deep-sea imports. When foreign retailers first enter a host country, they tend to import a large share of their supplies from their home base and, over time, increase their share of local sourcing (Cattaneo, 2013). Using supermarket experiences in different countries (Shoprite in Zambia and Madagascar, Carrefour in Morocco and Tunisia, and Metro in Kazakhstan), Cattaneo (2013) highlights three phases of connection to the “global” value chain: 1: Lead retailer in developing country imports most of its products • Phase given the lack of capabilities and capacity of local producers to satisfy its

• •

requirements and standards. Phase 2: As local producers build capabilities and capacity, they begin to grow their supplies to lead retailer. Phase 3: Local producers that meet high standards export their products to the retailer’s regional/global network.

The duration of each phase is likely to be very dependent on the type of products, the existing level of supplier capacity and capabilities in a given country, and country-specific institutional and political factors. Foreign supermarkets are most likely to first source perishable agricultural products locally, given the importance of short cold chains for such products. Only a few large farmers can usually meet the stringent requirements of supermarkets and transition to exportation. A GVC framework is useful to understand whether suppliers can upgrade and enter regional or global value chains. While lead retailers are becoming increasingly demanding in terms of reducing costs, raising standards, and increasing speed of production, if they actively provide support in terms of governance in the value chain, they can transfer skills, knowledge, and best practice to suppliers relatively quickly on how to improve layout and production flows. That is, they can facilitate the upgrading and transition of suppliers that show potential from Phase 1 to phases 2 and 3. Upgrading can be categorized as process, product, functional, and intersectoral upgrading (Humphrey and Schmitz, 2002). This “upgrading” effect has been credited for relatively underdeveloped regions becoming substantial exporters in a short space of time. Sourcing by supermarkets from national, regional, and global networks therefore affects trade. Reardon et al. (2007) provide preliminary evidence about how such multi-sourcing strategies affect South–South trade, drawing from experiences in Central America and Indonesia. This impact on trade is evident in the Southern African region too.

The “supermarket revolution” in the South  125

3. SOUTHERN AFRICA CASE STUDY This section evaluates the experiences of the supermarket revolution in Southern Africa as a case study, to illustrate and test some of the concepts and predictions highlighted above. South Africa has the most advanced grocery retail sector in Africa. It is estimated that supermarket chains hold around 60 per cent of all retail sales in the country (das Nair, 2019). Other estimates for 2015 (Figure 7.1) similarly suggest that modern food retail accounts for around 56 per cent of total food expenditure in South Africa (calculated as the percentage of all supermarket sales, including chains and independents, over total food expenditure). Namibia was under South African rule until March 1990 and the relatively higher levels of food share through modern formats are a legacy of this period (Figure 7.1). Other countries in the region started their supermarketization much later than South Africa (as part of the fourth wave identified in the literature), and internationalization has essentially been about the extension of South African supermarket chains into these countries. In South Africa particularly, but also in the region, there has been a general narrative that growing supermarketization has occurred, and continues to occur, at the expense of independent retailers. However, Euromonitor data suggests that supermarketization has already happened in South Africa, and is now slowing down, while the independent retail segment has remained resilient. The share of packaged food going through formal supermarket and hypermarket channels actually decreased from 69.7 per cent in 2003 to 65.2 per cent in 2017

% modern food retail

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Source: Formalising African Retail, Sagaci Research, 2017 (underlying data from The African Development Bank, IMF and World Bank, and Sagaci Research).

Figure 7.1  Modern food retail share in selected countries in Southern Africa, 2015

126  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

(Euromonitor International, 2018), although the overall share of packaged food sales through modern retail channels has remained high in this period at around 80 per cent, but also declining (Table 7.1). The share of “traditional” grocery retailers in packaged food also declined slightly from 14.3 per cent in 2003 to 13.1 per cent in 2017. However, this share has not been lost to supermarket and hypermarket formats, but to convenience stores and forecourts, which are also owned by large supermarket chains. The growth of forecourts and convenience stores reflects the mature nature of grocery retail in South Africa. In fresh food, the share sold through traditional grocery retailers increased from around 39.4 per cent in 2008 to 40 per cent in 2017 (Euromonitor International, 2018). In packaged and fresh food categories, the share through supermarkets and hypermarkets has reduced over the same period. Independent retailers are shown under the traditional grocery retailers’ category in Table 7.1. This category is dominated by independent small grocers, but also includes specialist food, drink, and tobacco retailers; independent small grocers; and other grocery retailers. This also, at least partially, covers informal retail through “spaza” (informal) shops that buy from formal retailers such as cash-and-carrys and from wholesalers. South Africa’s mature levels of supermarketization were facilitated by ­apartheid-era economic planning, with highly formalized economic structures serving mainly white urban areas. Traditional retailers and informal spaza shops were limited to township areas serving black communities. Following the end of apartheid and zoning restrictions, the formal supermarket chains took grocery retail closer to where the majority of the population lived in township, peri-urban, and even rural areas. However, the share of food sold through supermarkets did not necessarily increase as a result since supermarkets and hypermarkets already constituted a large proportion of sales of fresh and packaged food. What did evolve were the formats that the chains introduced in these areas to target lower-income consumers (Table 7.2). This also led to traditional independent grocery retailers adopting alternative formats of retail by organizing under buying groups to compete with the new formats of chain supermarkets. The main buying groups – Buying Exchange Company, United Management Services, Independent Cash & Carry Group, and Independent Buying Consortium – support many independent retailers under their respective banners. Buying groups address some of the barriers to entry faced by independent retailers, such as economies of scale in procurement and logistics, and advertising costs. These are an important alternative retail channel for consumers and suppliers. While independent retailers have, to some degree, been resilient in cases where they have been supported by buying groups, these are not direct rivals to the full PQRS (price–quality–range–service) offerings of chain supermarkets and compete mainly with the lower-end format offerings of these chains in peri-urban and rural areas.

127

14 0.4 9.6 3.9 0.4 0.3 0.2 5.3

14.3 0.4 9.8 4 0.4 0.3 0.1 5

5.5

0.2

13.7 0.4 9.5 3.7 0.5 0.3

99.7 93.8 80.1 5.2 0.6 5.3 5 64.1 69.1

5.7

0.2

13.4 0.4 9.4 3.6 0.5 0.3

99.7 93.6 80.1 5.5 0.6 5.5 5.5 63.1 68.6

5.7

0.2

13.4 0.4 9.6 3.4 0.5 0.3

99.7 93.5 80.1 6 0.6 5.7 5.6 62.2 67.8

5.8

0.2

13.1 0.3 9.6 3.2 0.5 0.3

99.7 93.4 80.3 6.3 0.6 5.7 5.8 61.8 67.6

6

0.2

13.1 0.3 9.8 3 0.5 0.3

99.7 93.2 80 6.6 0.6 5.7 5.8 61.3 67.1

6.1

0.2

13.2 0.3 9.9 2.9 0.6 0.4

99.7 93 79.8 6.7 0.7 5.8 5.7 61 66.7

6.2

0.2

13.3 0.3 9.9 3.1 0.6 0.4

99.8 93 79.6 6.8 0.7 5.7 5.6 60.7 66.3

6.3

0.2

13.2 0.3 9.8 3.1 0.7 0.4

99.8 92.8 79.6 6.9 0.7 5.7 5.6 60.7 66.3

6.4

0.3

13.2 0.3 9.8 3.1 0.7 0.4

99.7 92.6 79.4 6.9 0.7 5.7 5.6 60.4 66

6.5

0.3

13.1 0.3 9.7 3.1 0.7 0.4

99.7 92.4 79.3 6.9 0.8 5.7 5.7 60.2 65.9

6.8

0.3

13 0.3 9.8 2.9 0.7 0.4

99.6 92.1 79.1 7 0.8 5.7 5.7 60 65.7

6.8

0.3

13.1 0.3 9.8 2.9 0.7 0.4

99.6 92 79 7 0.8 5.7 5.7 59.8 65.5

7

0.3

13.1 0.3 9.9 2.9 0.7 0.4

99.6 91.9 78.8 7.1 0.8 5.6 5.6 59.6 65.2

0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.2 0.3 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

99.7 94 80.1 5.1 0.5 5.1 5 64.3 69.3

99.7 94.3 80 4.9 0.5 4.9 5.6 64.1 69.7

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

Source: Euromonitor International database, 2018.

Note: All grocery retail includes modern grocery retailers (convenience stores, discounters, forecourt retailers, hypermarkets, supermarkets) and traditional grocery retailers (specialist food, drink, tobacco retailers, independent small grocers, and other grocery retailers).

NON-STORE RETAILING Vending Home shopping Internet retailing Direct selling TOTAL

STORE-BASED RETAILING Grocery retailers Modern grocery retailers Convenience stores Discounters Forecourt retailers Hypermarkets Supermarkets (Supermarkets + hypermarkets) Traditional grocery retailers Food/drink/tobacco specialists Independent small grocers Other grocery retailers Non-grocery specialists Health and beauty specialist retailers Other foods non-grocery specialists Mixed retailers

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Table 7.1 Share of packaged food sold through different retail channels in South Africa, 2003–2017

128  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

These trends in supermarketization are consistent with South Africa being part of the first two waves of the supermarket revolution. Shares of food retailing through supermarkets grew from 10–20 per cent to 50–60 per cent in the first wave, and from 5–10 per cent to 30−50 per cent in the second wave between 1990 and 2004 (Reardon et al., 2005; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003). The proportion of food sales through supermarkets and hypermarkets in South Africa was even higher than estimated for the first wave for the packaged food category. Declining supermarketization in the home country also provides new market-seeking motivations for internationalization, with limited growth prospects at home and greater sales opportunities outside it (Narula and Dunning, 2000). Most of the supermarket chains in South Africa have diversified their formats to include hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores at fuel forecourts, liquor outlets, and fast food offerings (Table 7.2). Except for Woolworths, which targets high-income customers, all the chains have extended their offerings to multiple branded formats of differing sizes, targeting customers at different income levels. The various formats leverage off a common base in terms of logistics, distribution, sourcing, and branding. Supermarket chains thus compete by offering a range of formats, with competition in any given market being between stores of similar formats. The extent of different formats is more limited outside South Africa, highlighting the relative maturity of the country. This shows segmentation of markets, with fewer competitors within segments with the same formats, which has implications for competitive rivalry. 3.1 Internationalization of Supermarket Chains in Southern Africa The pace of internationalization in Africa in terms of the entry of transnationals from outside the continent has not reached the extent predicted. In the early 2000s it was predicted that global multinational supermarket chains would enter Africa by around 2010, repeating patterns evidenced in Latin America and East and Southeast Asia (Reardon et al., 2004; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003; Traill, 2006). While Walmart did indeed enter Southern Africa in 2011, through the acquisition of South African Massmart Holdings, its entry into grocery retail through its Game and Cambridge store network has been relatively recent. The growth of these stores has been very limited, especially outside South Africa. Other transnational chains such as Carrefour and Metro have not entered Southern Africa, but are present in East and North Africa respectively. In Southern Africa, transnational chains such as Walmart (US) and Spar International (Netherlands) are present but have not grown as rapidly as South African chains and Botswana-owned Choppies Enterprises (subsequently exited). In Zambia and Zimbabwe, some Spar franchises are owned by Spar International, although Spar South Africa is increasing its shareholding in these

The “supermarket revolution” in the South  129

Shoprite Pick n Pay SPAR Woolworths Walmart/Massmart Fruit and Veg City Choppies

Table 7.2  Formats and offerings of the main supermarket chains in South Africa

Formats: Supermarket Hypermarket Low-to-middle income segment supermarket Wholesalers, cash-and-carrys, hybrids In store delicatessens Convenience store at fuel forecourts

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✓

✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗

Offerings (in addition to groceries and/or as separate outlets): Financial and other services Fast food outlets Liquor outlets Furniture Clothing Pharmacy Other (electronics, DIY)

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗

✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗

✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗

✓ ✗ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✓

✗ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗

✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗

Source: Websites and annual reports. Supermarkets and hypermarkets include food, general merchandise, and personal care.

countries. Walmart’s limited growth in Southern Africa indicates that it has yet to gain traction in the region, despite having supply chains that reach more than 100,000 suppliers around the world. This raises questions about why a large multinational with significant ownership advantages, such as access to global supply networks and capital, has seen limited growth in Southern Africa, despite the African continent having been identified as a strong growth opportunity by the chain. The ownership advantages that Walmart has, which could translate into lower prices for consumers, are apparently not sufficient to grow market share in host countries. What was seen instead is the “regionalization” of South African chains, and more recently, Choppies, in the SADC region (Barrientos et. al., 2016; Crush et al., 2017), and Kenyan chains in East Africa. The saturation of supermarkets in the South African market provides motives for the internationalization of South African chains. The spread of supermarkets across borders has mainly been driven by a handful of large South African grocery retail chains (Table 7.3): Shoprite Holdings, Pick n Pay Stores, the Spar Group South Africa,

130  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Woolworths Holdings, and Fruit & Veg City (Food Lover’s Market). The fact that regional supermarket chains have been more successful in Southern Africa than transnational retail chains suggests that there may be specific location advantages that have allowed local supermarket chains to grow more rapidly in the region. One locational advantage is the proximity to strong supplier networks in South Africa, built over many years by the South African chains, around which sophisticated distribution systems and supply networks have been developed. The South African chains import significantly from their suppliers in South Africa for their store networks in the region, as seen in regional trade flows (Trademap, 2019). The locational advantages of regional chains in terms of access to welltrusted suppliers from their home country and with whom they have strong relationships are therefore critical. Shorter supply chains and lead times may be more beneficial than having numerous deep-sea suppliers. Being relatively new in the grocery retail space, Walmart’s Game has yet to build these relationships in the region. Location advantages therefore play a significant role in understanding the internationalization patterns of grocery retailers in Southern Africa. This is even more relevant for fresh produce supply chains, given the need for shorter cold chains. The benefits that regional chains have over global multinationals in terms of proximity to supply networks was also seen in the entry and growth of Botswana’s Choppies. Other factors that have affected internationalization in Southern Africa include local policies and political economy dynamics. These have clearly affected the pace of internationalization in the region. For instance, local policies such as Zimbabwe’s indigenization requirement to have 50 per cent local ownership for FDI impacts how easily multinational retailers can enter and grow. South Africa’s Pick n Pay has had to enter through a joint venture with Zimbab­wean chain, TM Supermarkets. Similarly, the national protection of certain local food industries, such as cooking oil or poultry, and “soft” local content policies in some of the SADC countries, limit the ability to expand if there is a lack of local production capacity. Political economy dynamics, such as preferential treatment for certain chains (which has included import tariff and tax concessions) or lobbying by powerful interest groups for support for specific industries also has an impact on the pace of spread. While regional chains are growing faster than transnational chains in Southern Africa, South African chains have not fared well across the rest of the continent and beyond. Again, this may be due to greater distances from their supplier networks, but culture also appears to be significant. Principles of economic geography contribute to understanding these patterns of internationalization (Burt et al., 2002; Coe and Hess, 2005; Dawson and Mukoyama, 2006; Dawson, 2007). The adaptation for retailers is smaller if cultures are similar, as

131 Choppies – Botswana Melissa – Zambia (only national)

Ownership: Other African Choppies – Botswana Shoppers (Sefalana) – Botswana (only national)

Source: Author compilation from annual reports and interviews.

Note: Choppies has since closed down in these countries.

Choppies – Botswana

Saverite (Walmart) – US

Game – US

Shoprite Pick n Pay Food Lover’s Market Woolworths

Zambia

Spar International – Netherlands PoundStretcher – UK

Game and Cambridge/ Walmart – US

Shoprite Pick n Pay Food Lover’s Market Woolworths Spar Group

Ownership: South African Shoprite Pick n Pay Food Lover’s Market Woolworths Spar Group

Ownership: Global Game/Walmart – US

South Africa

Botswana

Choppies – Botswana OK Zimbabwe – Zimbabwe (only national) Food World – Zimbabwe (only national)

Spar International – Netherlands

TM/Pick n Pay – Zimbabwe/SA JV Food Lover’s Market

Zimbabwe

Table 7.3  Formal supermarket chains operating in selected Southern African countries and their ownership

132  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

in Southern Africa, or larger when trying to succeed in very different markets (Dawson, 2007; Wrigley and Currah, 2003). Shoprite is the largest chain in terms of store numbers and revenue in Southern Africa (Table 7.4), but it has not grown significantly beyond the region. As the first South African chain to internationalize in the 1990s, Shoprite has treated the Southern African region as a natural extension of its South African business, transferring lessons from South Africa into these markets. Its expansion strategy has largely been to duplicate the South African model through the acquisition of existing stores in the countries, although over time a mixed model of acquisitions and greenfield investments has been pursued. Duplicating the South African model was possible and more successful in countries where consumer preferences were similar to those in South Africa. By contrast, Shoprite has been relatively unsuccessful in East and West Africa, Egypt, and India, where consumer habits and cultures are different and there are greater distances from known and established supplier bases. The proportion of Shoprite’s grocery stores outside South Africa grew from around 11 per cent in 2001 to 17 per cent in 2017. The actual number of stores outside South Africa increased more than threefold between 2001 and 2017. The number of countries outside South Africa in which Shoprite operated more than doubled between 2000 and 2017. Shoprite’s non-RSA turnover as a proportion of total turnover more than tripled between 2000 and 2017. Listed on the Johannesburg, Namibian, and Lusaka (Zambia) stock exchanges, it is also the only South African chain to have multiple listings on the continent. Shoprite has had only one store outside Africa – in India – for a short period, which closed in 2010. While these metrics suggest strong internationalization, it has not met Shoprite’s own estimates of how significant the rest of Africa would be for its operations. In 2000, Shoprite noted its long-term aim to increase its operating income from other African countries to 50 per cent of group revenue (Shoprite, 2000). Although it is not clear what timeframe was envisaged by “long-term”, Table 7.4 shows that, by 2017, only 20 per cent of group revenue came from outside South Africa. The growth of the other retailers in Southern Africa and the rest of Africa – aside from Choppies Enterprises, which grew rapidly over a short period until 2017 but has now exited the market – has been far slower than Shoprite’s growth. The growth of the transnationals, as noted, has been even slower than that of the other South African retailers. 3.2 Impact on Competition While the spread of supermarkets outside South Africa has been slower than predicted, it has still impacted the competitive dynamics in markets, with significant implications for consumers and suppliers. In turn, the pace of

133

— 663 729 630 650 643 694 718 737 806 870 911 1073 1141 1206 1236 1284 1335

— 82 — 113 133 134 134 146 150 153 158 159 174 193 207 228 246 279

— 745 729 743 783 777 828 864 887 959 1028 1070 1247 1334 1413 1464 1530 1614

— 11% — 15% 17% 17% 16% 17% 17% 16% 15% 15% 14% 14% 15% 16% 16% 17%

17 286 001 18 030 885 19 850 589 22 404 975 24 517 841 27 354 510 30 156 155 34 642 975 41 756 411 51 197 924 52 121 519 57 213 793 64 584 215 70 925 545 76 881 000 84 945 000 94 167 000 101 734 000

1 144 562 1 565 844 2 259 208 2 566 358 2 653 803 2 973 966 3 355 132 4 306 870 5 895 137 8 120 635 7 002 912 7 316 698 9 174 147 11 729 237 14 779 000 16 781 000 22 246 000 24 840 000

Non-RSA RSA revenue revenue (ZAR ’000) (ZAR ’000) 18 430 563 19 596 729 22 109 797 24 971 333 27 171 644 30 328 476 33 511 287 38 949 845 47 651 548 59 318 559 59 124 431 64 530 491 73 758 362 82 654 782 91 660 000 101 726 000 116 413 000 126 574 000

 6%  8% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 11% 12% 14% 12% 11% 12% 14% 16% 16% 19% 20%

% Non-RSA Total revenue revenue of (ZAR ’000) total  6  9 — 13 16 16 16 16 16 16 15 15 16 16 14 14 14 14

No. of non-RSA countries

Source: Shoprite annual reports (2000−2017).

Note: Store formats include Shoprite, Checkers, Checkers Hyper, USave, OK Foods, OK Grocer, OK Mini Mark, OK Value, Megasave, Sentra, Friendly. Gaps in the table indicate where data was not easily discernible from annual reports.

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

RSA

Total store % Non-RSA Non-RSA nos. no. of stores

Table 7.4 Shoprite’s growth in and out of South Africa over time, number of stores in grocery retail only

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internationalization and supermarketization has been affected by competitive market dynamics. In South Africa and other countries such as Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia, the exertion of market power by large supermarket chains has concerned competition authorities. In South Africa, the Competition Commission (CCSA) recently undertook a Grocery Retail Market Inquiry (GRMI) into various concerns about market power (Competition Commission South Africa, 2015). Prior to the inquiry, complaints were lodged against large supermarket chains for engaging in strategic behaviour to maintain their first-mover advantage. This was mainly with respect to “locking in” lucrative store sites by entering into long-term exclusive leases with shopping mall developers. The CCSA included these and other concerns, such as buyer power of supermarkets and the displacement of independent retailers in townships, as part of the GRMI’s terms of reference and report. The use of exclusive leases in shopping malls is a widespread practice in South Africa. This prevents new entrants from locating in these retail spaces, limiting their ability to enter or expand. An outcome of incumbency advantages and path dependency, this conduct acts as a barrier to entry and expansion, and entrenches the position of the incumbents. The first movers who access mall space insulate themselves against competition in that space by entering into such leases as anchor tenants. This allows them to grow at the expense of rivals, making it easier to secure other lucrative retail spaces in the future and pay lower rentals. Competition concerns around this practice have been exposed by large supermarket chains and smaller independent retailers. Fruit & Veg City lodged a complaint with the CCSA about not being able to access mall space for this reason when it started growing in the early 2000s. More recently, complaints were lodged by Walmart’s Game on being refused the opportunity to expand into grocery retail offerings (from its previous model of only non-grocery offerings) in malls in which the incumbent anchor supermarket tenant had exclusive leases in place. Neither Fruit & Veg City nor Game were successful in their appeals to the competition authorities due to the way the Competition Act has been interpreted in the past, and the emphasis the competition authorities have placed on proving substantial effects on end consumers, often only through price effects. Complainants are often unable to show that their exclusion results in a substantial lessening of competition in terms of higher prices. Limiting the scope of effects on consumers in this way is a static and narrow approach and dismisses the importance of the process of effective competitive rivalry, as well as the potential for new chains to enter and grow to be even more effective competitors in the future. Non-price dimensions in which supermarkets compete, such as location, format, range, quality, convenience, ancillary offerings, a one-stopshopping experience, ambiance, and others, are not considered.

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Although economies of scale mean that large incumbents are likely to be able to offer lower prices than new entrants and independent or specialist retailers, this is only one dimension of the PQRS bundle. New entrants and independent retailers may be able to effectively compete on other dimensions (if not on price). The GRMI ambit is wider than the previous provisions of the Competition Act, allowing it to address conduct that has an adverse effect on competition if any feature, or combination of features, prevents, distorts, or restricts competition in that market. The CCSA has indeed tackled this long-standing practice in South Africa through its market inquiry provision and in 2019 released firm recommendations on the cessation of the practice. Relationships between South African property developers and supermarket chains extend throughout the Southern African region. It is often the same set of South African supermarkets and property developers that operate in the region, and similar concerns have emerged in other countries, affecting the pace of spread of chains in the region. 3.3 Impact on Suppliers Supermarket networks provide opportunities for the growth and development of suppliers, acting as catalysts to stimulate the industrialization of food processing and light manufacturing sectors in line with regional growth objectives. Supermarkets have substantially affected food supply chains in the region through their evolving procurement methods and requirements, and through their negotiation of trading terms in supply agreements and private standards. Even with alternative retail channels present, supermarket chains are an important route to market in the region, and play a gatekeeper role for suppliers of food and household consumable products in accessing wider national and regional markets. By exerting significant power and control over suppliers, large supermarket chains control production by setting and enforcing product and process parameters. By controlling trading terms in the contracts with suppliers and exerting buyer power, they affect supplier margins and their ability to participate in supply chains. Competition authorities conventionally use an industrial organization framework to assess issues of buyer power. This is limiting in terms of practical applicability and measurement in competition tests. They are typically reluctant to deal with cases of buyer power as it may lead to a reduction in prices for final consumers in the short term. A more dynamic, long-term perspective would appreciate that it harms the growth and development of suppliers, which in turn affects competition at the supplier level. The long-term effects of buyer power include suppliers exiting the market, which ultimately can lead to higher prices for consumers, especially when a few, often multinational, suppliers dominate.

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It also limits the dynamic benefits of competition such as innovation. A combination of GVC and industrial organization frameworks allows for a more complete assessment of core concepts of governance, rent extraction, linkages, and upgrading in value chains (Dallas et al., 2018; Gereffi and Fernandez-Stark, 2005, 2011), and the evaluation of the mechanisms and consequences of exercising buyer power (Clarke et al., 2002; Davis and Reilly, 2009; Dobson et al., 1998; Inderst and Valletti, 2011; OECD, 2015). Various studies have taken this hybrid approach to understanding the impact on suppliers. Interviews in Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe with supermarkets, suppliers, wholesalers, independent retailers, industry associations, competition authorities, and government departments highlighted the requirements that suppliers have to adhere to in order to successfully supply supermarkets in the region. Supermarket chains often lead in food and other household consumable value chains, and govern and shape requirements that suppliers need to adhere to. These “critical success factors” include investments in packaging and brand awareness; the ability to supply products at the lowest cost, at the required quality and consistency; and to supply the required volumes across all outlets. Centralized procurement and regional DCs mean that suppliers have to supply volumes designated for all stores, which is difficult for small suppliers and new entrants as they do not have sufficient scale to supply all outlets (Bosiu et al., 2017; das Nair and Chisoro, 2015, 2016, 2017; das Nair et al., 2017, 2018). In addition to these critical success factors for supply, each country has legal standards that suppliers need to adhere to, including food safety, health and safety, environmental, packaging, and labelling standards enforced through other regulatory bodies. Over and above legal requirements, supermarkets impose private standards (for instance, international accreditations, sustainability requirements, good manufacturing practices, minimum chemical and pesticide requirements, organic systems, barcoding, and packaging requirements). A lack of harmonized legal standards across the SADC region and different private standards make it difficult for suppliers to extend their sales to different chains and across the region. To meet these requirements, suppliers have had to upgrade their capabilities, including investing in process upgrading to reduce costs and increase efficiencies (such as upgrades in plant, machinery, and equipment; quality management systems; distribution and storage facilities; and packaging, labelling, and barcoding). There has also been product upgrading through movement into more sophisticated product lines (such as value-added food products), and intersectoral upgrading, with firms moving into new productive activities altogether (such as laterally branching into packaging). However, upgrading and developing capabilities does not automatically ensure access to supermarket shelves. The exertion of considerable buyer power by supermarkets can, and

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has, resulted in the exclusion of suppliers in the region, irrespective of investments made. The interviews revealed the various ways in which, through the unbalanced bargaining power of large supermarket chains, buyer power can be exerted through trading terms. In Southern Africa, listing fees, slotting allowances, advertising, and promotional charges, in addition to a range of other charges (such as basic rebates, swell and shrinkage allowances, settlement discounts, fridge space fees, category management fees, new store opening allowances, and distribution/warehousing allowances) may be exploitative and not in relation to costs incurred by the supermarket. Cumulatively, fees can add up to 10−15 per cent off the price of the product sold to supermarkets, placing considerable strain on supplier margins. Negotiations of these terms are often skewed towards supermarket chains, resulting in the margins of smaller suppliers being squeezed and their exclusion from supply chains. In the UK and Australia, regulation specifically protects suppliers against such potential abuses. Suppliers of private-label or house brand products to supermarket chains in the Southern African region also expressed concerns about buyer power. Private labels are becoming successful fast-sellers in the region as they compete with branded alternatives on price, value, and quality, particularly for costconscious customers. Every major supermarket chain has a wide and growing range of private-label or house brand products. The relationship between the supermarket chains and suppliers of these products represents more captive or hierarchical governance structures in which supermarkets completely control the production parameters and margins that suppliers can make. Once committed to producing house brands, this capacity is captive to the supermarket chain, so the suppliers’ outside options to sell are reduced. This increases the bargaining position of supermarkets, which allows them to extract greater surplus from suppliers (OECD, 2008). Buyer power can hinder upgrading efforts into higher-value products or GVCs. Small- and medium-sized suppliers are often excluded from supermarket value chains, and are limited to supplying alternative routes to market. While buyer power can lead to lower end prices, these may not necessarily be passed on to consumers. The long-term effects of buyer power can result in suppliers exiting the market, which ultimately could lead to higher prices for consumers. While larger, multinational suppliers may have countervailing power, small- and medium-sized suppliers are often forced to accept the terms imposed on them. The competition acts in South Africa and Kenya were strengthened in 2018 to more effectively address concerns about the abuse of buyer power.

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3.4 Impact on Intra-Regional Trade The significance of the spread of supermarket chains in the region on suppliers is also seen in the impact on intra-regional trade. South African chains have driven the trade of products sold on supermarket shelves, reflecting the upgrading of suppliers that are able to supply regionally. Under a GVC framework, evidence of product upgrading includes suppliers increasing values and volumes of local and export sales, and diversifying export markets. Through centralized distribution and advanced logistics used to serve store networks in the region, supermarkets act as conduits for increased trade. However, this trade is heavily skewed from South Africa to the region, given the large and established supplier base located there, and facilitated by SADC trade allowances. The skewed nature of trade from South Africa has raised concerns about the ability of local suppliers in host countries in the region to participate in supply chains and compete with South African suppliers for shelf space. Political economy tensions have arisen as a result and national governments have imposed local content requirements on supermarkets, for instance, in Namibia through its Retail Charter, and “soft” local content policies and other forms of trade protection in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.

4. CONCLUSION Literature on the supermarket revolution is vast and multi-faceted. This chapter has focused on the implications of the spread of supermarkets on concentration levels and market power; on regional trade; and the impact on suppliers of buyer power, changing procurement systems, and escalating standards. It further highlights the differences between the factors that affect the internationalization of supermarkets and manufacturing firms, providing insights on how the unique characteristics of supermarkets impact their spread globally. A case study of the supermarket revolution in Southern Africa illustrates these themes and shows that supermarketization in South Africa, with the most advanced retail sector in the region, reached maturity relatively early in the 2000s. Independent retailers in South Africa remain resilient through alternative business models, mainly through buying-group led independent retailers. The extent of internationalization across countries in Southern Africa has, however, been slower than expected. The experience has been the regionalization of a few South African supermarket chains, with limited infiltration and growth of large transnational chains. The significance of location to supplier bases and national policies affecting internationalization were highlighted. The case study also shows that the concentrated nature of many formal grocery retail markets has raised concerns about buyer power. This has important

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implications for consumers, suppliers, and the competitive landscape. The competition cases and inquiries before competition authorities in Southern and East Africa reflect concerns around exclusionary and exploitative practices of supermarket chains. There have been many complaints about supermarket chains using their positions of power to engage in strategies to exclude rivals in mall spaces in South Africa. Competition authorities, and national and local governments, can play important roles in actively fostering a competitive environment for a diversity of retail models. With their evolving procurement practices and requirements, supermarkets have a significant impact on the growth and development of suppliers of food and household consumable products. They can be a strong catalyst to stimulate these industries and increase intra-regional trade. However, onerous conditions imposed on suppliers, in addition to the exertion of buyer power, can exclude small- and medium-sized suppliers from participating and upgrading within value chains. The skewed balance of power between supermarkets and suppliers is illustrated by the numerous fees not related to underlying costs charged to suppliers, extracting surpluses from them. The result is that only a few large multinational suppliers are able to meet these requirements, thus dominating the production level of food and household consumables value chains. These types of concerns have triggered regulatory responses in countries globally. Intervention has typically taken the form of retail sector inquiries that have resulted in enforcement of codes of conduct that govern ­supermarket– supplier relationships, supplier development programmes to build the capabilities of suppliers, or a combination of both. The international experience has shown that voluntary or mandatory codes of conduct between suppliers and supermarkets may be a useful way to control the exertion of buyer power. This has been identified as a practical and effective approach in developed countries to level the playing field and reduce information asymmetries between suppliers and supermarkets (for instance, the Groceries Supply Code of Practice in the UK, and the voluntary Food and Grocery Code of Conduct in Australia). These codes serve to reduce the cost of supplying supermarkets, and promote transparency in procurement procedures and trading terms. They regulate the conduct of supermarkets towards suppliers by setting minimum standards and obligations for supermarkets in terms of supply agreements and various fees included in the trading terms. In the Southern African region, Namibia’s Retail Sector Charter of 2016 is an example of formalized retail sector intervention that sets out certain voluntary conditions that supermarkets agree to adhere to in dealings with suppliers, and committing to supplier development. Such a code could be developed and extended to a “regional code of conduct” as it is largely the same supermarket chains that operate in Southern Africa. Given that supermarkets play a big role in the development trajectory of suppliers by determining the requirements of supply, they are well-placed to

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support supplier development programmes, fostering industrialization. Supermarkets are the key interface between suppliers and customers, and can provide valuable guidance on what customers want. However, successful supplier development programmes require long-term, commercially oriented commitments by supermarket chains, in partnership with national governments or regional bodies. Even with alternative routes to market that are showing some resilience in the face of the supermarket revolution, supermarkets are still significant for customers in urban, peri-urban, and rural locations in Southern Africa. Competition in the grocery retail space is therefore important for consumers to access a wide variety of affordable and good quality food products, and is important for food security. Actively fostering competitive environments between and within grocery retail formats and opening up markets for a diversity of retail models benefits both consumers and suppliers and reduces the risk of anticompetitive behaviour.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter draws from research conducted for UNU-WIDER, which commissioned the research for the project Regional Growth and Development in Southern Africa.

REFERENCES Abrahams, C. (2009), ‘Transforming the region: supermarkets and the local food economy’, African Affairs, 109(434), 115–34. Altenburg, T., E. Kulke, A. Hampel-Milagrosa, L. Peterskovsky and C. Reeg (2016), ‘Making retail modernisation in developing countries inclusive: a development policy perspective’, Discussion Paper 2/2016, German Development Institute. Asfaw, A. (2008), ‘Does supermarket purchase affect the dietary practices of households?: some empirical evidence from Guatemala’, Development Policy Review, 26(2), 227–43. Barrientos, S. and M. Visser (2012), ‘South African horticulture value chains: opportunities and challenges for economic and social upgrading’, Capturing the Gains Working Paper No. 12, University of Manchester. Barrientos, S., P. Knorringa, B. Evers, M. Visser and M. Opondo (2016), ‘Shifting regional dynamics of global value chains: implications for economic and social upgrading in African horticulture’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(7), 1266–83. Bartels, F., P. Buckley and G. Mariano (2009), ‘Multinational enterprises’ foreign direct investment location decisions within the global factory’, Working Paper 04/2009, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Basker, E. and M. Noel (2013), ‘Competition challenges in the supermarket sector with an application to Latin American markets’, Report for the World Bank and the Regional Competition Centre for Latin America.

The “supermarket revolution” in the South  141 Berdegué, J. and T. Reardon (2016), ‘Impacts of the supermarket revolution and the policy and strategic responses’, in E. Thomas, J. Jiggins and C. Farnworth (eds), Creating Food Futures: Trade, Ethics and the Environment, New York, NY, US: Routledge, pp. 149–62. Betancourt, R. (2006), The Economics of Retailing and Distribution, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, US: Edward Elgar Publishing. Betancourt, R. and M. Malanoski (1999), ‘An estimable model of supermarket behaviour: prices, distribution services and some effects of competition’, Empirica, 26(1), 55–73. Boselie, D., S. Henson and D. Weatherspoon (2003), ‘Supermarket procurement practices in developing countries: redefining the roles of the public and private sectors’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 85(5), 1155–61. Bosiu, T., F. Chinanga, R. das Nair and P. Mondliwa (2017), ‘Growth and development in the cosmetics, soaps and detergents regional value chains: South Africa and Zambia’, Working Paper 2017/19, Centre for Competition, Regulation, and Economic Development (CCRED). Brown, O. and C. Sander (2007), ‘Global supply chains and smallholder farmers: supermarket buying power’, Report for the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Burt, S., K. Mellahi, T. Jackson and L. Sparks (2002), ‘Retail internationalization and retail failure: issues for the case of Marks and Spencer’, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 12(2), 191–219. Cattaneo, O. (2013), ‘Aid for trade and value chains in agrifood’, Report for World Trade Organization (WTO) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Clarke, R., S. Davies, P. Dobson and M. Waterson (2002), Buyer Power and Competition in European Food Retailing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, US: Edward Elgar Publishing. Coe, N. and M. Hess (2005), ‘The internationalization of retailing: implications for supply network restructuring in East Asia and Eastern Europe’, Journal of Economic Geography, 5(4), 449–73. Coe, N. and N. Wrigley (2018), ‘Towards new economic geographies of retail globalization’, in G. Clark, M. Feldman, M. Gertler and D. Wojcik (eds), The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 427–47. Competition Commission South Africa (2015), ‘Retail market inquiry’ at www.compcom.co.za/ retail-market-inquiry/. Crush, J. and B. Frayne (2011), ‘Supermarket expansion and the informal food economy in Southern African cities: implications for urban food security’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37(4), 781–807. Crush, J. and M. Caesar (2016), ‘Food access and insecurity in a supermarket city’, in J. Crush and J. Battersby (eds), Rapid Urbanisation, Urban Food Deserts and Food Security in Africa, New York, NY, US: Springer, pp. 47–58. Crush, J., N. Nickanor, L. Kazembe and J. Wagner (2017), ‘The supermarket revolution and food security in Namibia’, Urban Food Security Series No. 26, AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network) and HCP (Hungry Cities Partnership), Cape Town, SA and Waterloo, Canada. Dakora, E. (2012), ‘Exploring the fourth wave of supermarket evolution: concepts of value and complexity in Africa’, International Journal of Managing Value and Supply Chains, 3(3), 25–37. Dallas, M., S. Ponte and T. Sturgeon (2018), ‘A typology of power in global value chains’, Working Paper No. 92 for Copenhagen Business School, Business and Politics. das Nair, R. (2019), ‘The spread and internationalisation of South African retail chains and the implications of market power’, The International Review of Applied Economics, 33(1), 30–50. das Nair, R. and S. Chisoro (2015), ‘The expansion of regional supermarket chains: changing models of retailing and the implications for local supplier capabilities in South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe’, UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2015/114, Helsinki, Finland. das Nair, R. and S. Chisoro (2016), ‘The expansion of regional supermarket chains and implications for local suppliers: A comparison of findings from South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe’, UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2016/169, Helsinki, Finland. das Nair, R. and S. Chisoro (2017), ‘The expansion of regional supermarket chains: implications on suppliers in Botswana and South Africa’, UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2017/26, Helsinki, Finland. das Nair, R., M. Nkhonjera and F. Ziba (2017), ‘Growth and development in the sugar to confectionery value chain’, CCRED Working Paper 2017/16.

142  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South das Nair, R., S. Chisoro and F. Ziba (2018), ‘Supermarkets’ procurement strategies and implications for local suppliers in South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe’, Development Southern Africa, 35(3), 334–50. Davis, P. and A. Reilly (2009), ‘The UK Competition Commission’s groceries market investigation: market power, market outcomes and remedies’, presented at the 27th International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Beijing, 16–22 August. Dawson, J. (1994), ’Internationalization of retailing operations’, Journal of Marketing Management, 10(4), 267–82. Dawson, J. (2007), ‘Scoping and conceptualising retailer internationalisation’, Journal of Economic Geography, 7(4), 373–97. Dawson, J. and J. Henley (1999), ‘Internationalisation of hypermarket retailing in Poland: West European investment and its implications’, Journal of East–West Business, 5(4), 37–52. Dawson, J. and M. Mukoyama (2006), ‘Retail internationalisation as a process’, in J. Dawson, R. Larke and M. Mukoyama (eds), Strategic Issues in International Retailing, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 31–50. Dobson, P. (2015), ‘Structural issues in the groceries sector: merger and regulatory issues’, Background Paper by the OECD Secretariat for Session 1, Latin American Competition Forum, Jamaica, 23–24 September. Dobson, P., M. Waterson and A. Chu (1998), ‘The welfare consequences of the exercise of buyer power’, Research Paper No. 16, Office of Fair Trading, London, UK. Ellickson, P. (2004), ‘Supermarkets as a natural oligopoly’, accessed June 2016 at www.­ goodfoodworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SupermarketsAsNO.pdf. Euromonitor International (2018), Retailing in South Africa and Database, Country Report for Euromonitor International. European Commission (2014), The Economic Impact of Modern Retail on Choice and Innovation in the EU Food Sector, Final Report by Ernst and Young, Cambridge Econometrics Ltd., Arcadia International. Gereffi, G. and K. Fernandez-Stark (2011), Global Value Chain Analysis: A Primer (Second Edition, 2016), North Carolina, US: Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness (CGGC), Duke University. Gereffi, G., J. Humphrey and T. Sturgeon (2005), ‘The governance of global value chains’, Review of International Political Economy, 12(1), 78–104. Gibbon, P. and S. Ponte (2005), Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy, Philadelphia, US: Temple University Press. Huang, C., K. Tsai and Y. Chen (2015), ‘How do wet markets still survive in Taiwan?’, British Food Journal, 117(1), 234–56. Humphrey, J. (2007), ‘The supermarket revolution in developing countries: tidal wave or tough competitive struggle?’, Journal of Economic Geography, 7(4), 433–50. Humphrey, J. and H. Schmitz (2002), ‘How does insertion in global value chains affect upgrading in industrial clusters?’, Regional Studies, 36(9), 1017–27. Ietto-Gillies, G. (1998), ‘Different conceptual frameworks for the assessment of the degree of internationalisation: an empirical analysis of various indices for the top 100 transnational corporations’, Transnational Corporations, 7(1), 17–39. Inderst, R. and T.M. Valletti (2011), ‘Buyer power and the waterbed effect’, The Journal of Industrial Economics, 59(1), 1–20. Jenkins, R. (2013), Transnational Corporations and Uneven Development (RLE International Business): The Internationalization of Capital and the Third World, Volume 21, London, UK and New York, NY, US: Routledge. Jenny, F. (2015), ‘International Report’, in P. Kobel, P. Këllezi and B. Kilpatrick (eds), Antitrust in the Groceries Sector & Liability Issues in Relation to Corporate Social Responsibility, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 3–40. Jonsson, A. and U. Elg (2006), ‘Knowledge and knowledge sharing in retail internationalization: IKEA’s entry into Russia’, The International Review of Retail Distribution and Consumer Research, 16(2), 239–56. Kobel, P., P. Këllezi and B. Kilpatrick (eds) (2015), Antitrust in the Groceries Sector & Liability Issues in Relation to Corporate Social Responsibility, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

The “supermarket revolution” in the South  143 Narula, R. and J. Dunning (2000), ‘Industrial development, globalisation and multinational enterprises: new realities for developing countries’, Oxford Development Studies, 28(2), 141–67. Nickanor, N., L. Kazembe, J. Crush and J. Wagner (2017), ‘The supermarket revolution and food security in Namibia’, Urban Food Security Series No. 26, AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network), Cape Town, SA. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2008), Monopsony and buyer power, DAF/COMP (2008) 38. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2013), Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs Competition Committee: Competition Issues in the Food Chain Industry, DAF/COMP (2014) 16. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2015), Session III − Competition Issues in the Groceries Sector: Focus on Conduct, Background paper by the OECD Secretariat, Latin American Competition Forum, Montego Bay, Jamaica. DAF/COMP/LACF (2015) 18, 23–24 September. Peyton, S., W. Moseley and J. Battersby (2015), ‘Implications of supermarket expansion on urban food security in Cape Town, South Africa’, African Geographical Review, 34(1), 36–54. Reardon, T. and J. Berdegué (2002), ‘The rapid rise of supermarkets in Latin America: challenges and opportunities for development’, Development Policy Review, 20(4), 371–88. Reardon, T. and A. Gulati (2008), ‘The rise of supermarkets and their development implications, international experience relevant for India’, IFPRI Discussion Paper 00752, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Michigan State University. Reardon, T. and R. Hopkins (2006), ‘The supermarket revolution in developing countries: policies to address emerging tensions among supermarkets, suppliers, and traditional retailers’, European Journal of Development Research, 18(4), 522–45. Reardon, T. and C.P. Timmer (2007), ‘Transformation of markets for agricultural output in developing countries since 1950: How has thinking changed?’, Handbook of Agricultural Economics, 3, 2807–55. Reardon, T., P. Timmer and J. Berdegué (2004), ‘The rapid rise of supermarkets in developing countries: induced organizational, institutional, and technological change in agrifood systems’, e-Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics, 1(2), 168–83. Reardon, T., P. Timmer and J. Berdegué (2005), ‘Supermarketization of the emerging markets of the Pacific Rim: development and trade implications’, Journal of Food Distribution Research, 36(1), 3–12. Reardon, T., S. Henson and J. Berdegué (2007), ‘“Proactive fast-tracking” diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: implications for market institutions and trade’, Journal of Economic Geography, 7(4), 399–431. Shoprite (2000), ‘Joint Report of Chairman and Managing Director’ accessed December 2019 at www.shopriteholdings.co.za/content/dam/MediaPortal/documents/shoprite-holdings/­ integrated-report/2000/AR2000_Shoprite.pdf. Stopford, J. and J. Dunning (1983), Multinationals: Company Performance and Global Trends, London, UK: Macmillan Publishing. Sullivan, D. (1994), ‘Measuring the degree of internationalization of a firm’, Journal of International Business Studies, 25(2), 325–42. TradeMap (2019), Data retrieved from www.trademap.org/Index.aspx, accessed January 2019. Traill, B. (2006), ‘The rapid rise of supermarkets’, Development Policy Review, 24(2), 163–74. Tschirley, D. (2010), ‘Opportunities and constraints to increased fresh produce trade in East and Southern Africa’, Paper prepared for 4th Video Conference under AAACP-funded series of high value agriculture seminars, 14 September. Tschirley, D., T. Reardon, M. Dolislager and J. Snyder (2015), ‘The rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa: implications for food system transformation’, Journal of International Development, 27(5), 628–46. Weatherspoon, D. and T. Reardon (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa: implications for agrifood systems and the rural poor’, Development Policy Review, 21(2003), 333–55. Wrigley, N. and A. Currah (2003), ‘The stresses of retail internationalization: lessons for Royal Ahold’s experience in Latin America’, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 13(3), 221–43.

144  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Wrigley, N. and A. Currah (2004), ‘Networks of organizational learning and adaptation in retail TNCs’, Global Networks, 4(1), 1–23. Wrigley, N. and M. Lowe (2010), ‘The globalization of trade in retail services’, Report commissioned by the OECD Trade Policy Linkages and Services Division for the OECD Experts Meeting on Distribution Services, Paris, 17 November.

8.

Urbanization and the quiet revolution in the midstream of agrifood value chains Thomas Reardon

1. INTRODUCTION Academic debates on changing food markets in developing countries have tended to focus on three main themes over the past several decades. The first is the growth of exports and imports with trade liberalization and globalization (for example, Anderson et al., 1997), and sourcing by US and European supermarkets from developing countries (Dolan and Humphrey, 2000). The second theme is the transformation of upstream in the food system, in farming intensification, commercialization and diversification (Pingali and Rosegrant, 1995), and the growth of input markets for water (Rosegrant et al., 1995), land (Deininger and Feder, 2001) and improved seeds (for example, Pray and Naseem, 2007). The third theme is transformation downstream in the domestic food system, especially the supermarket revolution (Reardon et al., 2003; Traill, 2006), dietary diversification and the shift towards highly processed foods with attendant health challenges (Pingali, 2006; Popkin, 2014). In comparison, far less attention has been paid – in research and more noticeably in policy debates – to the rapid transformation of the midstream segments of agrifood value chains, by which is meant processing, storage, wholesaling and logistics. The term “value chain” is preferred to “supply chain”; the former is associated with quality differentiation and value added and a consumer perspective, and the latter, more from the supplier perspective with a focus on efficiency and logistics and coordination aspects of moving products from farm to fork. However, as Feller et al. (2006) note, there should be an integration of these terms and concepts as food systems need to and do (with varying performance levels) deliver both value and efficiency. The segments of the value chain are increasingly important period. For example, the share of the midstream segments in total margins in rice and potato food value chains to the capital cities of Bangladesh, China and India averages 32 per cent for rice and 42 per cent for potatoes (Reardon et al., 2012). Those pieces of the food system are too important to stay hidden from the debate. Moreover, there is emerging evidence of rapid change in the midstream’s structure and conduct/behaviour; illustrated in this chapter mainly for developing Asia (with comparative mention of similar trends in Latin America and, in 145

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incipience, in Africa). This change is driven mainly by private-sector investment by both large and small enterprises, encouraged by transformation in upstream and downstream in the food system, and facilitated by policy reforms. In an interesting parallel, a similar phenomenon was observed in the mid-1990s in the United States by Schertz and Daft (1994) in their book about the “quiet revolution” in food and agricultural markets. They noted how transformation of the midstream segments had not only occurred rapidly through the 1970s and 1980s, but had also remained hidden to policy debate that in the US had been focused upstream on the farm and input sectors. This chapter focuses on the transformation of the midstream of food value chains in developing countries. It examines domestic food system transformation rather than international food value chains involving developing countries, because domestic food production constitutes roughly 90–95 per cent of the food economy of the region, and international trade in food is only about 5–10 per cent. Asian evidence of midstream transformation is used, simply because the midstream transformation started earlier and has gone furthest in Asia and Latin America, with Africa just starting on what appears to be a similar road of food system transformation (Reardon et al., 2013). Moreover, between Asia and Latin America, there has been more recent empirical survey work on the midstream transformation in Asia. The chapter is organized into three parts. The first sets the stage by discussing the conditioners of the transformation. The second focuses on the first of two broad axes of the transformation, namely the structural transformation of the midstream, which is itself integrated into change in the overall structure of the food system (including geographic lengthening combined with dis-­ intermediation in food value chains). The final part focuses on the second of the broad axes of transformation, that of conduct/behaviour of the midstream segment, including firms’ choice of technologies, institutions (such as standards and contracts), and organization (such as vertical and horizontal integration and coordination). Two caveats are relevant here. First, it is beyond the scope of the chapter to assess how these transformations affect consumers and farmers and other welfare and performance aspects; those are important topics for further research. Second, the chapter is mainly qualitative and illustrative, with the use of as much empirical data as are available for the patterns; but developing countries in general mainly track crop output and exports but have much less data and detail on the other segments of the value chain. Data sources on part of the midstream, in particular processing, such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, do not offer sufficient disaggregation to track the midstream segments in detail. So, key indicators of change and case information had to be relied on.

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2. BROAD DETERMINANTS OF TRANSFORMATION OF THE MIDSTREAM OF THE VALUE CHAINS Reardon and Timmer (2014) develop a framework to describe the transformation of food systems in terms of five simultaneous and inter-linked spatio-­ economic transformations in Asia: urbanization; dietary change; transformation of the midstream and downstream components of the agrifood system; technological and commercial transformation of the farm segment; and transformation of the upstream components of the agrifood system with accompanying rural-factor market (labour, credit and land) transformation. They note that urbanization and dietary change are the demand-side forces pulling the whole set of transformations; factor market and farm technology change are the upstream supply-side forces feeding the rest of the changes; and the agrifood system spans all the segments and intermediates or links supply and demand. Because this chapter focuses on the midstream transformation nestled among and conditioned by the upstream and downstream transformations, the latter two are briefly discussed here. For succinctness and because the downstream forces are more important than upstream changes in affecting the midstream segments, this starts with a review of recent findings on urbanization and dietary change and does not touch on the upstream changes already mentioned in the introduction. Several “policy meta conditioners” of all five transformations are outlined, in particular, public-sector investments in hard and soft infrastructure, policy interventions including direct public-sector intervention in the midstream and, after intervention, liberalization and privatization of the midstream. These sets of conditioners are considered in turn. 2.1 Urbanization Rapid urbanization has emerged relatively recently in much of Asia. By 2010, the urban population share reached 32 per cent in south Asia, 44 per cent in south-east Asia, and 54 per cent in east Asia. But population shares alone underestimate the importance of urbanization for the food economy: urban consumers have lower shares of food in total household expenditure compared with the rural population, but their incomes are sufficiently higher that their per capita food expenditure is higher. India exemplifies this: Ablett et al. (2007) note that by 2006, while only 29 per cent of India’s population was in cities, urban consumers accounted for 43 per cent of all market expenditures on food consumption, while in more urbanized countries of east and south-east Asia, urban consumers are responsible for roughly two-thirds to even three-quarters of all food expenditures. For example, 74 per cent of fruit in Indonesia is consumed in cities (Reardon and Timmer, 2014; Reardon et al., 2014a).

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Urbanization conditions the rural non-farm economy and thus, in turn, the rural part of midstream activities. On the one hand, there appears to be more rapid growth of the rural non-farm economy in the market catchment areas of mega and intermediate cities (see, for example, Deichmann et al. (2009) for Bangladesh, and Fafchamps and Shilpi (2003) for Nepal). This “radiation” is magnified as a positive function of rural infrastructure. The correlate is that in more hinterland areas the process is occurring less quickly. On the other hand, much rural non-farm activity is directly or indirectly linked to the midstream segments, such as transport and wholesale of agrifood products (Haggblade et al., 2007). But the radiating effects of urbanization can also cause competition for food-system-related rural non-farm employment. Reardon et al. (2007b) note that this competition can be especially in the midstream segments, as the intermediate cities are directly (themselves) and indirectly (as conduits for products from mega cities) a channel for urban manufactured food products and services into rural areas, pitting urban firms with economies of scale against small traditional food firms in the informal urban and rural areas. Moreover, recent research such as that of Reardon et al. (2012) in Asia tends to show that areas nearer cities experience more rapid transformation of food value chains, including the development of the midstream. A city’s food market catchment area can be national or further, but it appears that in a certain radius the city’s demand pull is strongly felt and the profits from the urban market induce substantial local investment by midstream firms. 2.2 Diet Transformation Diets have been rapidly changing in Asia in ways that are important for the development of the midstream segments. Diets have been changing and urbanization proceeding in a similar way, just with a lag, in Africa (see Tschirley et al. (2015) for eastern and southern Africa and Hollinger and Staatz (2014) for West Africa). The first change in diets, as incomes have risen, has been a shift in the food expenditure shares, with a decline in the share of rice (Timmer and Dawe, 2010) and an increase in the shares of meat/fish, dairy, horticulture products and edible oils, and an increase in corn and soya use for feeding animals. This is consistent with “Bennett’s Law”, which states that as income increases, the proportion of the budget spent on starchy-staples decreases (Bennett, 1954). In India, for example, by 2010 the total value of dairy consumption was greater than that of grains (Kumar et al., 2013). This has happened earlier and faster in urban areas, inducing rapid development of wholesale and logistics from rural to urban areas for products intensive in handling.

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A second change in diets is that rural consumption has rapidly commercialized (i.e. the share of purchased food in total food consumed has risen). This bolsters demand for marketing and logistic services, again part of the midstream. Mellor (1976) noted that many rural households benefitted from a reduction in food prices due to the Green Revolution in India because so many were net buyers. This left unanswered how important purchases are in the food budget, and thus how important rural marketing is from the demand side. New evidence shows that it is very important. Reardon et al. (2014a), based on analysis of Living Standards Measurement Study data in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam, show that rural households on average buy a large share of their diet. Purchased food in total food consumed was found to be about 80 per cent in rural Bangladesh and Indonesia, 72 per cent in rural Vietnam and 58 per cent in Nepal. The trend counterpart to an increase in purchased food by rural households is the rise in the generation of cash by rural households from rural non-farm employment as noted above, and from commercialization of farming (Pingali and Rosegrant, 1995). The latter has proceeded very far; Reardon et al. (2014b) found in surveys of rice farmers in Bangladesh, China, India and Vietnam that the marketed surplus rate is about 85 per cent on average. A third change in diets is that, with the rise of incomes and the rising opportunity cost of women’s time with urbanization, there has been a rapid penetration of processed foods (such as wheat noodles, see Timmer (2015)), as well as prepared foods sold in restaurants. This has occurred first and most forcefully in urban areas, but with a lag and only somewhat less in rural areas. This is a major fillip for the supply-side development of processing and marketing as part of the midstream. For example, Reardon et al. (2014a) find that even in rural areas processed food has diffused, with 59 per cent of total rural food expenditure in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam accounted for by processed food, of which 69 per cent is “low processed” and 31 per cent “high processed”. The overall processing share rises with development level and with the degree of urbanization: the simple average over the four countries for urban areas was 73 per cent of total food expenditures. Morisset and Kumar (2008) had a similar finding for India. 2.3 Infrastructure Investment Government investment in hard and soft rural infrastructure has helped to increase the length and volume and reduce the seasonality of food value chains. In turn, this has encouraged urban dietary change and magnified impacts on rural areas. “Distance” to urban areas is not just a physical distance but an economic distance in the sense that road infrastructure, toll highways and train and bus routes condition the transport cost of a given distance. In most countries in the region there have been large expenditures by governments on transport

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and electricity infrastructure in the past several decades. In China, for example, there was massive rural road investments in the 1980s and 1990s (Fan and Chan-Kang, 2005). Wholesale market infrastructure is another important public-sector investment. For example, China’s wholesale market volume increased 11,000 per cent from 1990 to 2000 (Huang et al., 2007; Ahmadi-Esfahani and Locke, 1998) and India’s regulated wholesale markets went from 450 in 1948 to 5500 in 2008 (Reardon et al., 2012). The latter has been reinforced by the establishment of the “soft infrastructure” of commercial regulations and public standards. There have also been many modest investments from the small- to mediumscale private sector – by truckers, warehouse owners, millers, cold storage operators, wholesale traders and rural brokers. These have been mainly aimed at accessing the urban market; even in Vietnam, a country where rice exports are substantial, most of the investments and transformation are occurring in the domestic rice value chain, not just the minor part of the rice sector that is traded. 2.4 Government Policy: First Intervention Then Liberalization There have been direct and indirect government market interventions in the agrifood system, including in the midstream sector. A first round included public and large private-sector investments before the 1950s from colonial enterprises, especially in south-east Asia (for the export-oriented agrifood industrial enclaves and plantations), and in another wave in the 1950s to 1970s by national governments. Upstream, these interventions included government input and credit parastatals; at the midstream, the provision of public wholesale markets (first for grains and then for wet goods such as fish, meat and fruits/vegetables), distribution agencies and processing parastatals; and downstream, export marketing boards and some public-sector retail facilities such as the state grain stores in India and China. A second round of food system transformation occurred following the withdrawal by most governments in the region from direct intervention. While the privatization of agricultural parastatals and trade liberalization have received the most public attention (see Rashid et al., 2008), an equally important part of this round was the opening up of the sector to FDI, including substantial flows into the midstream segment. Asia has thus seen cross-border investments from large global firms such as Cargill, and regional firms such as Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand, the Philippines’ San Miguel and China’s Shuanghui Group (which in 2013 bought what was the world’s largest pork processor, the USbased Smithfield Foods), which have paved the way for a surge in new investments as well as merger and acquisition activity by large domestic firms and eventually SMEs.

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3. TRANSFORMATION IN THE MIDSTREAM In this section we explore the dynamics of the transformation from traditional to modern of the midstream agrifood sector in developing Asia by examining change in the structure and conduct of the overall food system and of the midstream segment in particular. A qualification is in order before we lay out the axes of transformation. The transformation itself has exhibited a substantial degree of variation in speed and form over space and products, depending in part on countries’ overall levels of development. The transformation has taken place unevenly over countries in the Asian region (as in other developing regions). In the earlier phase, from the 1950s to the 1980s, this unevenness was less acute in the first round (1950s–1980s) when the primary drivers were public-sector direct action (such as the erection of parastatals). By contrast, since the 1980s when the key drivers were urbanization and liberalization, experiences across countries were less evenly spread. The process of the structural transformation of midstream value chains roughly reflects the order/ranking of countries in terms of urbanization, industrialization, levels of income per capita and liberalization of policy. Thus, the process started in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, followed by the early-­ liberalizing countries of south-east Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. These countries were followed by the transition-cum-late-­ liberalizing countries of China and Vietnam, and finally India and the smaller poorer countries of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. There is also unevenness in the transformation within countries, particularly between rural and urban sectors. But, as noted above, within rural areas there is a sharp difference in the progress of the transformation processes in dynamic/ near-city zones compared with remote, hinterland areas. The exception is development of first-stage processing enclaves in the hinterland areas (such as for tea, rubber, oil palm and cassava processing in large plantations in frontier areas of Cambodia, Lao and Myanmar; see Byerlee, 2014). Moreover, there are many instances of a migration of the transformation into the hinterland areas as the dynamic urban areas “climb the value ladder” and the production of cheap food products, rural processing and wholesale are pushed further out to areas with cheaper land. The transformation of both the retail and the midstream segments occurs in general at different rates over product categories. The first wave was in grains and traditional export crops with transformation driven by government-led reforms – in plantation cropping and processing, in tea, rubber and oil palm. Next came processed foods in general, and grains, edible oils and condiments such as soy sauce in particular – products that could be shipped and stored at low cost – followed by the feedstock sector linked to the booming demand for livestock,

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fish and, eventually, milk. Next were semi-processed perishables such as meat, fish and dairy products, and, finally, fresh fruits and vegetables. The economic logic of the sequence is a combination of perishability (and thus the challenges this brings to value chains) and the emergence and growth of substantial demand in urban areas for these products in direct or derived demand. Although the above discussion emphasizes the sheer heterogeneity of the transformation, there is nonetheless a series of clear patterns of change in developing Asia (mirrored in other developing regions) in the structure and conduct of food value chains in general and the midstream in particular. 3.1 Structure Change: Spatial Elongation and De-Seasonalization of Value Chains It was noted above how urbanization combined with rural infrastructure improvement (and low dependence on imports) make it that food value chains need to lengthen within a country or sub-region to supply the growing large cities and the rapidly emerging intermediate cities. This means that the logistics/ transport and rural and urban wholesale sub-segments expand in parallel with the spatial lengthening of the value chain. The China rice sector is illustrative: the share of the midstream in the value chain of rice to Hangzhou in southern China, mainly from southern and middle regions, is about 25 per cent of total margins (Wang et al., 2013). For the much longer value chain to Beijing from the north-east provinces, the share of the midstream is about 50 per cent (Reardon et al., 2010). Von Thünen (1826) founded our now-traditional conceptualization of the standard pattern of correlations between spatial length of a rural–urban value chain and product categories. He noted that farm product composition changed over space as one went away from a city, as a function of land and other farm costs and transport costs. Von Thünen noted that perishable, high-value products, such as vegetables and dairy, tended in that era to be produced in a concentric ring near cities, followed by a ring for timber, then extensive grains and then hinterland. While these spatial-cum-product composition patterns were typical in developing countries (and still are in the poorest areas), they are beginning to change, partly as a function of the transformation of the midstream segments. The latter has begun to alter the geography and seasonality of farming and value chains to cities. This is discussed by midstream sub-segment as follows: of transport via road and rail has extended the market catch• Development ment area of rice and wheat, and of semi-perishables such as potatoes and apples.

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of the fish freezing industry has recently spurred long • Development domestic value chains in fish, for example in China from southern China

•

•

• •

to Beijing. Development of the poultry, hog and fish feed industry has allowed intensive production far from cities. For example, Yi et al. (2015) discuss the rise of intensive shrimp farming off Java, in islands with improved water conditions; feed is produced on Java, sent by boat to these islands, then shrimp is harvested and shipped to export points and cities. Fish farming is blossoming in clusters around Bangladesh, with feed produced near Dhaka then trucked to these clusters and fish put in barrels of ice and shipped back to Dhaka. NaRanong (2008) tells a similar story for chicken production in Thailand. Development of medium and large-scale output processing has allowed both economies of scale and location of plants further from cities. Schneider (2011) notes for China that as small-scale pig production dropped from 95 to 27 per cent of pigs over 1985 to 2007, the scale of pig processing plants soared and moved away from peri-urban areas. Highly processed foods made by Indofoods in Jakarta or San Miguel in Manila are consistently available in most parts – at least of the main islands, where three-quarters of the food economies are – of Indonesia and the Philippines, respectively. Development of medium and large-scale feed processing mills in maize and soya areas has induced the movement of chicken production from peri-urban areas out to these crop areas, such as in Thailand in the 1990s (Rushton et al., 2005). Development of the cold storage industry has recently and quickly expanded and de-seasonalized value chains of potatoes, for example, to cities in India (Das Gupta et al., 2010) and Bangladesh.

3.2 Structure and Conduct Change: At First a Proliferation of Intermediaries, Followed by Dis-Intermediation in Value Chains In Asia, as in other developing regions, the traditional foundations of the food value chain were rooted in farmers’ sales to a nearby village or rural town. As rural towns and cities grew, there was a proliferation of intermediaries in the midstream; rural–urban brokers emerged in dendritic structures to collect from rural areas, sell on to villages, then to semi-wholesalers in district towns who would then sell on to cities (see, for example, Skinner (1964) for China, or Lele (1971) for India). The subsequent stage, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, has been a “first wave of dis-intermediation” in the midstream. As rural–urban value chains developed and lengthened, and intermediaries proliferated, the image grew in the

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policy debate and research literature in the Asian region (and other developing regions) of “many hands” stretching along the long rural–urban value chains. Often in policy debates the terms “speculation”, “exploitation” and “inefficiency” became attached to rural brokers and wholesalers. Empirically supported or not, that image spurred support for the establishment of marketing and processing parastatals in the 1960s and 1970s as a form of state-led dis-intermediation of grain value chains to cities. The emerging evidence points to a process in the 1980s–2000s in which state establishment of parastatal processors and marketing in the 1960s–1970s and investment in rural and urban wholesale markets and roads in the 1970s–1990s led to a second wave of grassroots private-sector-led restructuring of rural distribution. Wholesalers from rural wholesale markets and even urban markets began to buy directly (via transporters) from farmers; mills got bigger and started to buy directly from farmers; trucking firms proliferated and eased local logistics constraints. The result in many places has been that small rural brokers have been sidelined and eventually eliminated, with many recent surveys showing this in rice, mangoes, tomatoes and potatoes; see for example Huang et al. (2007) for tomatoes in Shandong. A third wave of dis-intermediation in value chains and restructuring of the distribution segment emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. This can be seen from two angles: procurement and marketing. From the angle of procurement, the third wave has involved the emergence – either from inside or outside wholesale markets – of modern “specialized dedicated wholesalers” (Reardon and Berdegué, 2002). These buy directly from first and second-stage processors and farmers as agents of supermarkets (such as Bimandiri on Java, see Natawidjaja et al. (2007)) and processors. This has also involved midstream and downstream firms buying directly from each other (such as large retail chains in Beijing buying directly from large mills in north-east China). This is sometimes facilitated by the firms of two segments of the food industry delivering between their distribution centres to reduce transaction costs. This can extend over countries in the region to affect international trade by “internalizing” trade in intra-firm transactions as in “new trade theory” (see Reardon et al., 2007a). Dis-intermediation of local procurement agents can be done through enlisting the assistance of non-local agents. An emerging and important form of this is “follow sourcing”, where product or service providers for a food industry firm follow that firm to the new market to which that firm locates. An example is TNT Logistics following Tesco to Thailand, or Baakavor following Tesco to China (Reardon et al., 2003, 2007a). This following also occurs across provinces as food industry firms spread their operations over zones; an example is suppliers of cold chain services in China following US fast-food chain KFC’s diffusion in China (Bell and Shelman, 2010).

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From the angle of marketing, the third wave of dis-intermediation has involved large processors’ obviating the traditional channel of broker-stockists to distribute directly to small retail stores (as well as to supermarkets) with their own delivery vans or third-party logistic companies. An example is Yili distributing its dairy products directly to shops and supermarkets in Beijing (Abrami et al., 2008). Where the product is perishable, this appears to be increasingly done with the help of integrated logistics firms undertaking a variety of tasks – wholesaling (intermediation), warehouse management, ICT system integration into retail and distribution systems of companies, cold chain development and packaging. They may also forward-integrate into retail management of specific divisions (such as Radhakrishna Foodland in India becoming an external “channel captain”, managing fresh produce for second-tier Indian supermarket chains). This has been via multinational companies such as the Japanese Snowman Frozen Foods Ltd. It has also occurred through domestic investment, which has been emerging in this sub-segment, from transport company roots (such as Concor in India for the rail segment), maritime company roots (such as Adani in India), and hotel roots – companies with some transport functions that were extended into logistics for modern agrifood companies. Some were conglomerates that had food operations and saw the unmet demand for modern logistics and added logistics; in India, Pantaloon (the leading retailer) started a major logistics company (see Reardon et al. 2012). 3.3 Structural Change: A Consolidation of the Midstream Segments of the Value Chains Consolidation in the midstream segment of agrifood value chains has followed a number of paths across Asia. The first is a monotonically increasing concentration curve where the segment starts (traditionally) fragmented, as a set of small-scale firms, and then concentrates because of foreign or local investment by large firms or by organic growth of the small firms, without passing through a stage of state-induced consolidation via parastatal formation. Most perishable product value chains are examples of this – chicken, fish, pork, and fruit and vegetables. In recent Asian literature, the example of vegetables presents itself (Gorton et al. (2011) for Thailand and Moustier (2009) for Vietnam); as does that of chicken and pork with Thailand having gone very far in the concentration from the late 1970s to the present (NaRanong, 2008). China is in mid-path (Schneider, 2011), and, in the case of dairy, India is at the early stage with small and marginal farms still producing 68 per cent of the milk but medium/large private-sector firms undertaking 58 per cent of the processing of marketed milk by 2010 (Kumar et al., 2013).

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The second path, such as that found in the rice sector, is a J-curve over time of concentration (with time on the horizontal axis and concentration on the vertical axis), where the traditional phase is only small-scale firms and the first stage of consolidation is induced by government establishment of parastatals. However, the parastatals dominate only a part of the market; alongside them are small-scale operators (informal or formal depending on whether the “parallel market” is legal) (Roemer and Jones, 1991). After the dissolution of the parastatals, there was sometimes a proliferation of small formal or informal firms in their stead. A further phase in the J-curve (or the U-curve below) is the private-sectorled consolidation after liberalization from FDI and from large extra-regional capital (such as Cargill), large regional capital (such as Thailand’s Charoen Popkhand’s investments in Cambodia), and large domestic capital. In turn, domestic or regional firms grown large by this process are beginning to make the same kind of jump to extra-regional investments as did the United States and Western European companies after a similar process of consolidation in their regions. An example is the purchase by Shuanghui of Smithfield Foods (Xia, 2015). This private-sector-led consolidation of the midstream features the pushing out or acquisition or mergers of large midstream firms with the small and medium firms. In a sense, the new wave of concentration in the midstream is an expanded but repeated version of the earlier state-led concentration of the midstream, but now with private-sector dominance. There are exceptions to the latter, for instance in giant state-owned processing firms, including food giant Cofco Corp. in China (Collinson and Rugman, 2007) and government distribution of grain in India (but extremely little in other Asian countries) (Rashid et al., 2008). A third path is a U-curve over time of concentration. This is where a sector has been traditionally concentrated; then there may be a phase of relative deconcentration, either from liberalization or from new zones/areas being brought into production; finally, there is a phase of mergers and acquisitions from large domestic capital or multinationals. Illustrations of this are, of course, the estate/ export crops in several countries, such as rubber in Myanmar (Byerlee et al., 2014). An interesting variation on this third path is where concentration may be occurring in the “commodity” branch of the product, while in parallel there is a proliferation of small and medium firms producing differentiated products to compete with the commodity. An illustration of this is a concentrated brewing sector with a commodity, beer, parallel to micro-breweries offering qualitydifferentiated products. Note that some parts of the midstream can be concentrating while others are lagging, or the overall midstream is concentrating while other segments of the value chain lag or are even fragmenting. For example, tea plantations

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and processing in Indonesia can be concentrated but, at least initially, the retail of tea can be of low concentration, through many small shops. It appears that in most sectors in developing Asia (and other developing regions), processing concentrates first (due mainly to economies of scale in processing), followed by retail and then by wholesale. However, the unevenness of concentration over parts of the midstream and segments of the value chains appears gradually to be diminishing. This is driven by shared drivers of concentration, as well as competition in the post-liberalization era after the 1980s. Moreover, there is evidence that the concentration in one value chain segment induces concentration in the others through favouring scale in choice of client or supplier. This can be termed “symbiosis” among the modern agrifood industry segments. On the one hand, large processors reduce transaction costs for modern retailers by facilitating dis-intermediation, delivering to the distribution centres or stores of the retailers (such as large rice mills in north-east China delivering directly to supermarket chains in Beijing; Reardon et al., 2012). Large processors can adapt packaging and variety to the needs of the retailers; their inventory systems reduce the chance of retail stock-out. On the other hand, modern retailers facilitate development of market size and scope economies for large processors. Supermarkets tend to carry a limited set of brands per product category and these tend to be mainly from medium and large processors, and a smattering of small company brands for non-­ commodity products. Modern retailers develop markets for processed products as they tend to sell them cheaper than traditional stores once procurement systems are modernized (Minten et al. (2010) for India). Additionally, large processors and supermarket chains provide the initial key markets for modern wholesalers (the “dedicated wholesalers” noted above) and modern logistics firms. These firms are competing with traditional wholesalers to serve the modern retailers and processors – and do so by offering better transport services (with modern cross-docking and refrigerated vehicles), warehousing management and services not usually found in traditional distribution segments (such as operating packing houses, packaging, ICT systems and cold chains), and managing contract farming, merchandise inventory and international networks. 3.4 Conduct Change: A Shift from Labour-Intensive to Capital-Intensive Technologies in Midstream Firms Across many developing Asian countries, there has been a shift from small to larger scale in processing plants, wholesale and logistics, and storage operations. This is roughly correlated with the concentration paths, as well as the waves of transformation over countries and products noted above. For example, there were large rice processing units during the state-led period in several countries; then after privatization there was a proliferation of smaller plants;

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and then with technological change and consolidation, there was an exit of smaller mills (such as in rice in China and Vietnam) and a rapid rise of larger mills owned by large rice milling companies (Reardon et al., 2012). The increase in scale and capital/labour ratio has been driven by several factors beyond the most obvious – that there are economies of scale in processing and competition drives firms to seek those economies. First, there have been large inflows of investment in fixed plant and equipment in the processing sector in the past two decades. For example, investment in fixed plant in this segment in China jumped from USD26.3 billion to USD84.7 billion from 2007 to 2011 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2012) – a ratio of 3:2 – while the national nominal GDP rose in that period by a factor of 2.2. China and India explicitly encourage technology upgrading and plant size increase in measures for the food processing industry in their 12th five-year plans. Domestic investment is encouraged by policies cheapening credit (as it had been in the Indonesian rice sector in the 1970s; Timmer, 1973) as well as by subsidies for land acquisition and fixed period tax exoneration. That rise in investment was also partly due to the liberalization of foreign investment in food processing in the 1990s and 2000s. For example, China and India liberalized food processing FDI and large inflows occurred. FDI into food processing in India had averaged only USD117 million per year from 2001 to 2012, then went to USD401 million in 2012/2013, and then in the first half of 2014/2015 jumped to USD2.15 billion (Times of India, 2014). Second, it appears that food safety regulations increased plant size and induced modernization of equipment in developing Asia. This impact is like that of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act in the United States on processing and distribution firm scale – inducing rapid exit of small firms unable to meet the new requirements (Levenstein, 1988). For example, regulations concerning hygiene and location of poultry processing, production and retail facilities were put in place during the bird flu crisis in Vietnam and spurred the development of larger-scale and formal plants such as those of Chaoren Popkhand (Figuié et al., 2013). Health regulations had a similar effect on poultry processing in Thailand (McLeod et al., 2009). Sometimes regulation resisted transformation. For example, India reserved most food processing for small enterprises until 1998, to protect employment. In 1998, as part of overall liberalization, the sector was “de-reserved” – and a flood of investment quickly increased the concentration indices and deepened capital (Bhavani et al., 2006). Moreover, while the modernization and increase in scale of plant and equipment in the midstream is more obvious in the case of large firms, it is important to note that there appears to be a massive amount of investment by small and medium-scale firms. This is emphasized in Reardon et al. (2012), with widespread investment by small transporters, cold storage and warehouse operators, wholesalers and processors in the past 10 to 15 years.

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This corresponds to the discussion above of the “proliferation of SMEs” phases in structural change trajectory. The technology shift in the midstream can be rapid and dramatic, in particular when it is linked to increasing urban demand, improving infrastructure and a policy of encouragement and support. The case of the rapid rise of potato cold storages in Bihar (Minten et al., 2014) and Western Uttar Pradesh near Delhi (Das Gupta et al., 2010) illustrate this. With the latter, a survey of cold storages in Agra found that the combination of the rapid development of vegetable demand in Delhi, the improvement of the road link from Agra to Delhi, the introduction of a disease-resistant and long-shelf life potato variety, the introduction of an electricity grid, the partial subsidizing of irrigation pumps and cold storage equipment, and the economy’s generating investable funds among the intermediate city business sector, led to rapid change in the cold storage sector in Agra. This, in turn, affected the seasonality and cost of potatoes in Delhi and intermediation patterns in the rural area. In the early 1990s, few farmers grew potatoes in Agra and there were almost no modern cold storages. By the late 1990s, cold storages had risen to store 40 per cent of the vastly larger potato output and, by 2009, 80 per cent. Traditional on-farm storage went from ubiquitous to one per cent of the potato harvest. Delhi went from sharply seasonal potato consumption (from fresh harvest) to multi-season availability and 65 per cent of consumption from cold storage potatoes mainly from Agra. Rural brokers were sidelined by the cold storages themselves becoming the main locus of intermediation, with urban wholesalers coming to buy potatoes from farmers at the storages. 3.5 Conduct Change: Changing Financial Relationships Between Farmers and Retailers A key policy assumption about the midstream segment in Asia has been the traditional view that “tied output-credit markets” are the ubiquitous way in which traders deal with, and in a sense entrap and exploit, farmers. This translates to the idea that traders’ practice of value chain finance has a trader advancing funds to a farmer, and extracting the promise from the farmer that he/she will sell the crop to that trader at harvest. It is usually hypothesized that hidden in that advance is a high interest rate and the entrapment of the farmer so that he/she must accept a low crop price. The idea is that the credit market is missing so that farmers are forced to look to the trader for credit to make ends meet until the harvest and are thus willing to enter a tied output-credit market arrangement. These arrangements were often the justification for grain parastatals to sideline exploitative traders and for governments to develop agrarian banks to resolve missing credit markets. During the structural-adjustment decades of the

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1980s to 2000s, this hypothesis of traditional value chain finance was rarely questioned and not explored empirically. In fact, one finds considerable attestation to the persistence of the belief in the dominance of this traditional finance in policy debates and academic papers of the past decade. This persistence is important because it casts doubt on whether farmers can gain from the development of the midstream segment of the value chain and the market in general, and whether the market is really free even when it is de jure liberalized, as the assumption is that these tied arrangements persist. These ideas have recently been re-examined by Reardon et al. (2014c) using survey data on potato and rice farming in China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. They find little value chain finance upstream in the rice or potato value chain in Asia, in both more and less developed areas. But there is a lot of value chain finance midstream and downstream; however, these intra-midstream (i.e. between two sub-segments such as between processors and wholesalers) or between midstream and downstream (with processors and/or wholesalers on the midstream side, and retailers on the downstream side) advances and delayed payments are frequent but minor. They usually involve tight transaction times of a week or so – the churning of money in the regular relationships and networks of traders, clients and suppliers. 3.6 Conduct Change: Incipient Emergence of Market Institutions in the Form of Contracts and Private Standards While structural and technological changes in the midstream are more widespread and advanced, some important institutional and organizational changes in agricultural value chains have been concentrated in the initial, emergent stage. They tend to be correlated with the waves of transformation over the countries and products, mainly linked to large and especially multinational companies, and related more to products that are highly perishable, which present potential food safety and thus liability issues. Of course, given that the consumption of perishables and the role of larger companies are rising, these institutional mechanisms will take on an increasing importance and role. First, there is some evidence of an incipient shift from solely spot markets to contracts. There is no systematic information on how advanced the diffusion of contracts is among segments in value chains in developing Asia; contract farming linked to processors seems to be emergent only in a few product categories and countries, such as for some export vegetables and fruits, and some processed vegetables, such as potatoes for chip production by large companies, or feed grain operations, such as maize in Indonesia (Simmons et al., 2005); pork and chicken (for example, in Thailand; NaRanong, 2008), and milk in some countries as an emerging segment. In staples, such as rice, there is some anecdotal evidence of contract farming, but surveys tend to find

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little evidence of it. Reardon et al. (2014b) reported that large mills claimed they were using contracts but farm surveys in their catchment areas showed very few or no contract arrangements with farmers. They found no evidence of contracts in domestic fruit and vegetable or fish value chains, apart from in the export of shrimp or other export-oriented arrangements by multinational companies. Second, there has been a shift from no public standards to the emergence of public health standards and the emergence of private standards. Again, there is no systematic assessment of the diffusion of private standards. There appears to be a correlation between how traded a product is into the international market, and/or its degree of processing, and the degree of public standard emergence for the product. Private standards tend to be for internal procurement across borders of multinational retailers, and for some large processing companies such as Nestlé sourcing from an array of countries and selling in the regional market. Third, and more common, is the shift from no brands to the spread of branding for packaged and processed foods, especially in the more advanced parts of developing Asia. Reardon et al. (2014b) analyze the evidence from rice retail surveys in urban areas of China, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam to show that there has been a relatively recent but rapid shift from sale of loose or polypacked unbranded rice to mill-branded rice in China and, to a lesser extent, in India and Bangladesh. Fourth, as noted above, organizational change has begun, especially for large retail chains and large processors and mostly for dry and frozen processed foods. There is also the emergence of centralized procurement systems of large food industry companies with use of distribution centres, regional and global networks, and specialized wholesalers.

4. CONCLUSIONS The chapter shows that there has indeed been rapid growth and transformation of the midstream segments, both in a “modern revolution” with the ingress of large and often foreign companies, but also a “quiet revolution” with a proliferation of SMEs and substantial investment by them. These revolutions were first spurred by direct government action, but then by liberalization and privatization. They continued with a take-off of urbanization, income growth and dietary change, vast improvement in hard and sometimes in soft infrastructure, and with private-sector investment – overwhelmingly important compared to direct government investments and, for the domestic market, overwhelmingly important compared to the internationally traded sectors.

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During these processes, agrifood policies have played important roles. Sometimes the roles have been to slow transformation, such as in the marketlimiting and “reserving” regulations of India, or in the lack of public investment in upgrading wholesale markets, such as in Indonesia. But often policy and public investment have spurred transformation of the midstream – by liberalizing FDI, which had a much larger role than product trade in changing the Asian food value chain midstream; by putting in place enabling conditions such as roads and electricity to make profitable the private investments; by sometimes improving upstream supply conditions to the midstream, such as in the introduction of potato varieties that are more storable and shippable; by putting in place commercial regulations that improve the domestic food business climate; and, occasionally, by subsidizing equipment and plant investments to upgrade processing and logistics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter is a revised version of Thomas Reardon (2015), ‘The hidden middle: the quiet revolution in the midstream of agrifood chains in developing countries’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 31 (1), 45–63, by permission of Oxford University Press.

REFERENCES Ablett, J., A. Baijal, E. Beinhocker, A. Bose, D. Farrell, U. Gersch, E. Greenberg, S. Gupta and S. Gupta (2007), The ‘Bird of Gold’: The Rise of India’s Consumer Market, San Francisco, CA, USA: McKinsey Global Institute. Abrami, R., W. Kirby, F. McFarlan and T. Yuen Manty (2008), ‘Inner Mongolia Yili Group: China’s pioneering dairy brand’, Harvard Business School Case 308–52, January. Ahmadi-Esfahani, F. and C. Locke (1998), ‘Wholesale food markets with “Chinese characteristics”’, Food Policy, 23(1), 89–103. Anderson, K., B. Dimaranan, T. Hertel and W. Martin (1997), ‘Asia-Pacific food markets and trade in 2005: a global, economy-wide perspective’, The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 41(1), 19–44. Bell, D. and M. Shelman (2010), ‘Yum! China’, Harvard Business School Case 511-040, December. Bennett, M. (1954), The World’s Food, New York, NY, USA: Harper Publishing. Bhavani, T., A. Gulati and D. Roy (2006), ‘Structure of the Indian food processing industry: have reforms made a difference?’, presented at the workshop, ‘From Plate to Plough: Agricultural Diversification and its Implications for the Smallholders’, New Delhi, 20–21 September. Byerlee, D. (2014), ‘The fall and rise again of plantations in tropical Asia: history repeated?’, Land, 3(3), 574–97. Byerlee, D., D. Kyaw, U. San Thein and L. Seng Kham (2014), ‘Agribusiness models for inclusive growth in Myanmar: diagnosis and ways forward’, Report to USAID by Michigan State University and the Myanmar Development Research Institute, 20 June. Collinson, S. and A. Rugman (2007), ‘The regional character of Asian multinational enterprises’, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 24(4), 429–46.

Urbanization and the quiet revolution in the midstream of agrifood value chains  163 Das Gupta, S., T. Reardon, B. Minten and S. Singh (2010), ‘The transforming potato value chain in India: from a commercialized-agriculture zone (Agra) to Delhi’, Report of value chains component of Asian Development Bank RETA (13th) IFPRI Project on policies for ensuring food security in South and Southeast Asia, October. Deichmann, U., F. Shilpi and R. Vakis (2009), ‘Urban proximity, agricultural potential and rural non-farm employment: evidence from Bangladesh’, World Development, 37(3), 645–60. Deininger, K. and G. Feder (2001), ‘Land institutions and land markets’, in B. Gardner and G. Rausser (eds), Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Amsterdam, NL: Elsevier North Holland, pp. 287–331. Dolan, C. and J. Humphrey (2000), ‘Governance and trade in fresh vegetables: the impact of UK supermarkets on the African horticulture industry’, Journal of Development Studies, 37(2), 147–76. Fafchamps, M. and F. Shilpi (2003), ‘The spatial division of labour in Nepal’, Journal of Development Studies, 39(6), 23–66. Fan, S. and C. Chan-Kang (2005), ‘Road development, economic growth, and poverty reduction in China’, Research Report 138, IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute), Washington, DC, USA. Feller, A., D. Shunk and T. Callarman (2006), ‘Value chains versus supply chains’, accessed 23 April 2015 at www.bptrends.com/value-chains-versus-supply-chains/. Figuié, A., T. Pham and P. Moustier (2013), ‘Grippe aviaire dans la filière: la réorganisation du secteur agro-industriel au Vietnam’, Revue d’Etudes en Agriculture et Environnement, 94(4), 397–419. Gorton, M., J. Sauer and P. Supatpongkul (2011), ‘Wet markets, supermarkets and the “Big Middle” for food retailing in developing countries: evidence from Thailand’, World Development, 39(9), 1624–37. Haggblade, S., P. Hazell and T. Reardon (eds) (2007), Transforming the Rural Nonfarm Economy: Opportunities and Threats in the Developing World, Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hollinger, F. and J. Staatz (2014), Agricultural Growth in West Africa: Market and Policy Drivers, Rome, IT: FAO. Huang, J., Z. Huang, H. Zhi, Y. Wu, X. Niu and S. Rozelle (2007), ‘Production, marketing and impacts of market chain changes on farmers in China: case study of cucumber and tomato in Shandong Province’, Micro Study Report of Component 1 of the Regoverning Markets Program, Beijing, Chinese Academy of Science. Kumar, A., S. Parappurathu and P. Joshi (2013), ‘Structural transformation in dairy sector of India’, Agricultural Economics Research Review, 26(2), 209–19. Lele, U. (1971), Grain Marketing in India: Private Performance and Public Policy, New York, NY, USA: Cornell University Press. Levenstein, H. (1988), Revolution at the Table, New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. McLeod, A., O. Thieme and S. Mack (2009), ‘Structural changes in the poultry sector: will there be smallholder poultry development in 2030?’, World’s Poultry Science Journal, 65(June), 191–200. Mellor, J. (1976), The New Economics of Growth, Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press. Minten, B., K. Singh and R. Sutradhar (2014), ‘The new and changing roles of cold storages in the potato supply chain in Bihar’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(52), 98–108. Minten, B., T. Reardon and R. Sutradhar (2010), ‘Food prices and modern retail: the case of Delhi’, World Development, 38(12), 1775–87. Morisset, M. and P. Kumar (2008), ‘Structure and Performance of the Food Processing Industry in India’, Laval, mimeo. Moustier, P. (2009), ‘Governance and performance of food chains in Vietnam’, Economie et Sociétés – Cahiers de L’ISMEA, Série ‘Systèmes Agroalimentaires’, 11(November), 1835–57. NaRanong, V. (2008), ‘Structural changes in Thailand’s poultry sector: Avian Influenza and its aftermath’, TDRI Quarterly Review, 23(3), 3–10. Natawidjaja, R., T. Reardon and S. Shetty, with T. Noor, T. Perdana, E. Rasmikayati, S. Bachri and R. Hernandez (2007), ‘Horticultural producers and supermarket development in Indonesia’, UNPAD/MSU/World Bank, World Bank Report 38543, Jakarta, ID: World Bank.

164  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South National Bureau of Statistics of China (2012), Annual Statistics, 2011, Beijing, CN: Government of China. Pingali, P. (2006), ‘Westernization of Asian diets and the transformation of food systems: implications for research and policy’, Food Policy, 32(3), 281–98. Pingali, P. and M. Rosegrant (1995), ‘Agricultural commercialization and diversification: processes and policies’, Food Policy, 20(3), 171–85. Popkin, B. (2014), ‘Nutrition, agriculture and the global food system in low and middle income countries’, Food Policy, 47(2014), 91–6. Pray, C. and A. Naseem (2007), ‘Supplying crop biotechnology to the poor: opportunities and constraints’, Journal of Development Studies, 43(1), 192–217. Rashid, S., A. Gulati and R. Cummings (2008), From Parastatals to Private Trade: Lessons from Asian Agriculture, Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reardon, T. and J. Berdegué (2002), ‘The rapid rise of supermarkets in Latin America: challenges and opportunities for development’, Development Policy Review, 20(4), 317–34. Reardon, T. and C. Timmer (2014), ‘Five inter-linked transformations in the Asian agrifood economy: food security implications’, Global Food Security, 3(2), 108–17. Reardon, T., C. Timmer, C. Barrett and J. Berdegué (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa, Asia and Latin America’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 85(5), 1140–46. Reardon, T., S. Henson and J. Berdegué (2007a), ‘“Proactive fast-tracking” diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: implications for market institutions and trade’, Journal of Economic Geography, 7(4), 1–33. Reardon, T., K. Stamoulis and P. Pingali (2007b), ‘Rural nonfarm employment in developing countries in an era of globalization’, Agricultural Economics, 37(s1), 173–83. Reardon, T., K. Zhang and D. Hu (2010), ‘The transforming rice value chain in China: the rice road from Heilongjiang to Beijing’, Report of value chains component of Asian Development Bank RETA (13th) IFPRI Project on Policies for Ensuring Food Security in South and Southeast Asia, November. Reardon, T., K. Chen, B. Minten and L. Adriano (2012), The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains in Asia: Enter the Dragon, the Elephant, and the Tiger, Manila, PH: Asian Development Bank and International Food Policy Research Institute. Reardon, T., D. Tschirley, B. Minten, S. Haggblade, C. Timmer and S. Liverpool-Tasie. (2013), ‘The emerging “quiet revolution” in African agrifood systems’, brief for Harnessing Innovation for African Agriculture and Food Systems: Meeting Challenges and Designing for the 21st Century, African Union Conference Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Kofi Annan Foundation and B&M Gates Foundation), 25–26 November. Reardon, T., M. Dolislager, J. Snyder, C. Hu and S. White (2014a), ‘Urbanization, diet change, and transformation of food supply chains in Asia’, Report for USAID Michigan State University Project of the Global Center for Food System Innovation and the Food Security Policy Innovation Lab, May. Reardon, T., K. Chen, B. Minten, L. Adriano, T. Dao, J. Wang and S. Das Gupta (2014b), ‘The quiet revolution in Asia’s rice value chains’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1331(1), 106–18. Reardon, T., B. Minten, K. Chen, S. Das Gupta, T. Dao, J. Wang and K. Murshid (2014c), ‘Tied output-credit markets have come untied: the fall of traditional agrifood value chain finance in Asia’, paper for the Asian Development Bank, Michigan State University and International Food Policy Research Institute, August. Roemer, M. and C. Jones (1991), Markets in Developing Countries – Black, Fragmented and Parallel, Cambridge, MA, USA: International Center for Economic Growth and Harvard Institute for International Development. Rosegrant, M., R. Gazmuri Schleyer and S. Yadav (1995), ‘Water policy for efficient agricultural diversification: market-based approaches’, Food Policy, 20(3), 203–23. Rushton, J., R. Viscarra, E. Guerne Bleich and A. McLeod (2005), ‘Impact of Avian Influenza outbreaks in the poultry sectors of five south east Asian countries (Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Thailand, Vietnam): outbreak costs, responses and potential long-term control’, World’s Poultry Science Journal, 61(3), 491–514.

Urbanization and the quiet revolution in the midstream of agrifood value chains  165 Schertz, L. and L. Daft (eds) (1994), Food and Agricultural Markets: The Quiet Revolution, Washington, DC, USA: National Planning Association, Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture. Schneider, M. (2011), Feeding China’s Pigs: Implications for the Environment, China’s Smallholder Farmers and Food Security, Minneapolis, MN, USA: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Simmons, P., P. Winters and I. Patrick (2005), ‘An analysis of contract farming in east Java, Bali, and Lombok, Indonesia’, Agricultural Economics, 33(3), 513–25. Skinner, G. (1964), ‘Marketing and social structure in rural China: part 1’, Journal of Asian Studies, 24(1), 3–43. Times of India (2014), ‘FDI in food processing touches $2.15 billion’, accessed 28 April 2019 at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/FDI-in-food-processing-touches2-15-billion/articleshow/29259620.cms. Timmer, C. (1973), ‘Choice of technique in rice milling on Java’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 9(2), 57–76. Timmer, C. (2015), ‘The dynamics of agricultural development and food security in Southeast Asia: historical continuity and rapid change’, in I. Coxhead (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Economics, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Routledge, pp. 89–113. Timmer, C. and D. Dawe (2010), ‘Food crises past, present (and future?): will we ever learn?’, in D. Dawe (ed.), The Rice Crisis: Markets, Policies and Food Security, London, UK: Food and Agriculture Organization and Earthscan, pp. 3–11. Traill, W. (2006), ‘The rapid rise of supermarkets?’, Development Policy Review, 24(2), 163–74. Tschirley, D., T. Reardon, M. Dolislager and J. Snyder (2015), ‘The rise of a middle class in urban and rural East and Southern Africa: implications for food system transformation’, Journal of International Development, 27(5), 628–46. Von Thünen, J. (1826), Der isolierte staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie, Jena, DE: Gustav Fischer Verlag. Wang, J., T. Reardon, K. Chen and Z. Huang (2013), ‘The rice VC from Jiangxi to Zhejiang in China’, Report for Asian Development Bank TA-7648 REG; Regional – Research and Development Technical Assistance (R-RDTA). Xia, T. (2015), ‘US implications of the Smithfield acquisition by Shuanghui’, Choices, 30(1), 1–5. Yi, D., T. Reardon and R. Stringer (2015), ‘Modern variety adoption and intensification in Indonesian shrimp aquaculture: are small farmers included?’, Working Paper for University of Adelaide and Michigan State University.

9.

Food systems at the rural–urban interface Felicity J. Proctor and Julio A. Berdegué

1. INTRODUCTION While the demand for food is increasing in unprecedented terms, the food basket of the consumer is changing with an increased demand for more diversified diets, changes in food preparation patterns and an increase in consumption of highly processed foods. These changes are taking place at a time of rapid urbanization, agrifood market system transformation, rural factor market transformation, and intensification of farm technology and thereby agricultural transformation (Reardon and Timmer, 2014). The pace and depth of these interlinked transformations differs between regions and, while fairly rapid in Latin America and Asia, are in the early stages in much of Africa (Reardon and Berdegué, 2006; World Bank, 2007a). This chapter discusses the changes that together shape, and are shaped by, change taking place within the entire food system from production to consumption and the factors influencing these changes. We define the food system to include all activities involving the production, processing, wholesale, retail, logistics, transport, storage and consumption of human food. It includes all scales of production, food types and levels of processing, as well as the interrelationships between modern and traditional systems. It reaches out to the debates on food policy, food security, food safety, nutrition and public health, as well as changing patterns of consumer demand. We focus discussion on the implications of the observed food system trends on the increasingly diffuse and porous interface of rural and urban societies and on rural–urban linkages. The work is based on secondary data and sources.

2. CHANGES IN THE FOOD SYSTEM AND INFLUENCING FACTORS 2.1 Increasing Incomes, Population Growth and Urbanization Population growth combined with urbanization and rising incomes in urban areas are increasing the demand for food, with gains in poverty reduction in many parts of the world leading to an increase in per capita food consumption. However, most of the world’s poor, perhaps as many as 70 per cent, live in 166

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towns and small and medium cities and the rural areas more proximate to them (Ferré et al., 2012; IFAD, 2010; World Bank, 2007b). It is still surprising how little we know about the detailed spatial distribution of rural and urban poverty beyond large categories like rural vs urban, or by states or provinces within countries. Poverty rates are also higher in such small and medium cities than in larger urban agglomerations (Ferré et al., 2012). Around 2000, about 950 million people lived in urban slums (UN-Habitat 2005), but we do not know how many lived in slums of cities of different sizes. Households in the most prosperous areas of developing countries have an average consumption almost 75 per cent higher than that of similar households in the lagging areas of these countries (World Bank, 2013). By 2050, in order to feed this larger, more urbanized and richer population, food production must increase by 70 per cent (FAO, 2009). The result of urbanization is that today 6.8 urban persons depend on each farm compared to 4 per farm only 25 years ago and an estimated 11 per farm by 2050 (UNDESA, 2014). The number of farms of all sizes is around 570 million worldwide (Lowder et al., 2014). Globally, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas, with 54 per cent of the world’s population residing in urban areas in 2014 (UNDESA, 2014). In 1950, 30 per cent of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 66 per cent of the world’s population is projected to be urban. However, such urbanization has not been exclusively or even mainly in large cities. Drawing on the review by Berdegué et al. (2014), it was noted that almost two billion people or half the world’s urban population reside in towns and small and medium cities of up to half a million inhabitants; this is about 27 per cent of the world’s total population (Figure 9.1). Forty-three per cent of urban citizens live in locations of less than 300,000 people (most of which are towns with as few as 2,000 inhabitants), and an additional seven per cent in cities of 300,000 to 500,000 people. This is by no means a characteristic only of developing countries. In the United States, for example, almost 45 million people live in cities with a population of over 250,000, another 40 million live in places of between 50,000 and 250,000 and a further 40 million in cities of between 10,000 and 50,000 (Bell and Jayne, 2009). An additional 3.4 billion people are classified as living in rural areas, or 46 per cent of our planet’s inhabitants (UNDESA, 2014).Thus 5.5 billion people live in the increasingly diffuse and porous interface of rural and urban societies. Almost every country shows some degree of continuum between isolated rural areas that have very weak interactions with urban centres, rural–urban functional territories, peri-urban rural zones in the shadow of medium and large urban agglomerations, and larger cities that exchange with an indeterminate number of rural areas over long distances. The distribution of people and reciprocal flows of social and economic goods and services across these types

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Source: Updated by the authors with data from the World Urbanization Prospects (UNDESA, 2014), following Roberts (2014).

Figure 9.1 Small and medium cities house a majority of the urban people in the world, 2015

of spaces including all those associated with the food system is by no means static; it changes with development, with the rate of urbanization, and with the degree to which the urban population is concentrated in one or two cities or is more distributed among a larger group of primary, secondary and tertiary cities (Berdegué et al., 2014). The underlying question for society is how to secure and foster sustainable food systems that meet the demands of people living in mega cities, small and intermediate cities, in the diverse and porous space between such towns and cities and rural areas, and in remote rural locations. The urban poor are disproportionately concentrated in intermediate cities and in this diffuse space between rural and urban. To ensure equity in food access and food security, how populations in these places access food and how the food systems are structured to meet their needs has to be better understood and differentiated. 2.2 Changing Dietary Patterns Increased income and globalization of food is changing dietary patterns. Much of the structural change concerns the rapid increase in consumption of livestock products (meat, milk and eggs), vegetable oils and sugar as sources of food energy. These three food groups together provide 29 per cent of total food consumption in the developing countries. Their share is projected to rise further to 35 per cent in 2030 (in industrialized countries the share has been around 50

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per cent for several decades). These changes have not been universal, however, and wide diversity between and within countries remains in the share of different commodity groups in total food consumption (FAO, 2012). Urban residents typically have lower shares of food expenditure in total household expenditure compared with rural residents – but have sufficiently higher incomes to enable them to spend more on food per person than rural consumers (Reardon and Timmer, 2014). Higher expenditure groups show a shift towards higher-value-added processed foods (in India, Morisset and Kumar (2011); in China, Zhai et al. (2014); in East and Southern Africa, Tschirley et al. (2015)). The two stages of dietary diversification is a pattern that applies broadly across regions, illustrated with the case of Asia (Joshi et al., 2007). The first is the “income-induced diet diversification”, where economic growth leads to an increased variety of foods consumed, but the diet maintains mostly traditional features. The second is that of “diet globalization”, also known as nutrition transition (Hawkes, 2006; Keats and Wiggins, 2014), where a diet high in fats and sweeteners is promoted through the opening up of trade and foreign investment. This transition is supported through shifts in global and local food industry production systems and marketing, as well as changes in household lifestyles and choice. This, coincidentally, is giving rise to an increase in incidence of chronic non-communicable diseases including hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and cancers often associated with obesity and high salt and sugar intakes. Although hesitant, policy makers in some countries have been active in efforts to influence consumer choice and thereby health outcomes. Reviewed in Popkin and Ng (2006) are examples of macroeconomic levers used to change the relative pricing of selected foods (in particular the dairy sector) in Finland and Norway and the linkage of these changes with positive change in nutritionrelated chronic disease outcomes, and from South Korea policies that foster the consumption of healthier diets with major associated health improvements. Rural nutrition education and the linking of local contracting and procurement of fresh produce for improved school feeding programmes are examples from Brazil of national and local public policy responses to obesity (Gómez, 2015). Energy-dense foods are relatively cheap sources of energy but typically have a low nutrient density. As noted in the Southern African context, “industrial food processing and food supply systems have replaced traditionally nutritious foods (still available in many rural areas) with nutritionally inferior, energydense, but cheaper foods and drink” (Frayne et al., 2014). People with a low income select a relatively less healthy diet, and we know that low-income earners live disproportionally in rural areas and in towns and small and medium cities. Tschirley et al. (2015) report that in Eastern and Southern Africa, the pattern of penetration of highly processed food is similar in both rural and urban areas. In China, Liu et al. (2014) observe that rural communities have been limited

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by high electricity and transportation costs (associated with the handling of perishable foodstuffs) and low infrastructure development in their ability to diversify their food baskets and thus improve nutritional balance. In a study to examine the effects of supermarket penetration on food consumption patterns in small towns in Kenya, Rischke et al. (2015) found that supermarket purchases increase the consumption of processed foods (this includes primary processing e.g. milling) at the expense of unprocessed foods. Further, supermarket purchases increase the per capita calorie availability, which is associated with lower prices paid per calorie, in particular for processed foods. 2.3 Structural Change in the Agrifood Systems Change is taking place in the intermediate segments of value chains between the consumers and producers, driven in part by these shifting consumer demand patterns, by competitive strategies among firms in these segments, and by the immense technological changes in logistics and supply-chain management. Several reviews give insights into these transformations within the food supply systems in Asia (Reardon et al., 2012a; Reardon and Timmer, 2014); Africa (Reardon et al., 2013) and Latin America (Berdegué et al., 2004; Reardon and Berdegué, 2002). Changes most relevant to food systems in the rural–urban interface include the following: The pattern of spatial and social diffusion of modern retail (supermarkets, • chain retail) and fast-food outlets/chains starts in larger cities and even-

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tually reaches almost all neighbourhoods in all but the smallest towns (Reardon et al., 2012b). Secondary and tertiary stage food processing penetrates into modern retail (hypermarkets, supermarkets, chain stores) accompanying the pattern of spatial and social diffusion of modern retail as well as into the traditional retail sectors (formal and informal). Primary processing includes basic cleaning, grading and packaging as in the case of fruits and vegetables. Secondary processing includes alteration of the basic product as in the case of milling of cereals. Tertiary processing includes adding together multiple ingredients leading to ready-to-eat food like bakery products, ready meals and snacks. Changes in the organization of procurement systems of supermarket chains and agri-processing businesses toward centralized systems and the use of specialized and dedicated wholesalers and preferred supplier systems often with accompanying private quality standards. These require investment in technological change and “upgrading” at the producer level and impact on the type and scale of producer included in these supply

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chains – thus impacting on location of chain activity as well as location and type of producer. Modern food systems increasingly require an integrated packing, grading, processing and transport and logistic infrastructure, including cold chain. These changes impact on the location of post-production infrastructure and on employment in, for example, transport and logistics, commission agents, wholesaling, warehousing and processing facilities. These often align a concentration of related businesses such as agri-processors, transport companies and cold storage operatives. In some cases, these related enterprises are fully integrated within the business model, for example, in the poultry sector in South Africa where product production and finishing operations include feed mills (Poultry Site, 2010). The growth of modern retail and concentration in agri-processing changes the organization and rules of food production and procurement and, as such, creates many more hurdles that the vast majority of smallholder producers cannot pass through. Thus, large numbers of smallholders are excluded from these new and more dynamic markets, which over time may become dominant in the country. Those who can gain access to them, frequently do benefit. Change at the traditional wholesale market level impacts on the relationship between the producers and the market, often with the exclusion of customary farm gate agents. This has been mostly stimulated through domestic public and private sector investment, including market liberalization policies, for example in India where wholesalers now contract directly with farmers (Chand, 2012).

The debate on changes within value chains has focused mostly on the implications of the rise in the consumption of high-value crops and livestock (Delgado et al., 2008; Gulati et al., 2007); the rapid emergence of modern retail and its impact (Reardon et al., 2009, 2012b); innovation to secure smallholder inclusion in modern retail (Biénabe et al., 2011); and the effect of food safety requirements on global value chains (Henson and Reardon, 2005; Swinnen and Maertens, 2006). Innovations midstream (intermediating) and downstream in the value chain that impact on agricultural performance and thus on producers, chain actors and consumers, have been the subject of review and policy debate (including Reardon et al., 2009, 2012b; Swinnen, 2007). There has been less study on the effects of market changes midstream in domestic value chains, both modern and traditional (and their interactions), including the changing roles of chain actors and the number and scale of actors. In particular, there is a lack of study on the spatial aspects (in, for example, rural locations, towns and the large urban peripheries) of food market infrastructure investment including collection hubs, cold storage, packaging and grading facilities, and on changes

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in wholesale and retail market structures and the impact of these on local employment and labour including skills demands. The penetration of processed (secondary and tertiary) foods has diffused from large to small cities and is often heavily promoted through multinational agrifood corporations. Modern food manufacturers are leveraging traditional distribution networks (modern-to-traditional retail including formal and informal), substantially increasing access to low-priced processed/packaged foods in rural areas and low-income urban neighbourhoods with mixed impacts on malnutrition (Gómez and Ricketts, 2013). 2.3.1 Change in retail The pace and penetration of modern retail is central to the debate on the changing food system. This, however, differs by region. South Africa and countries in Latin America show a share of modern food retail in overall food retail of over 50 per cent; countries in Southeast Asia (outside transition countries like Vietnam) and Central America within the range of 30–50 per cent; and China, Vietnam, India and most countries in sub-Saharan Africa at below 10 per cent (Reardon and Berdegué, 2006). Such penetration has implications on transition of traditional retail structures, on consumer choice and food access, and on local employment both at the retail level itself but also throughout the associated food system. However, informal and traditional retail continue to play a central role. Small shops, street markets, hawkers, food stalls and other players in the informal and traditional food economy structures each have their own dynamic, and service particular groups of urban consumers. They are central to many urban food supply and distribution systems and remain a major source of informal and formal employment, often linked with rural households either as producers or as part of multi-locational non-farm livelihoods of rural households, particularly those adjacent to smaller urban centres. They are a major source of food for the urban poor who often purchase small quantities on a daily basis and/or purchase prepared street food. Buying street food is often a preferred option given access to and costs of water and energy for cooking in, for example, slum areas or poorly provisioned properties rented by migrant workers. In countries such as Indonesia, traditional retail remains central to consumer purchasing behaviour. Within Southern Africa, significant regional and local variation exists in the relative importance and role of modern versus traditional retail in urban locations. See Box 9.1 for examples. Low-level harassment of the informal food trade sector in urban centres is ever present with the often-punitive regulations imposed on informal street traders and food vendors. This contrasts with the absence of regulatory controls on supermarket expansion in urban markets (Crush and Frayne, 2011) and corrupt practices by large multinationals such as Walmart in Mexico obtaining

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BOX 9.1 RETAIL CHOICE AND CONSUMER PURCHASING BEHAVIOUR In Indonesia and in three cities – Surabaya, Bogor and Surakarta (representing large, medium and small cities, respectively) – the shopping habits at each of seven types of food retail outlets: hypermarkets, supermarkets, minimarkets (convenience stores), small shops (warung), semi-permanent stands, traditional wet markets and peddlers were surveyed. Minot et al. (2013) find that 73% of urban consumers use modern retail outlets, defined to include hypermarkets, supermarkets and mini­ markets, while virtually all (99%) also use traditional food outlets. Traditional markets are considered the best place to get good prices, while warung and peddlers are appreciated for their convenience. The main reasons for shopping at supermarkets and hypermarkets include proximity to entertainment options, discounts, high quality of food and cleanliness. In the Southern Africa region, supermarkets are growing rapidly in importance as a source of basic foodstuffs for the urban poor. Across the region as a whole and in the major cities – with some exceptions – 79% of poor urban households normally source some of their food from supermarkets. In South African cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg and Msunduzi, the figure is over 90%. In many cities, small outlets are the first to feel the pressure from supermarket expansion (Crush and Frayne, 2011). The picture in Maputo, Mozambique is, however, very different. Almost all the households regularly obtain food from informal sellers and over 90% do so at least once a week and many on a daily basis. Over three-quarters of the households never shop at supermarkets. Small shops (including independent grocers, butcheries and bakeries) are also regularly patronized (Raimundo et al., 2014).

permits for new stores through widespread bribes (Harris, 2014; Viswanatha and Barrett, 2015). While towns and small and medium cities are closer to the locations of production in rural areas, which might offer food system advantages, we speculate that poorer food retail market infrastructure and provision prevails in smaller towns. Research in Southern Africa indicates that populations in small and lower-income towns have increasingly fewer choices available to them for the purchase of healthy foods at affordable prices (Crush and Caesar, 2014; Temple and Steyn, 2011). Urban and rural food consumption is not only influenced by purchased goods. A yet indeterminate but probably significant number of households are spatially stretched across rural and urban spaces, with different household members at different times living and working in different areas, while retaining basic household functions including the production of food for home consumption. This impacts on household food access and food security patterns in both rural and urban locations through food transfers. For example, almost one in three

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of the poor urban households surveyed in 11 Southern African cities said they receive food from relatives or friends outside the city, and 11 per cent of rural households were recipients of urban-to-rural food transfers (Crush, 2012). 2.3.2 Changes in midstream Modern retail and food processing call for closer linkages between the producers and the agribusiness sector for the timely delivery of the required quantities and qualities of raw materials, to enable the integration of quality assurance systems and private standards, and to provide the necessary flexibility to be responsive to the changes in consumer markets. A primary objective of modern firms is to reduce the number of intermediaries – “dis-intermediation” – in a move away from traditional and often multiple transaction stages. In particular, modern retail procurement is shifting away from the use of traditional wholesale markets, which are often located in towns and small and medium cities, to sourcing directly from preferred suppliers including dedicated wholesalers, food companies, producer organizations or contract farmers. There are multiple examples of food system models where dis-­intermediation has shortened the number of actors in the supply chain, including bypassing of the traditional wholesale market, such as virtual integration “Hub and Spoke” model of e-Choupals, India (Annamalai and Rao, 2003); value chains model with rural collection centres and rural business hubs, Reliance Retail Ltd, India (Parwez, 2014; Pfitzer and Krishnaswamy, 2007); contract production for onward distribution, McCain Foods India (Sharma et al., 2012) and Saung Mirwan Ltd, West Java Indonesia (World Bank, 2007a); tiered cooperatives Amul Cooperative, India (Sharma et al., 2012); and innovation on smallholder market inclusion in modern retail (Biénabe et al., 2011), including direct retail store to grower contracting such as Thohoyandou Spar Supermarket, South Africa (Romanik, 2008). While these new relationships between the producer and the food chain actors may bring new opportunities (higher prices, market stability) for some producers, those who are unable to meet the exacting requirements are excluded (Birthal et al., 2005, 2011). Current trends indicate that this smallholder market exclusion will continue. An important related trend is the diffusion of activities in the intermediate segments of food systems into small and medium cities as road infrastructure and services expand (for example, electricity and communication). This includes the locations where first-stage transactions take place and where primary and secondary processing is undertaken. Geographic proximity of these first-stage activities can bring new employment opportunities in, for example, grading and packing facilities, warehousing, mills, logistics and transport that are centred in rural areas or nearby towns and small cities. However, other urban centres previously active in food market systems, through traditional wholesale markets for example, may now be bypassed.

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BOX 9.2 MULTIPLE ACTORS ALONG BASIC FOOD CHAIN IN RURAL AND URBAN LOCATIONS: COWPEAS IN BURKINA FASO Some 13,000 tons of cowpeas are produced annually in the Sahel Region of Burkina Faso, destined for Ouagadougou and for export. This involves 21,000 farmers, 325 local traders (primary collectors), 14 wholesalers operating in rural markets in the production zone, four wholesalers based in Ouagadougou, as well as 273 retailers and 546 food processors in urban areas. In terms of value added, 95% of the total value added remains in the region and 50% of total value of the wages generated along the chain are paid in the Sahel Region. In the East Region where a larger share of cowpea is processed and consumed in the regional capital, Fada N’gourma (52,000 population), there are some 200 women processors making a living from the production and sale of fried cowpea as a food snack. Source: Lançon et al., 2009.

But traditional food system structures continue to matter. For many food staple commodities, such dis-intermediation is not yet observed, for example in much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where traditional market structures abound. These structures engage multiple actors along the market chains, as shown in the case of the cowpea sector in Burkina Faso (Box 9.2). While highly fragmented, these traditional structures create livelihoods for many thousands of households and especially women. Wholesale markets in towns and small and medium cities play a central role in traditional food market systems and some have adapted to meet the needs of and integrate with modern food systems. Some wholesalers operating within wholesale markets have become “modern wholesale actors and logistics companies” undertaking a variety of logistics tasks including wholesaling, warehouse management, information management systems integrated with retail and distribution systems of other companies, cold chain development and packaging, while others continue with more limited and traditional functions. Such “modern wholesalers” integrate with modern retail and the food processing industries as well as traditional retail. Even within the traditional food system, change is taking place. For example, in India, with liberalization in some states, wholesale market buyers are now able to contract production directly with producers and eliminate the first-stage village commission agents/traditional village traders. While wholesale markets remain central to both the modern and traditional food systems in many countries, many such markets in small towns and large cities alike are poorly governed and lack adequate infrastructure and basic services (Box 9.3).

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BOX 9.3  PUBLIC WHOLESALE MARKETS The case of India The traditional segment of the wholesale sector in India is transforming. Whilst supply chains are shortening as village brokers and commission agents (arhtiyas) play a reducing role and as mandi (public wholesale markets) wholesalers buy direct from farmers (Reardon and Minten, 2011), this transformation is incomplete. Agricultural marketing suffers from inefficiency and a disconnect between the prices received by producers and those paid by consumers, fragmented marketing channels, poor infrastructure and policy distortions. Chand (2012) summarizes the appalling state of marketing infrastructure (including lack of auction platforms, drying spaces, and general amenities) revealing why producers continue to depend on commission agents and traders in primary markets (mandis). Shilpi and UmaliDeininger (2007) show in the case of Tamil Nadu that the likelihood of farmer sales at the market increases significantly with an improvement in market facilities and a decrease in travel time to the market. India requires multiple approaches to address the situation including through the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) mechanism, new business models and the scaling up of successful ventures such as cooperative milk marketing, along with organized retail. Most of the reforms needed in agricultural marketing are proposed in the Model Act which has yet to be fully implemented in order to pave the way for direct marketing and vertical coordination through contract farming, creating a competitive environment for services, and reducing the near monopoly of the APMCs (Chand, 2012).

Traditional wholesale and retail markets in Eastern and Southern Africa In a four-country study in sub-Saharan Africa, the traditional wholesale and retail market sector was found to be extremely under-served with physical infrastructure. Tschirley et al. (2013) report that the infrastructure deficit is especially acute at the wholesale level. All wholesale trading in Blantyre and Lusaka and over 60% in Nairobi occurs in uncovered dirt fields. Maputo is better, with all of its trading occurring in a single market under somewhat improved physical conditions. Maputo also stands out in having better trash collection and drainage in its wholesale market, while Blantyre and Lusaka markets have no drainage of any kind and suffer large amounts of accumulated and rotting organic trash. Though infrastructure at retail is generally better than at wholesale, still 80% of traders in Maputo and Lusaka and nearly 50% in Blantyre operate in areas that lack either an improved floor or roofs that provide sufficient clearance for comfortable walking. 95% of traders in Nairobi operate under such conditions. Across the four countries, the share of retail traders operating in areas with neither a roof nor an improved floor ranges from about 25% in Nairobi to about 70% in Lusaka. Drainage is also poor, with nearly 70% of traders in Maputo and 80% in Nairobi operating in areas either with no installed drainage infrastructure or where the installed system does not work. Waste collection is sporadic.

Food systems at the rural–urban interface  177 However, others such as the National Fresh Produce Market in Johannesburg are seeking new ways of doing business to continue to provide vital functional roles including the upgrading of facilities and services as well as offering wholesaling provision for smallholder producers enabling them to maintain a place in the food system (Romanik, 2008).

Traditionally, centralized wholesale food markets have been located in suburban locations and close to major transport routes. As cities have grown, these food markets have become part of the city (for example in Manila, Hanoi and Santiago) and are now located in more congested areas, creating problems of access, congestion and conflicting land use. As cities modernize, expand and develop multi-nodal sub-centres, new and decentralized wholesale food markets emerge (Steinberg, 2014). It is noted, however, that there are numerous examples of both public and private-sector investments in modern wholesale markets on the outskirts of large cities that have failed often due to a lack of understanding of how the markets work and of key trends and changes within the food industry sector. 2.4 Changes in Primary Food Production The changes in consumer demand and in the intermediate segments of food systems send powerful signals to all types of producers and induce response strategies. Important consequences of these changes include the exclusion of the vast majority of small-scale farms from the more profitable and dynamic market sectors; farm consolidation; crop and farm intensification and or diversification (within and outside agriculture); an increased use of agri-inputs, mechanization and credit; and changes in location of production including regional specialization. With 570 million farms worldwide – of which 500 million are considered family farms and 95 per cent are less than 2 ha (Lowder et al., 2014) – where food is produced, by whom and how food reaches the consumer is central to the debate on the wider linkage between rural and urban areas in terms of the food system, consumer choice and employment, and livelihood. Masters et al. (2013) consider that urbanization and economic development have made global agriculture increasingly differentiated. While many farming households sell only part of what they produce and are often net buyers of food, those farming households closer to markets and those in agriculturally dynamic zones and along transport routes (even if located quite far from towns and cities), have become increasingly specialized and linked to agribusinesses. As dynamism spreads, even shrinking-size farms can become increasingly commercialized with capital investment in specialized equipment mostly in higher-value cash

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crops (for example, horticulture) and livestock and livestock products (poultry and dairy, among others), although also in staple product and commodity differentiation (for example, higher quality and specialist rice and maize). The first responders have been in production regions with better production conditions and often with associated change in the midstream and downstream vertical market chain coordination and infrastructure investment. Examples in India include the rapid expansion of potato production associated with intermediaries’ investment in cold storage facilities in western Uttar Pradesh (to serve the Delhi market, where two-thirds of potato consumption is now from cold stores based in this production area) (Das Gupta et al., 2010) and in the more distant Bihar (Minten et al., 2014). Such infrastructure investment is associated with policy change (change in marketing laws) and positive tax incentives; refrigeration and primary processing, for example of dairy products in Tanzania (Wenban-Smith, 2014); investment in mills, for example in the rice sector in several Asian countries (Reardon et al., 2014); and where market proximity through good road access has enabled the development of the food sector (Rao et al., 2004 for India; and World Bank, 2007a for Indonesia). There is substantial evidence that investment in roads and road connectivity positively affects agricultural productivity and output, for example in China and India (Fan and Hazell, 2001). In sub-Saharan Africa, Dorosh et al. (2010) find that agricultural production is highly correlated with proximity (as measured by travel time) to urban markets. Whilst differences were observed between West and East Africa on the adoption of high-productivity/high-input technology, overall total crop production relative to potential production was found to be 45 per cent for areas within four hours’ travel time from a city of population 100,000, falling to 5 per cent for areas more than eight hours away. Several authors have reviewed the integration of agriculture within urban boundaries and in peri-urban areas to enhance urban food security and livelihood (Smit et al., 2001; Thebo et al., 2014), and on the role of agriculture in the urban income share (Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010). The massive numbers of farms reported (Smit et al., 2001; Thebo et al., 2014) raise questions on the minimum scale of measurement used in international farm size assessments; the wider understanding of the role of very small plot holdings (that is for example, roof gardens, micro plots and home gardens, and small livestock management in the case of landless households) in household livelihood and food security; and critically on the definitions used for urban and rural in this debate. On the last question, food production may well be within the functional limits of the town or city and either within or outside of the urban administrative boundaries – yet both are often included in the definitions of urban agriculture. Further, many farmers live within the administrative boundaries of a town or city but their farm plots are outside the city limits, complicating the analysis of data.

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Using data from six sub-Saharan African countries, Jayne et al. (2015) indicate that households whose primary residence is defined as urban, control between 10 and 30 per cent of total national agricultural land and that this share has risen in recent years for most of the countries examined. However, crosscountry and regional data analysis is constrained because urban, as officially defined, can include villages of 1500 people in some countries. For example, in Latin America, 86 per cent of the farmers are “urban” dwellers in Bolivia, 84 per cent in Ecuador, 75 per cent in Mexico, and 22 per cent in Chile. The 2014 census in Colombia found that out of 2.3 million people working in agriculture, only 760,000 lived in the legally defined rural areas. The rest are all “urbanites”, although most live in small towns of only a few thousand inhabitants (DANE, 2015). This issue may affect the debate on urban agriculture because of the outdated ways of looking at rural and at urban and by assuming that people work in the same place as their home, particularly if they are rural or farming people. Competition and resulting conflicts are increasingly seen between urban land uses and agricultural land on the urban and peri-urban perimeters as urban infrastructure seeks to expand. This process of change can be seen not only in the shift of land use from agricultural to industrial, residential and infrastructural, but also in the use of and impacts on natural resources (deforestation, water depletion and pollution) (Steinberg, 2014). Innovative models are being developed, for example in Sri Lanka’s Western Province (Dubbeling, 2014), which integrates agriculture into planning for both food security and environmental gains in these diffuse rural and urban spaces. With the area expansion of secondary cities (Roberts and Hohmann, 2014), there is a call for the reform of land governance systems with a focus on the adoption of collaborative governance in these urban–rural spaces.

3. IMPLICATIONS OF CHANGE FOR THE FOOD SYSTEM AT THE RURAL–URBAN INTERFACE The following section focuses on the implications and opportunities arising from the observed trends of food system change on the increasingly diffuse and porous interface of rural and urban societies and on the links between rural areas and towns and small and medium cities. 3.1 Food Production and First Stage Procurement To produce food to meet future demands in a world of increasing per capita consumption, changing consumer demand and urbanization, places and will

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continue to place new pressures on the farming community and on natural resource assets, particularly land and water. While the debate on global food supplies and meeting the needs of mega cities is beyond the scope of this chapter, the place where 5.5 billion persons live in the diffuse and porous interface of rural and urban societies has implications and opportunities both for local consumers and for producers and other related food system actors who supply that local market and contribute to wider national and global markets. Agriculture – wherever located – that meets the requirements of new and modern food systems will increasingly become intensive in services located in towns and small and medium cities. Towns and small and medium cities are where producers, including smallholders, access essential inputs and services needed to increase productivity and help to secure access to better markets. This can be through output market structures and their related services such as packaging material suppliers, product quality, and plant and animal health inspection services, or input services including agro-dealers for agricultural machinery, equipment and tools, seeds and planting material, fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides, veterinary products, and irrigation systems and related equipment; banks for financial intermediation provision; small machine shops for equipment repair; or extension services. For both input and output markets, proximity matters to strengthening linkages between urban areas and the farming community. All of these service providers create local employment opportunities. Building the capacity of small-scale input retailers in technical, product and business management skills enables them to become certified providers. This is the focus of initiatives such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa programme in a number of African countries, where support to input providers is creating both urban employment and building better service provision for farming households. However, as the first point of connection between the producers and the market is set to change with the processes of “dis-intermediation”, the relationship between the producer and first-stage market chain actor is reshaped, with potentially either positive or negative implications to employment and the local economy in towns and small and medium cities where traditionally services have first been provided. While dis-intermediation reduces the number of chain actors thus reducing employment and income-generating activity, it can also offer opportunities for producers able to mobilize direct linkages with buying agents, often enabled through the formation of farmer organizations or cooperatives or through new business models that provide for bulking up of a consistent quality of product. Opportunities may also arise for traditional wholesalers/ intermediaries where they are able to modernize and service modern chain actors; or where modern chain actors set up new logistics, transport and product preparation infrastructures. Where the locations are attractive, in terms of an

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efficient supply base and conducive agribusiness environment, second-stage food system chain actors can invest in infrastructure (packing houses, meat processing plants, mills, etc.) that in turn creates employment and attracts associated goods and services. These changes can create new employment opportunities which, where skills are available, can be taken up locally and potentially drive the local economy. Modern logistics used by food retailers and processors can also reduce the advantage of geographic proximity with logistics technologies and systems that allow for integration to take place nationally and globally, that is, through “geographical repositioning”. The winners will be more efficient and competitive producers of food irrespective of where they are placed. This can increase spatial polarization and reduce opportunities in regions with lower productivity levels and where there are weak incentives for agribusiness investment (inadequate infrastructure, services and land; nonconductive tax and regulatory environments, etc.). As supply chains seek to secure greater product availability, including all-year-round supply – “de-seasonalization”– retailers and their procurement agents source from more distant locations which again can create new opportunities for producers and associated local chain actors. To secure and exploit production and market opportunities for local economic development and for employment generation essentially requires an understanding of the food system, including the local production and the output and input services required in a given rural and urban space. 3.2 Fostering a Diversity of Food Systems There is a growing debate on issues of consumer choice, food access and public health, calls for new models of producer–consumer linkages, a push back against industrial foods including modern retail and often global large-scale agribusinesses, and on food sovereignty. Such debates offer opportunity in this diffuse and porous interface of rural and urban societies in fostering shorter and local food supply chains. As such, they also provide opportunities for job creation. “Short food supply chains” is a term used to describe a range of food systems that share three main characteristics: or no intermediation. These chains are “forms of agrifood move• Low ment with only one or no intermediary between production and consumption” (Nicholson et al., 2012, p. 21) and bring producers and consumers closer together in terms of reconnecting the agricultural producer and consumer to aid food traceability and quality (including for organic produce) (Parker, 2005).

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proximity. Short chains imply short physical distances and • Geographical a shared spatial base between production and consumption, which allows

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for a “direct relation between both extremes of the agrifood chain” (Nicholson et al., 2012, p. 24). Trust and strengthening of social capital. Short chains share information on the production process, the origin and the distinguishing characteristics related to quality and product traceability. Thus, short chains create greater trust between consumers and producers and strengthen social networks (Ilbery and Maye, 2006; Marsden et al., 2000; Renting et al., 2003). Some definitions include “extended” short food supply chains where consumers are aware of the identity of the producers such as fair trade, cultural practice and identity (Kneafsey et al., 2013).

In a review of urbanization, rural transformations and food security in China, a range of short chain approaches are identified, including increasing agricultural production in urban areas; community-supported agriculture; direct selling between producers and consumers, whether face-to-face or internet based; various third-party-guaranteed systems; organic food shops; and periodic smallscale markets operated in car parks and urban residential compounds (Holdaway, 2015 citing Zhang, 2013). Holdaway (2015) notes, however, that many such initiatives are recent and no comprehensive data exist on their extent or efficacy in ensuring safe food supplies. Further, Holdaway notes that such approaches generally require investment of time and/or greater expense, making scaling up difficult and limiting the likelihood of reaching more than a small percentage of the population. In Latin America, short chains are being recognized as an important phenomenon, linked to local and cultural heritage, biodiversity and, to a lesser extent, agro-ecology and social economy initiatives (ECLAC, 2014). Several Latin American governments (for example, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) have or are putting in place short chain public policies, often linked to smallholder or “family farming” development strategies and/or for the enhancement of regional agrifood heritages. Some examples of innovations relating to short food supply chains are given in Box 9.4. New approaches on short food supply chains are now being explored at the level of large cities and their hinterlands, that is, city–region food systems. Some principles developed in such programmes (Box 9.5) may also be relevant and transferable to medium-size and intermediate cities and their rural hinterlands.

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BOX 9.4  LINKING SMALLHOLDERS WITH CONSUMERS Farmer markets – India A marketing model for producers to sell directly to consumers has been developed in some states in India known variously as Apna Mandi, Rythu, Shetkari, Krushak Bazaars and Uzhavar Sandhais (Dey, 2012). These markets enable farmers to sell their produce as retail to consumers in towns on certain days without intermediaries. Whilst the scale of operation of these arrangements is quite small and only farmers near big towns can benefit from them, such an innovative short chain model has been endorsed for promotion by the Planning Commission (Planning Commission, 2011; Chand, 2012).

Farmer fairs – Costa Rica The Peasant Women’s Coordinating Committee (Coordinadora Mujeres Campesinas), a sub-committee of the National Peasant Platform (Mesa Nacional Campesina), together with the Union of Small Farmers (Unión de Pequeños Agricultores – UPANACIONAL) has played a key role in raising the profile of farmers’ fairs (Ferias del agricultor) as a way for smallholder farmers – in particular women – to sell their products directly to consumers. Good-practice tools for farmer fair management have been developed and shared and these weekend fairs are now part of the food system of many small towns in Costa Rica (Coq, 2013).

Gastronomy in Peru Mistura is a food and gastronomy fair that takes place in Lima, with the aim of promoting awareness among consumers about the ecological and cultural diversity of food, and the role of smallholder communities in the maintenance of the country’s food heritage. A recent Mistura in Lima (2014) brought together over 8000 producers and 192 restaurants, as well as 420,000 visitors. Mistura is one expression of a broader awakening of culturally distinct gastronomy that in the past 15 years has resulted in a 36% increase of traditional food markets, creating new opportunities for smallholders to reach urban consumers (Ranaboldo and Arosio, 2014).

Direct purchasing by government agencies (institutional markets) Inspired by the experience of Brazil and other Latin American countries, a programme of public acquisition of food was launched in 2012, as part of the World Food Program’s P4P (Purchase for Progress) initiative. The project involves 2700 farmers from poor rural communities in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal, with an initial investment of USD4.5 million funded by Brazil and the UK Department for International Development. In order that Brazilian students receive healthier foods in schools, and as early as 1999, the National Food Policy (Política Nacional de Alimentação – PNAN)

184  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South stipulated that schools that received grant assistance were required to adhere to the programme’s mandate that 70% of all funds be used to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers. Local schools were also encouraged to work closely with community based organizations. In 2009, the Programa Dinheiro Direto na Escola (Programme for Direct Money to Schools) provides monetary transfers from the Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Educação (National Development Fund for Education) on condition that 30% of the fund transfers purchase foods from local farmers and family business. The Programa Saúde nas Escolas also provides funding for schools to partner with farmers, as well as helping the latter with financial and technical assistance in producing food (Reis et al., 2011 cited in Gómez, 2015).

The Food Assembly initiative in Europe The Food Assembly is a social enterprise and web-based platform connecting local producers directly with local consumers. Launched in France in 2011, there are now over 700 assemblies in France, Belgium, the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. The organization operates a franchise model by recruiting people as local organizers who are responsible for sourcing producers, building a membership, and coordinating the weekly “market” under the Food Assembly umbrella. Food must be produced within a 150 mile radius of the assembly point and producers set their sale price. Source: Berdegué et al., 2014.

BOX 9.5 CITY–REGION FOOD SYSTEMS ON THE POLICY AGENDA OF LARGE METROPOLITAN REGIONS Mayors, city planners and local and regional administrations are now recognizing the social, economic and environmental opportunities offered through the strengthening of city-region or urban food systems. These include:

• • • •

localized production i.e. urban and peri-urban agriculture for food and income security at household level, to reduce market distortions and reduce dependency on “imported” supplies; creation of new enterprise and market opportunities; entry point for awareness raising on healthy foods and lifestyles. Resource recovery (urban waste including grey water) and climate change adaptation such as designating low lying areas and flood plains for agriculture to limit construction and reduce the impact of floods, or reduce emissions related to food transport and food waste thus lowering the urban footprint.

Examples of multiple entry points for city food strategies are summarized in Dubbeling (2013) and include: promoting and integrating urban agriculture into city planning; preferential local food procurement for the public sector; promoting safe reuse of urban waste and wastewater in urban and peri-urban agriculture; supporting food projects for the urban poor/disadvantaged, farmer markets and local food hubs, short market chains and local small enterprises in food processing and

Food systems at the rural–urban interface  185 distribution; forming Food Policy Councils or Platforms; and reducing food waste including linking to food banks. Such approaches are most commonly reported in large cities in the developed world such as New York, FoodWorks (Quinn, 2010) and the work of the Fair Food Network in Michigan and Detroit. There is growing interest in cities in developing cities such as Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Amman, Jordan (Dubbeling, 2013) in these approaches. Source: Berdegué et al., 2014.

3.3 Agrifood Investment in Towns and Intermediate Cities Food manufacturing – agro-processing – is more decentralized that other manufacturing sectors, which means towns and small and medium cities play a central role with impacts on the local economy and on rural and urban labour markets. Of the industrial sectors, food manufacture is a key sub-sector that has potential for reducing poverty, especially in rural areas, because it is less spatially concentrated than other sectors and is able to generate linkages with services, manufacturing and construction in both the informal and formal sectors (Cazzuffi et al., 2014). Processing plants are often located in secondary towns, providing a much-needed boost to local economies – for example, Miryalaguda in Andhra Pradesh, India, as a rice milling town (105,000 population in 2011) and Bothaville in the Free State, South Africa, with large maize granaries (46,030 population in 2011) (Atkinson, 2014). In a study of formal medium and larger scale food manufacturing in Chile and Mexico, Cazzuffi et al. (2014) found that, geographically, food manufacturing locates in relatively poor areas, but not in the poorest, and in municipalities with more availability of labour and raw materials and with better infrastructure; thus contributing to local poverty reduction. There are no studies on food manufacture that explore both the determinants of location of processing firms of all scales and levels of formality, and the associated local impacts on the farming community, local labour markets and poverty levels. Some observations can be gleaned from the larger scale agricultural export sector that shows that clustering presents many benefits, such as creating an enabling environment for inter-firm cooperation, facilitating the diffusion of innovations, and acting as an efficient means to channel public support to increase competitiveness in the agricultural sector. Farmers and small-scale firms can benefit from participating through joint-action advantages and agglomeration economies (Gálvez-Nogales, 2010). However, much local agribusiness is dominated by smaller-scale firms with weak linkages among actors, low productivity and skills shortages. These are organized in a more informal manner and face more difficulties in achieving a critical mass of firms. For example, in India the food processing industry is highly fragmented and dominated by

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unorganized and small-scale enterprises (KPMG, 2009). While the unorganized segment varies across categories, approximately 75 per cent of the market is still in this segment (KPMG, 2009; Rais et al., 2013). The food manufacturing sector is exposed to many of the same constraints as other industrial sectors when operating in small towns, as shown in a review of bakeries in small towns in South Africa (Louw et al., 2010), where bakeries were constrained by unreliable services (electricity), hampered by poor access to and retention of a suitably skilled and trained workforce, and exposed to competition from large food corporations’ distribution of bakery products through both modern retail and traditional small retail stores and outlets. There are examples of governments seeking to support the food processing sector and agricultural business centres. The government of India, faced with an under-developed food manufacturing sector, saw the expansion of the sector as a way of bringing industry to rural areas (Dev et al., 2004) and in 2014 launched an initiative to link producers with agro-industry and modern infrastructure through public–private partnerships. The proposed food parks will be in small and medium urban centres and along urban corridors, and offer a range of infrastructure services to the food processing sector. Each facility will consist of 30–35 food processing units and will aim to facilitate the establishment of food processing industries backed by supply-chain infrastructure including collection centres, a central processing centre and cold chain infrastructure. In Indonesia, the Medium-Term Development Plan for 2015–2019 builds on earlier experiences of Agropolitans and continues investment in productive or potentially productive rural areas and agriculture-based small towns (Mulyana, 2014). In South Africa, 2015 saw the launch of a major investment programme that seeks to kick-start rural economic transformation through the establishment of Agri-Parks in all District Municipalities. The Agri-Park plan comprises three interrelated components: farmer production support units – a rural smallholder farmer outreach and capacity-building unit that link farmers with markets; agrihubs – a production, equipment hire, processing, packaging, logistics, innovation and training unit; and rural–urban market centres – a contracting structure to link producers with rural, urban and international markets. Ultimately, the programme seeks to enable producer ownership of most of Agri-Parks equity (70 per cent), with the state and commercial interests holding minority shares. With the strengthening of these intermediate food system activities, many towns and small and medium cities, dependent on farming activity in the surrounding rural areas as a key economic driver, have the potential to gain in terms of employment. Proximity of inward investment in the sector matters in strengthening linkages between rural and urban areas. We would hypothesize that in countries with high levels of urban concentration in one or a very small number of cities, market access is more difficult for smallholders. On the other hand, in countries with more towns and small and medium cities, smallholders

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should be better able to access market opportunities and the food sector, including food manufacture, and be better able to take forward first-stage food marketing and preparation.

4. ADJUSTING POLICIES THAT FIT AND SERVE THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE AT THE RURAL–URBAN INTERFACE Given the major changes taking place in the food system from production to consumption and the implications to the millions of people in diffuse and porous rural and urban places, real opportunities exist to explore the national and local policies that influence the structure of the food system. Public- and private-sector adjustments should be structured to mitigate the risks as well as foster and create opportunities to the benefit of the populations in these places as both economic players and as consumers. Some interventions relevant to the food system at this rural–urban interface aimed to secure better social and economic local outcomes and distributional gains are given below. 4.1 Recognize the Rural–Urban Interface and the Importance of Towns and Intermediate Cities Deconstructing the rural–urban dichotomy is a necessary first step if any progress is to be made analytically or policy-wise for building strong and equitable food systems (Berdegué et al., 2014). The livelihoods of the majority of rural households, including smallholder farmers, are hardly only rural; “rural” defines the main place of residence, but no longer encompasses the spatial scope of livelihoods. The same is true of a large number of “urban” households, whose livelihoods are intimately dependent on the rural parts of the wider places where they also conduct their lives. Rural and urban, defined in the traditional way, are conceptual lenses that distort our view of the reality of social processes and can only lead to sub-optimal policies and investments. There can be no question of promoting better market access for smallholder agricultural producers or accessing better quality and lower price food for most of the world’s populations in the absence of stronger place-based rural–urban linkages for the food system. Traditional markets at the level of towns and small and medium cities continue to be the entry points to the food system for the vast majority of the world’s 500 million smallholders, because the proportion of smallholders that gain entry to the more dynamic segments of the food markets remains relatively small. Nevertheless, the deep and rapid changes taking place in the food system from production to consumption hold strong

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implications for local economies and employment, both urban and rural consumers, the farming community and traditional market chain actors. It is encouraging to note a growing recognition by policy makers at all levels of the importance of improving the connectivity between rural and urban places in order to foster reciprocal flows of goods, and social, economic and environmental services, for economic development, the reduction of regional inequalities, effective rural and territorial transformation, and sustainable urbanization (Berdegué et al., 2014; UN-Habitat, 2015). This recognition includes support of urban-based public goods that service the rural population of producers and entrepreneurs, rural-based public goods that service economic activities in rural areas starting with maintaining and enhancing support to agriculture and rural–urban connectivity. Strengthening rural–urban connectivity of infrastructure (including roads, electrification and telecommunications), the provision of basic public services (including fresh water and sewage, electricity, waste disposal and public safety) – in particular for towns and small and medium cities and their rural hinterland/territory – and the provision of economic services (including high-quality, transparent and efficient wholesale markets in key subregional and regional cities; a new type of agricultural and food extension service – good-quality farm and agribusiness integrated advisory service bureaus; and financial services) in every town of a certain size is essential to building vibrant local economies in which the food economy is often a central player. Specific policy opportunities exist at the national level to bring together and make coherent the overarching thematic strategies of rural and urban development as well as sectoral strategies and policies relevant to the food system. These include agriculture, food, industry, public health, labour and employment, and education and skills development through technical and vocational training. Land reform policy, including land access and security and conflict mitigation and resolution at the rural–urban intersection, is critical to the local debate on the food system and in the context of evolving land-use change. Further, national public policy can play a central role in innovation and bringing together social programmes with those that address rural and urban household economic development and public health issues. These offer opportunities in food system diversification nationally and at the local level, for example, school feeding programmes, maternal health and nutrition, and through innovation in food access for the poorest households. Building the capacity of governments and municipalities is central to improving the design and implementation of policies and investments. Only then can opportunities be optimized through the development of the food system in these diffuse and interlinked rural–urban functional territories.

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4.2 Improve the Investment Environment in Towns and Intermediate Cities Ranging from the small-scale producer to multinational agribusiness corporations, private-sector stakeholders are central players in the food system. The investment choices they make are directly influenced by public policy and investment. It is essential to attract investment in agriculture, in the intermediate segments of the food system, and in agricultural sector inputs and services, as well as in associated manufacturing and services indirectly linked to the food system to foster local economic development and to secure better social and economic local outcomes and distributional gains through the food system. At the national level, governments can play a key role in supporting policies that avoid metropolitan bias to reduce the gaps in public goods provision in rural areas and towns and small and medium cities and to adapt policies and public incentives (targeted subsidies) that enable medium and large firms to locate into regions of the country where social benefits (to the local economy and employment) can be derived. These policies should promote reducing and dismantling transfer mechanisms and schemes that are spatially and socially regressive, for example that generally favour medium and large firms located in more favourable regions of the country. Tax breaks and regulatory structures, for example, can create incremental incentives for agribusiness to diversify the spread of business investment (processing, cold storage, logistics, inputs, etc.) into towns and small and medium cities; and for investment in agribusiness modernization and in research and development in the food sector with implications for competitiveness locally and nationally. Secondary and tertiary technical and vocational training in agriculture, food processing, business skills and quality assurance is critical to building a labour market (formal and informal) for the sector. Making such training and education available at a decentralized level helps to ensure that people in rural areas and in small and medium cities are able to take up emerging employment opportunities. Critically, at sub-national level, there is a need to develop innovative models of association between local governments (urban and rural municipalities making up a functional territory) to face the wider governance challenge of strengthening rural–urban linkages and to build the capacity to develop the local food system in the interests of improving the local economy, servicing the local needs of the food system for income generation and to meet the consumption needs of local people. A sound local structure can also underpin the links of the local food system with wider national and global markets where opportunities arise. The skills and knowledge of municipal and local governments and urban planners should be strengthened to help build coherent planning between rural and urban jurisdictions to maximize the food system’s contribution to local

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economic development and job creation. Specific topics include zoning for wholesale and retail markets, modern retail, industrial parks including for the food sector; local land use planning; urban–rural public transportation; local government services with a direct impact on agrifood private-sector investment and economic activities (including informal and household-based enterprises), for example, licensing and fees, wholesale market management and supervision, modernization of traditional food retail and retail market management; removal of barriers that limit the diversification of the food system often in favour of modern retail while maintaining the basic principles of public health; and support to local food safety regulation such as training for street traders and food processors. Private and public sectors engaged in the food system sector and food related policy must come together at the national level and critically at the sub-national level (functional territory) to ensure a shared understanding the changes taking place, to address gaps in services, and to address choices and trade-offs between food system options and their associated opportunities. 4.3 Foster Retail Diversity Including the Potential of Short Chains Barriers to inclusion (from smallholders to informal and formal small and medium-scale enterprises including those in traditional retail and food preparation) should be removed and replaced with new opportunities for income generation in the food system. Ensuring that food of an acceptable quality and nutritional diversity is available and accessible in terms of price and location for purchase remains central to public policy and societal well-being. Innovative models of alternative food systems and diversified retail options can offer these benefits – access, availability and nutrition – to both smallholders and diverse groups of urban consumers, including the poor, slum dwellers, migrant workers and commuters. Examples of these models include: short chain models; public procurement policy and practice; food and gastronomy fairs; city-region food systems; smallholder and small and medium enterprise inclusion in modern food systems; and linking traditional and modern food systems at different stages along the chain. Such models (some already adopted in parts of the world) would benefit from full documentation, including evaluation for their social and economic impacts. 4.4 Generating Evidence to Inform Practice There are significant gaps in knowledge of the transformation of the food system in countries at different stages of change, specifically on the spatial differentiation and impacts and implications of change for socially inclusive growth,

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employment and food access and availability. Future studies in this area should include the interaction between patterns of urbanization and food system transformation. Studies should address the determinants of location of investment of agrifood processing firms of all scales and levels of formality, and the associated impacts on the local farming community, labour markets and poverty levels. There is a need to understand social institutions and other factors that prevent certain groups (women, youth, indigenous and ethnic minority groups, castes, poorest smallholders and rural households) in rural and urban societies from gaining equal access to opportunities in the sector. Few studies have been conducted on the health impacts of changing food supply systems and consumption patterns of consumers of different socio-economic categories in rural towns and cities of different scales, including how and where people access food. Filling this gap is critical to helping tackle chronic health conditions and has the opportunity to open the debate on the impact and options for alternative food systems. Outputs from such studies could help to inform national and subnational public policy and intervention. Dynamic change is taking place within the food system in all developing countries with strong impacts on rural and small town and city livelihoods, local economies and well-being, including employment and job creation, food access and nutrition and health. Such change has potential effects that may or may not be desirable and which, once in place, may be difficult to reverse. Systems to monitor food system change including its wider implications at local and national levels and to take necessary corrective actions need to be put in place. This requires cross-sectoral coordination and coordination at territorial and national levels, with the former cutting across the increasingly diffuse and porous interface of rural and urban societies.

AUTHOR NOTE This chapter was first published as: Proctor, Felicity J. and Julio A. Berdegué (2016), ‘Food systems at the rural–urban interface’, Working Paper series No. 194, Santiago, Chile: Rimisp. An earlier version was prepared for presentation at the International Conference on Territorial Inequality and Development (Puebla, Mexico, January 25–27, 2016) hosted by the Territorial Cohesion for Development Program of Rimisp – Latin American Center for Rural Development and sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada).

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Food systems at the rural–urban interface  193 Dey, S. (2012), ‘Key drivers for farmers and consumers of Rythu Bazaars – a study of the farmers’ markets in Andhra Pradesh’, Asian Journal of Research in Business Economics and Management, 2(6), 48–57. Dorosh, P., H. Wang, L. You and E. Schmidt (2010), ‘Crop production and road connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa: a spatial analysis’, Policy Research Working Paper 5385, World Bank, Washington, DC, US. Dubbeling, M. (2014), Integrating Urban Agriculture and Forestry into Climate Change Action Plans: Lessons from Sri Lanka (Inside Stories on Climate Compatible Development), London, UK: Climate and Development Knowledge Network. ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) (2014), ‘Efficiency – a key ingredient towards sustainable supply chains’, Position Paper on efficient and sustainable supply chains presented to International Transport Forum’s Annual Summit of Ministers, Leipzig, DE, 21 May. Fan, S. and P. Hazell (2001), ‘Returns to public investments in the less-favored areas of India and China’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 83(5), 1217–22. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2009), ‘Global agriculture towards 2050: how to feed the world 2050’, Issues Paper HLEF2050, High Level Expert Forum, Rome, IT, 12–13 October. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2012), ‘Global trends and future challenges for the work of the Organization’, Annex 2 presented to FAO Committee on Agriculture Twenty-third Session, Rome, IT, 21–25 May. Ferré, C., F. Ferreira and P. Lanjouw (2012), ‘Is there a metropolitan bias? The relationship between poverty and city size in a selection of developing countries’, World Bank Economic Review, 26(5508), 1–32. Frayne, B., J. Crush and M. McLachlan (2014), ‘Urbanization, nutrition and development in Southern African cities’, Food Security, 6(2014), 101–12. Gálvez-Nogales, E. (2010), ‘Agro-based clusters in developing countries: staying competitive in a globalized economy’, Occasional Paper 25, FAO Agricultural Management, Marketing and Finance, Rome, IT. Gómez, E. (2015), ‘Understanding the United States and Brazil’s response to obesity: institutional conversion, policy reform, and the lessons learned’, Globalization and Health 11(1), article 24. Gómez, M. and K. Ricketts (2013), ‘Food value chain transformations in developing countries: selected hypotheses on nutritional implications’, ESA Working Paper 13-05, FAO Agricultural Development Economics Division, Rome, IT. Gulati, A., N. Minot, C. Delgado and S. Bora (2007), ‘Growth in high-value agriculture in Asia and the emergence of vertical links with farmers’ in J. Swinnen (ed.), Global Supply Chains, Standards, and the Poor, London, UK: CABI Press, pp. 91–108. Harris, E. (2014), ‘Bribery scandal, high-level departures at Walmart’, New York Times, at www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/business/after-walmart-bribery-scandals-a-pattern-of-quiet-­ departures.html. Hawkes, C. (2006), ‘Uneven dietary development: linking the policies and processes of globalization with the nutrition transition, obesity and diet-related chronic diseases’, Globalization and Health, 2(1), 4. Henson, S. and T. Reardon (2005), ‘Private agri-food standards: implications for food policy and the agri-food system’, Food Policy, 30(3), 241–53. Holdaway, J. (2015), ‘Urbanisation, rural transformations and food security: the view from China’, Human Settlements Working Paper, IIED, London, UK. IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) (2010), Rural Poverty Report 2011: New Realities, New Challenges: New Opportunities for Tomorrow’s Generation, accessed 10 May 2019 at www.ifad.org/en/web/knowledge/publication/asset/39176373. Ilbery, B. and D. Maye (2006), ‘Retailing local food in the Scottish–English borders: a supply chain perspective’, Geoforum, 37(3), 352–67. Jayne, T., J. Chamberlin, L. Traub, N. Sitko, M. Muyanga, F. Yeboah, C. Nkonde, W. Anseeuw, A. Chapoto and R. Kachule (2015), ‘Africa’s changing farmland ownership: the rise of the

194  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South emergent investor farmer’, Plenary Paper presented at the 29th Triennial International Conference of Agricultural Economists, Milan, Italy, 13 August. Joshi, P., A. Gulati and R. Cummings (2007), ‘Overview’, in P. Joshi, A. Gulati and R. Cummings (eds), Agricultural Diversification and Smallholders in South Asia, New Delhi, IN: Academic Foundation. Keats, S. and S. Wiggins (2014), Future Diets: Implications for Agriculture and Food Prices, London, UK: ODI (Overseas Development Institute). Kneafsey, M., L. Venn, U. Schmutz, B. Balázs, L. Trenchard, T. Eyden-Wood, E. Bos, G. Sutton and M. Blackett (2013), Short Food Supply Chains and Local Food Systems in the EU: A State of Play of their Socio-Economic Characteristics’, Luxembourg City, LU: Publications Office of the European Union. KPMG (2009), ‘Consumer markets – food processing and agri business’, Briefing Paper presented at the International Summit on Food Processing and Agribusiness organized by (ASSOCHAM) Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, 28–29 July. Lançon, F., I. Drabo and M. Dabat (2009), ‘Appui à la définition de stratégies de développement des filières agro-sylvo-pastorales et halieutiques sélectionnées dans les régions d’intervention du PADAB II’, Rapport final filière Niébé, CIRAD, June. Liu, J., G. Shively and J. Binkley (2014), ‘Access to variety contributes to dietary diversity in China’, Food Policy, 49(2014), 323–31. Louw, A., M. Geyser and G. Troskie (2010), ‘Determining the factors that limit agro-processing in the wheat milling and baking industries in rural areas of South Africa’, Report prepared by Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension, and Rural Development, University of Pretoria, SA. Lowder, S., J. Skoet and S. Singh (2014), ‘What do we really know about the number and distribution of farms and family farms worldwide?’, Background Paper for The State of Food and Agriculture 2014, ESA Working Paper 14-02, Rome, Italy, FAO. Marsden, T., J. Banks and G. Bristow (2000), ‘Food supply chains approaches: exploring their role in rural development’, Sociologia Ruralis, 40(4), 424–38. Masters, W., A. Djurfeldt, C. De Haan, P. Hazell, T. Jayne, M. Jirström M. and T. Reardon (2013), ‘Urbanization and farm size in Asia and Africa: implications for food security and agricultural research’, Global Food Security, 2(3), 156–65. Minot, N., R. Stringer, W. Umberger and Wahida (2013), ‘Urban shopping patterns in Indonesia and their implications for small farmers’, High Value Agriculture Working Paper 4, Washington, DC, US and IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute). Minten, B., T. Reardon, K. Singh and R. Sutradhar (2014), ‘The new and changing roles of cold storages in the potato supply chain in Bihar’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(52), 98–108. Morisset, M. and P. Kumar (2011), ‘Trends and patterns of consumption of value added foods in India’, Presentation at 7th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development, ISI (Indian Statistical Institute), New Delhi, IN, 15–17 December. Mulyana, W. (2014), ‘Rural–urban linkages: Indonesia case study’, Working Paper prepared for Rimisp as a contribution to a Desktop Review on Inclusive Rural–Urban Linkages commissioned by The Ford Foundation. Nicholson, P., J. Aguado, E. Navarro, H. Hobbelink, E. Groome, B. Verdugo, M. Rivera, I. Sanz, F. Fernández, C. Vicente and E. Torremocha (2012), ‘Amasando la realidad: revista soberanía alimentaria biodiversidad y culturas’, Editorial SABC, No. 8. Parker, G. (2005), Sustainable food? Teikei, co-operatives and food citizenship in Japan and the UK’, Working Paper in Real Estate and Planning, Centre of Planning Studies, University of Reading, UK, November. Parwez, S. (2014), ‘Food supply chain management in Indian agriculture issues opportunities and further research’, African Journal of Business Management, 8(14), 572–81. Pfitzer, M. and R. Krishnaswamy (2007), ‘The role of the food and beverage sector in expanding economic opportunity’, Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative Report 20, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, US.

Food systems at the rural–urban interface  195 Planning Commission, Government of India (2011), ‘Agricultural Marketing Infrastructure, Secondary Agriculture and Policy Required for Internal and External Trade’, Report of the Working Group for the XII Five-Year Plan 2012–17, Agriculture Division, Planning Commission, New Delhi, IN, December. Popkin, B. and S. Ng (2006), ‘The nutrition transition in high and low-income countries: what are the policy lessons?’, Invited Paper prepared for presentation at the International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Gold Coast, Australia, 12–18 August. Poultry Site (2010), ‘South Africa: broiler production and consumption’, accessed 17 April 2016 at www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/1786/south-africa-broiler-production-and-consumption/. Raimundo, I., J. Crush and W. Pendleton (2014), ‘The state of food insecurity in Maputo, Mozambique’, Urban Food Security Series. No. 20, AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network), Cape Town, SA. Rais, M., S. Acharya and N. Sharma (2013), ‘Food processing industry in India: S and T capability, skills and employment opportunities’, Journal of Food Processing and Technology, 4, 260. Ranaboldo, C. and M. Arosio (2014), ‘Vínculos urbano-rurales: circuitos cortos de comercialización e iniciativas empresariales que valorizan los sistemas alimentarios locales’, Working Paper prepared for Rimisp as a contribution to a Desktop Review on Inclusive Rural–Urban Linkages commissioned by The Ford Foundation. Rao, P., P. Birthal, P. Joshi and D. Kar (2004), ‘Agricultural diversification in India and the role of urbanization’, Discussion Paper 77, IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute), Washington, DC, US. Reardon, T. and J. Berdegué (2002), ‘The rapid rise of supermarkets in Latin America: challenges and opportunities for development’, Development Policy Review, 20(4), 317–34. Reardon, T. and J. Berdegué (2006), ‘The retail-led transformation of agrifood systems and its implications for development policies’, background paper for the World Development Report 2008, Rimisp-Latin American Center for Rural Development, Santiago, Chile. Reardon, T. and B. Minten (2011), ‘The quiet revolution in India’s food supply chains’, Discussion Paper 0111, IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute), New Delhi, IN. Reardon, T. and C. Timmer (2014), ‘Five inter-linked transformations in the Asian agrifood economy: food security implications’, Global Food Security, 3(2), 108–17. Reardon, T., C. Barrett, J. Berdegué and J. Swinnen (2009), ‘Agrifood industry transformation and small farmers in developing countries’, World Development, 37(11), 1717–27. Reardon, T., B. Minten, K. Chen and L. Adriano (2012a), The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains in Asia: Enter the Dragon, the Elephant, and the Tiger, Manila, PH and Washington, DC, US: ADB (Asian Development Bank) and IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute). Reardon, T., C. Timmer and B. Minten (2012b), ‘Supermarket revolution in Asia and emerging development strategies to include small farmers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 109(31), 12332–7. Reardon, T., D. Tschirley, B. Minten, S. Haggblade, C. Timmer and S. Liverpool-Tasie (2013), ‘The emerging “quiet revolution” in African agrifood systems’, brief for “Harnessing Innovation for African Agriculture and Food Systems: Meeting Challenges and Designing for the 21st Century”, African Union Conference Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 25–26 November. Reardon, T., K. Chen, B. Minten, L. Adriano, T. Dao, J. Wang and S. Das Gupta (2014), ‘The quiet revolution in Asia’s rice value chains’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1331(2), 106–18. Reis, C., I. Vasconcelos and J. Barros (2011), ‘Políticas públicas de nutrição para o controle da obesidade infantile’, Revista Paulista de Pediatria, 29(1), 625–33. Renting, H., T. Marsden and J. Banks (2003), ‘Understanding alternative food networks: exploring the role of short food supply chains in rural development’, Environment and Planning A, 35(3), 393–411. Rischke, R., S. Kimenju, S. Klasen and M. Qaim (2015), ‘Supermarkets and food consumption patterns: the case of small towns in Kenya’, Food Policy, 52(2015), 9–21.

196  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Roberts, B. (2014), Managing Systems of Secondary Cities: Policy Responses in International Development’, Brussels, BE: Cities Alliance. Roberts, B. and R. Hohmann (2014), ‘Secondary cities: managing urban land governance systems’, paper presented at World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2014: Integrating Land Governance into the Post 2015 Agenda: Harnessing Synergies for Implementation and Monitoring Impact Session, Washington, DC, US, 25 March. Romanik, C. (2008), ‘An urban–rural focus on food markets in Africa’, Research Report for The Urban Institute, Washington, DC, US. Sharma, V., D. Jain and S. De (2012), Managing Agricultural Commercialisation for Inclusive Growth in South Asia, New Delhi, IN: Global Development Network. Shilpi, F. and D. Umali-Deininger (2007), ‘Where to sell? Market facilities and agricultural marketing’, Policy Research Working Paper 4455, World Bank, Washington, DC, US. Smit, J., J. Nasr and A. Ratta (2001), ‘Urban agriculture yesterday and today’, in J. Smit (ed.), Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities – 2001 Edition, Great Falls, VA, US: UNDP and Urban Agriculture Network Inc., pp. 1–31. Steinberg, F. (2014), ‘Rural–urban linkages: an urban perspective’, Working Paper prepared for Rimisp as a contribution to a Desktop Review on Inclusive Rural–Urban Linkages commissioned by The Ford Foundation. Swinnen, J. (ed.) (2007), Global Supply Chains, Standards and the Poor: How the Globalization of Food Systems and Standards Affects Rural Development and Poverty, Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing. Swinnen, J. and M. Maertens (2006), ‘Globalization, privatization, and vertical coordination in food value chains in developing and transition countries’, Plenary Paper prepared for the International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Gold Coast, Australia, 12–18 August. Temple, N. and N. Steyn (2011), ‘The cost of a healthy diet: a South African perspective’, Nutrition, 27(5), 505–8. Thebo, A., P. Drechsel and E. Lambin (2014), ‘Global assessment of urban and peri-urban agriculture: irrigated and rainfed croplands’, Environmental Research Letters, 9(11), 114002. Tschirley, D., S. Haggblade and T. Reardon (eds) (2013), ‘Africa’s emerging food system transformation: Eastern and Southern Africa’, White Paper for USAID Michigan State University Project of the Global Center for Food System Innovation and the Food Security Policy Innovation, May. Tschirley, D., T. Reardon, M. Dolislager and J. Snyder (2015), ‘The rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa: implications for food system transformation’, Journal of International Development, 27(5), 628–46. UNDESA (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division) (2014), ‘“Highlights” – World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision’, (ST/ESA/SER.A/352). United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) (2005), Financing Urban Shelter: Global Report on Human Settlements, UN-Habitat. UN-Habitat (2015), ‘Urban–rural Linkages’, Issue Paper 10 prepared for HABITAT III United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, April. Viswanatha, A. and D. Barrett (2015), ‘Wal-Mart bribery probe finds few signs of major misconduct in Mexico’ Wall Street Journal, at www.wsj.com/articles/ wal-mart-bribery-probe-finds-little-misconduct-in-mexico-1445215737. Wenban-Smith, H. (2014), ‘Rural–urban linkages: Tanzania case study’, Working Paper prepared for Rimisp as a contribution to a Desktop Review on Inclusive Rural–Urban Linkages commissioned by The Ford Foundation. World Bank (2007a), ‘Horticultural producers and supermarket development in Indonesia’, report 38543-ID, World Bank, Washington, DC, US. World Bank (2007b), World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, Washington, DC, US: World Bank. World Bank (2013), Rural–Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals – Global Monitoring Report, Washington, DC, US: World Bank.

Food systems at the rural–urban interface  197 Zezza, A. and L. Tasciotti (2010), ‘Urban agriculture, poverty, and food security: empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries’, Food Policy, 35, 265–73. Zhai, F., S. Du, Z. Wang, J. Zhang, W. Du and B. Popkin (2014), ‘Dynamics of the Chinese diet and the role of urbanicity, 1991–2011’, Obesity Reviews, 15(1), 16–26. Zhang, L. (2013), ‘Food safety policy in China’, report prepared for the Social Science Research Council, US.

10. The urban informal food sector in the Global South Graeme Young and Jonathan Crush

1. INTRODUCTION In cities of the Global South, the informal food sector is both a sub-division of the more general informal economy – identifiable primarily by the foodrelated activities of participants – and plays a critical role in urban food system functioning as a whole. In other words, the informal food sector can be looked at from a micro-perspective that focuses on the motivations, activities, interactions, and livelihoods of the participants, and from a macro-perspective that focuses on understanding the operation and importance of the sector within the urban food system. Both perspectives are necessary for a better understanding of the sector and for devising appropriate policy responses. For example, it is impossible to understand the role of the informal food sector in the urban food system without the compilation and analysis of systematic and representative data on the activities of informal enterprises across a city and along food supply chains outside it. Similarly, the urban food system is a necessary part of the operating environment of informal enterprises, both enabling and constraining their business activities. A third, more indirect, perspective seeks to understand the role of the informal sector and its place within urban food systems from the perspective of the individuals and households that patronize it. This perspective is more aligned to the long-standing emphasis on rural household food security and seeks to adapt its approach to the urban context, showing how the informal food sector mitigates household and community food insecurity in its various dimensions: availability, access, utilization, stability, and safety. Isolation of the urban informal food sector for analysis is, in some ways, an artificial exercise since it is a component and product of broader processes of informality that are an increasing feature of rapid urbanization in cities of the South. Thus, discussions of the informal food sector are also, of necessity, discussions about the informal sector writ large. For example, most policy responses to the growth of informality are not tailored to the specifics of the food sector, but impact on it nonetheless. Governance of the informal food sector per se tends to be a “missing link” in policy debates (Skinner and Haysom, 2017). However, the relative dearth of policies relating specifically to the informal food sector does not mean that it is ungoverned. On the contrary, it is regularly 198

The urban informal food sector in the Global South  199

affected by policies – sometimes heavy-handed and even repressive in nature – targeted at the informal sector as a whole. This chapter seeks to correct for the common neglect of the informal food sector by exploring the central role informality plays in urban food systems, and examining whether the design and implementation of effective governance initiatives can strengthen this role and benefit vendors and customers. It begins by presenting statistics on the extent of informal economic activity and patterns of food outlet patronage across the Global South, highlighting the central role of informality in urban food systems and the diversity that can be observed across cities for which detailed data is available. It then turns its attention to the relationship between formal and informal economic activity in urban food systems, with a particular focus on the effects of the supermarket revolution on the informal food sector. The potential for formal and informal outlets to contribute jointly to urban food security is emphasized, as are varying degrees of supermarketization across the Global South. The opportunities presented by informal food economies are then discussed, along with the challenges that informal food vendors face and the broader set of social and economic challenges that accompany informality. Finally, the topic of effective informal food sector governance is addressed, and recommendations for institutional and policy frameworks that could create an enabling environment for the informal food economy are proposed. Particular attention is given to the regulation of street and market vending, the promotion of formalization, and direct forms of support for customers and vendors. The chapter concludes by re-emphasizing the importance of designing holistic food policy strategies that incorporate the informal food sector and the benefits that doing so would entail.

2. A STATISTICAL PICTURE Informal economic activity is a global phenomenon, and a central aspect of social and economic life in rapidly growing urban areas in the Global South (Parnell and Oldfield, 2016; Pieterse and Parnell, 2015). Despite its ubiquitous presence, accurate statistical measurement of the informal sector in general, and the informal food sector in particular, remains a difficult challenge. There are obvious reasons for this: the lack of registration that is a defining feature of informality precludes comprehensive official record keeping. States often lack the will or the means to gather information on informality, and individuals and firms in the informal sector are often reluctant to offer insights into their activities due to their quasi-legal nature and/or experiences of state repression. However, various strategies do exist that allow for relatively accurate estimates of the scope and scale of informality, including household and labour market surveys that capture forms of income-generation and employment, and indirect

200  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

estimates based on statistics for the demand for currency, electricity usage, and labour market trends (Alderslade et al., 2006). The International Labour Organization (ILO) maintains an extensive database on informal employment in 45 countries and territories (ILO, 2018). Vanek et al. (2014) also provide detailed regional estimates, offering a comparative picture of informal employment around the world. As Table 10.1 shows, the proportion of informal employment (as a percentage of total nonagricultural employment) varies from 69 per cent in South Asia to 34 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Regional differences are less pronounced regarding the proportion of informal employees who are in wage employment versus self-employment, although the latter figure is significantly higher in Sub-Saharan Africa (at 67 per cent). Neither the ILO nor Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) provide a detailed sectoral breakdown of informal employment, so it is impossible to determine from their data the size and relative importance of the informal food sector at regional and national levels. This is a significant data gap, given that the food sector plays such a significant role in the informal economy of many cities, and that informal economic activity, in turn, plays a pivotal role in urban food systems. Further, since the urban food system extends beyond retail to include food procurement, aggregation, transportation, processing, and preparation prior to sale, data on the different types of enterprise, and their inter-relationships, operating at different points in food supply chains is required. Finally, data collection on the informal food sector needs to take into account the complexity and variety of the enterprises involved. WIEGO, for example, has collected household data on formal and informal employment in 11 cities, which shows the proportion of the workforce engaged in two main activities with a strong but not exclusive food component: market trade and street trade (Herrera et al., 2012). Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) data shows the proportion of households in each of its partner cities that patronize formal and informal food outlets (Table 10.2). Street vendors are patronized by as few as 16 per cent of households in Mexico City, Mexico, and as many as 62 per cent in Bangalore, India. Patronage of small informal shops also varies considerably but exceeds 60 per cent of households in four cities (Cape Town, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Kingston, Jamaica; and Bangalore). Markets – both formal and informal – are patronized by over 75 per cent of households in four cities (Maputo, Mozambique; Mexico City; Kingston; and Nanjing, China). Household food sourcing surveys also provide insights into the dependence of poor households on the informal food sector, and illustrate that the sector is patronized with great frequency in comparison to most formal sector food outlets. While virtually all households in Cape Town patronize supermarkets for some of their food, households in the lowest income tercile are the major patrons of informal vendors (such as street

201

M* 36 49 70 59

W 32 59 64 56

T 34 53 69 57

M 14 15 13 11

W 19 11 21 17

T 16 14 15 14

Informal employment outside the informal sector (as a % of non-agricultural employment) M 48 42 49 56

W 49 24 42 39

T 48 33 47 49

Informal wage employment (as a % of non-agricultural informal employment) M 52 58 51 44

W 51 76 58 61

Source: Vanek et al. (2014, pp. 10–11).

T 52 67 53 51

Informal self-employment (as a % of non-agricultural informal employment)

Notes: * M: Men, W: Women, T: Total. ** LAC: Latin America and the Caribbean; SSA: Sub-Saharan Africa; SA: South Asia; ESEA: East and Southeast Asia excluding China.

LAC** SSA SA ESEA

Employment in the informal sector (as a % of non-agricultural employment)

Table 10.1  Informal employment by region

202

Formal Supermarkets Small shops/outlets Fast food outlets Restaurants Informal Street vendors Small shops Mix of formal and informal vendors Markets 34.0 75.8 2.9 3.8 28.5 1.4 91.9

47.9 67.1 13.1

51.2

45.1 68.9

78.7 82.2 14.4 22.1

Nairobi

Africa Maputo

94.1 62.8 45.8 28.0

Cape Town

49.6

29.1 19.4

96.2 18.5 15.4 5.8

Windhoek

Table 10.2  Patronage of food outlets in HCP cities (per cent of households) LAC

86.4

16.3 7.4

56.8 68.4 4.5 6.8

Mexico City

76.5

30.1 65.8

65.8 74.6 44.6 34.9

Kingston

Asia

15.8

61.5 62.3

18.1 29.5 2.5 58.2

Bangalore

92.7

24.5 12.3

88.3 31.0 16.0 44.7

Nanjing

The urban informal food sector in the Global South  203

sellers and spazas) and source food from these outlets on an almost daily basis. Similar patterns have been observed in other HCP cities. Some markets are “formal” in the sense that vendors pay to operate in officially designated spaces. In Nairobi, these are called “designated city council/ county markets” and in Windhoek “open markets”. In Nanjing and other Asian cities, the designated markets are termed “wet markets”. Mexico City markets include large wholesale markets, periodic markets (tainguis) and local neighbourhood markets. Adjacent to these official markets in cities such as Maputo, Nairobi, Windhoek (Namibia), and Bangalore are unofficial “informal” markets. In Table 10.2, “markets” therefore refers to a mixture of formal and informal food vendors, depending on the city. Small informal shops go by different names in different cities (e.g. spazas in South Africa, tuck shops in Nairobi and Windhoek, and kiosks in Bangalore).

3. FORMAL AND INFORMAL IN THE URBAN FOOD SYSTEM The restructuring of urban food systems involves “extensive consolidation, very rapid institutional and organizational change, and progressive modernization of the procurement system” (Reardon and Timmer, 2012, p. 225). Reardon and colleagues were the first to suggest that this transformation constituted a “supermarket revolution”, which involved progressively greater control over the urban food supply and marketing by supermarket chains (Reardon and Gulati, 2008; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Reardon and Timmer, 2008; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003). Africa’s supermarket revolution has been called the “fourth wave” of supermarketization (Altenberg et al., 2016; Dakora et al., 2010; Reardon et al., 2003). The conventional wisdom is that the spread of supermarkets will inevitably displace and even eradicate more traditional informalized supply chains and vendors, destroying livelihoods and increasing unemployment in the process. Kennedy et al. (2004, p. 1), for example, argue that “competition for a market share of food purchase tends to intensify with entry into the system of … large multinational fast food and supermarket chains. The losers tend to be small local agents and traditional food markets.” Reardon and Gulati (2008, p. 17) similarly assert that “the mirror image of the spread of supermarkets is the decline of the traditional retail sector”. Louw et al. (2006, p. 25) argue that in South Africa “one of the primary threats is the encroachment of supermarkets into areas traditionally occupied by the informal market”. In recent years, there has been growing scepticism about the inevitability of an African supermarket revolution (das Nair, in this volume). Critics have cautioned against the over-optimism and inexorability of the model, pointing to the uneven speed of the spread of supermarkets, the challenges faced by

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supermarkets in establishing cost-efficient supply chains, and the resilience of informal forms of retail (Abrahams, 2010, 2011; Humphrey, 2007; Minten, 2008; Vink, 2014). Abrahams (2010) even calls the idea “supermarket revolution myopia”, primarily because it neglects the size and resilience of informal food economies in Africa. In Brazil, for example, Farina et al. (2005, p. 134) argue that “different formats of retail stores cohabit (the) Brazilian market, compete for consumer preference and, at the same time, complement each other”. Similar arguments about the complementarity of supermarkets and the informal food sector have been made in several Asian countries (Gorton et al., 2011; Huang et al., 2015; Minten et al., 2010; Schipmann and Qaim, 2011; Si et al., 2018; Suryadarma et al., 2010; Zhang and Pan, 2013). These findings are important as they lead to diverging conclusions about the extent to which supermarkets could threaten the viability of informal food outlets (Gorton et al., 2011) and the resilience of the informal food sector in the face of supermarket expansion (Abrahams, 2010). HCP research offers two key contributions to debates about supermarket expansion. The first is that supermarkets can play a crucial role in urban food security by being a major source of food for a broad range of households. High levels of household patronage of supermarkets do not necessarily preclude high levels of patronage of informal food outlets, suggesting that the two can coexist in modern urban food systems. The second important finding is that the rate of supermarket expansion has varied significantly across cities in the Global South. In Windhoek, for example, 96 per cent of households report relying on supermarkets, compared to only 34 per cent in Maputo; and household patronage levels in Nanjing and Bangalore, at 88 per cent and 18 per cent respectively, diverge even more significantly. Caution is therefore warranted in drawing generalized conclusions from the experiences of individual cities, suggesting that more structural explanations for why such variance occurs are necessary. In some countries, there has been vigorous opposition to the entry and expansion of multinational supermarkets, primarily because of their perceived negative impact on employment levels and standards. In others, such as South Africa, central and local states have taken a non-interventionist position and allowed untrammelled expansion of the supermarket sector. This has come to be seen as a threat to the informal food sector, which controls a 40 per cent share of the retail food market.

4.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN THE INFORMAL FOOD SECTOR

If properly managed, the informal food sector has the potential to play a key role in the promotion of food security, inclusive growth, and poverty reduction.

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Most obviously, it can play a vital role in urban food security by providing consumers – particularly those in poor urban communities – with an accessible, affordable, and reliable source of food, filling a large gap in the market left by formal food retailers. As cities in the Global South continue to experience rapid growth, demand on formal food infrastructure will likewise increase dramatically. The informal food sector can offset some of these pressures and ensure that rising demand does not result in major shortages or price increases, both of which would disproportionately affect marginalized groups. In doing so, it can complement rather than compete with the formal food sector in the promotion of urban food security. The informal food sector benefits not only those who rely on it as a source of food, but also those who rely on it as a source of income. Where formal jobs are either unavailable or undesirable, the informal food sector offers entrepreneurship and employment opportunities that would otherwise not exist. It thus provides not only necessary livelihood support, but also access to skills, experience, and certain forms of social protection and mobility (Bromley, 2000). There is also evidence that the informal sector can facilitate structural transformation by allowing individuals who would otherwise engage in low-­ productivity agriculture to participate in higher-productivity economic activities (Fox and Pimhidzai, 2011), and that informal sector growth can reduce inequality (Bhattacharya, 2011). The internal heterogeneity of the informal sector means that growth potential can vary dramatically across firms. While some focus on meeting basic needs, others are high performers and, more importantly, have great potential, but are subject to growth constraints stemming from their internal structure and broader macroeconomic environment (Grimm et al., 2012). Despite such constraints, participating in the informal sector can have clear benefits. Evidence from Ethiopia suggests that informal firms have a significantly higher annual return on capital at 52−140 per cent, than formal firms at 15−21 per cent (Siba, 2015). Williams et al. (2017) have also found that, across 127 countries, registered firms that began and remained unregistered for extended periods have significantly higher sales, employment, and productivity growth rates than their competitors. The benefits of the informal food sector are not limited to those who participate directly (Bromley, 2000). Contrary to popular perceptions, the fact that many individuals and firms operating informally pay various taxes and fees means that the informal sector can provide the government with essential revenue, even if compliance remains imperfect. Street trade and markets can also revitalize urban areas for residents and visitors, and can have a positive impact on tourism – often a vital source of income for cities in the Global South. Several benefits of informal economic activity are less tangible. Insofar as informal entrepreneurship or employment is the result of free decision-making

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processes, the right of individuals to choose their occupation and to design, within reason, their income-generating activities should be defended. This is particularly true if informality is understood as a popular alternative to an unjust or fundamentally flawed formal economic system that is upheld by a predatory or mismanaged state (de Soto, 1989; Tripp, 1997). A particularly important question surrounds whether the informal sector is pro-cyclical – in that it expands and contracts in line with formal sector fluctuations – or counter-cyclical, where it can temper the effects of formal economic shocks by absorbing displaced labour and serving as a source of the supply of and demand for goods. Evidence exists to support each interpretation (ArvinRad et al., 2010; Fiess et al., 2010; Loayza and Rigolini, 2011). The extensive linkages that connect the informal and formal sectors make it highly unlikely that the former can remain unaffected by crises in the latter if, for example, supply chains are disrupted, customers lose wages, credit becomes more difficult to obtain, and currency values fluctuate. Nevertheless, a decline in formal employment can be at least partially offset by the ability of former formal-sector workers to engage in informal economic activities, even if general macroeconomic conditions reduce their income-generating potential.

5. CHALLENGES FACING OPERATORS IN THE INFORMAL FOOD SECTOR While the informal food sector offers considerable opportunities for food security, inclusive growth, and poverty reduction, it also has its drawbacks. Particularly notable are the challenges that individuals and firms in the informal food sector confront while conducting their business. Table 10.3 identifies some of these challenges for four very different cities. Common to all is business competition (too many competitors, too few customers) and business costs (suppliers charging too much). Perceived competition from supermarkets varies from city to city, but is not as intense as often implied in existing literature. Lack of business skills is a common challenge, while lack of access to credit is perhaps not as significant as expected. However, almost without exception, food vendors found it extremely difficult to obtain start-up capital from formal lending institutions, relying instead on personal and family savings. Theft of stock and income (by criminals and the authorities) represents an additional challenge for a minority in many cities. Despite these challenges, and anecdotal evidence that the sector has a high business-failure rate, business income data shows that there are opportunities for consolidation and growth, and that the common image of informal food sector participants as marginalized survivalists disguises a more complex reality. Common challenges have led, in turn, to various innovative strategies that the survey also explores, including

The urban informal food sector in the Global South  207 Table 10.3  Informal food vendor business challenges Africa Business challenges (% agreed) Business competition Too many competitors Too few customers Insufficient sales Verbal insults against your business Conflict with local entrepreneurs Competition from supermarkets/ large stores Business costs Suppliers charge too much Customers don’t pay their debts Lack of access to credit Lack of relevant training in business skills Infrastructure issues No refrigeration Storage problems Victims of crime Theft of goods/stock Confiscation of goods by police Harassment/demands for bribes by police Theft of money/income Physical attacks/assaults by police Arrest/detention of yourself/ employees Physical attacks/assaults by citizens

LAC

Asia

Cape Town

Maputo

Kingston

Nanjing

67.3 75.1 59.2 13.0 19.6 33.6

77.9 90.1 85.4 23.1 10.2 27.8

47.7 87.7 87.7 43.9 8.8 9.5

75.7 83.2 82.9 9.7 18.6 47.9

65.6 37.9 18.3 29.5

78.9 51.7 26.0 23.2

69.5 62.7 16.6 35.0

65.0 22.1 5.6 19.8

14.5 22.3

8.4 17.6

4.4 10.2

11.4 19.8

21.7 11.3 7.8

34.8 13.6 8.2

28.1 — —

17.5 — —

13.3 5.4 4.0

18.5 3.2 1.3

16.5 — 8.7

5.9 — 0.5

7.0

2.2

3.8

4.3

Note: —: Question not asked. Source: Hungry Cities Partnership.

offering credit, price undercutting, targeting particular locations, bulk and collective buying, bulk breaking. and the use of cell phones to gather information on wholesale pricing. Each of these challenges prevents the informal food sector from realizing its full potential. Finding ways to address them must be a central feature of informal food sector governance.

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6. CHALLENGES ARISING FROM INFORMAL ECONOMIC ACTIVITY Informal economic activity poses a broad set of social and economic challenges. A particularly significant criticism is the charge that informal economies can be less efficient and less productive than their formal counterparts. There are several reasons why this might be the case: the greater misallocation of capital within and between informal firms; the small size of informal firms means they lack economies of scale; and the limited means informal firms have for enforcing contracts and property rights. That the informal sector will have a detrimental impact on the formal economy is a common concern. De Soto (1989), for example, highlights the negative effects of widespread informality, including, as described in Young (2019, p. 410), “reduced levels of productivity and investment, higher prices for services, minimal technological development, and difficulties collecting tax revenues and constructing macroeconomic policy.” Proprietors of formal firms are often vocal critics of informal economic activity. There is a perception that informal businesses are a source of unfair competition, which benefit from superior accessibility, lower operating costs, and the evasion of taxes and fees. Distinguin et al. (2016) present evidence that suggests that, in countries with weak rule of law and high levels of corruption and state bureaucracy, formal firms facing competition from the informal sector experience greater credit constraints than peers that do not have to contend with such competitive pressures; a problem that is particularly acute for micro and small firms. The challenges informality poses are not merely economic. Dobson and Ramlogan-Dobson (2012) find that the effect of corruption on inequality declines as the size of the informal sector increases, and that a reduction of corruption will not reduce inequality when the informal sector constitutes slightly more than 20 per cent of GDP. The informal sector can also limit the enforcement of human rights protections and labour regulations that seek to provide minimal working conditions (Miller, 2007). Individuals engaging in informal economic activity are particularly vulnerable to abuse by authorities, including demands for bribes, harassment, threats, fines, confiscation of goods, physical violence, and arrests. That the state is the source of these abuses highlights the importance of governance reforms. Informal trade on city streets is a common subject of criticism (Bromley, 2000). For its detractors, it can increase urban congestion, impede traffic flows and pedestrians, block exits from major city buildings, and even create an environment that is conducive to low-level crime, making cities less functional, clean, attractive, liveable, and business- and investment-friendly. A lack of regulation means there is no oversight of the potential health risks of the food and drinks sold by vendors, and little accountability for product quality. Such

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concerns can inform repressive enforcement measures that pose a further challenge to the viability of informal economic activities.

7. EFFECTIVE INFORMAL FOOD SECTOR GOVERNANCE Maximizing the potential benefits of the informal food sector requires welldesigned institutional and policy frameworks. If the informal food sector is to thrive and actively contribute to urban food security, inclusive growth, and poverty reduction, it must be supported by an appropriate enabling environment that addresses the needs of vendors and customers. At present, however, central and local government views of informal economic activity are more often ambiguous and inconsistent, leading to various forms of support, repression, and neglect that can fluctuate dramatically. This reflects broader inconsistencies in views among commentators, academics, and international organizations about the social, economic, and normative value of informality (Potts, 2008), and creates significant problems for informal food sector governance. A defining feature of informal food sector regulation in cities in the Global South is the eviction of street traders and forced relocations to markets. Major efforts to remove vendors from city streets have been documented in Accra, Ghana (Steel et al., 2014); Blantyre and Lilongwe, Malawi (Riley, 2014; Tonda and Kepe, 2016); Bogotá, Colombia (Donovan, 2008); Harare, Zimbabwe (Rogerson, 2016), Johannesburg, South Africa (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2016); Kampala, Uganda (Young 2017, 2018); Maseru, Lesotho (Setšabi and Leduka, 2008); Morelia, Mexico (Cabrales Barajas, 2005); Nairobi, Kenya (Morange, 2015); and Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador (Swanson, 2007). Removals can have a dramatic impact on informal sector livelihoods through arrests, fines, destruction of property, confiscation of goods, and reduced business opportunities. These measures often have the support of formal businesses due to concerns about “unfair” competition, illustrating that when formal businesses cannot eliminate their informal rivals through market competition, they turn to the power of the state (Cross, 2000). Existing case studies suggest that several approaches to and outcomes for the regulation of street vending are possible. In Kampala, for example, the de-­ democratization of the city caused street vendors to lose their ability to participate in the formation and implementation of policy (Young, 2017), while efforts by the city government to relocate vendors to a permanent market failed due to a combination of high rent costs and few customers (Young, 2018). In Morelia, by contrast, efforts to remove traders from the city’s historic centre involved cooperative problem-solving approaches that led to minimal resistance (Cabrales Barajas, 2005). Similarly, in Durban, South Africa, the local

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government has oscillated between repression, tolerance, and support throughout the city’s history (Skinner, 2008). It has adopted an official informal economy policy that seeks to promote enterprise development and incorporate the informal sector into urban development plans. These diverging trajectories further highlight the importance of inclusive institutions and cooperation in the design of informal sector regulation. In Kampala, institutional decline and a reliance on coercion have had dramatically detrimental effects; in Durban, the informal sector is, at least officially, recognized as an integral part of the urban economy, allowing for concrete gains to be made. Effective governance is necessary for the successful incorporation of street vending into urban development plans. The precise forms that this governance should take is highly dependent on local context, but should be grounded in participative decision-making processes to ensure that regulations and interventions enjoy popular support, and are thus more likely to succeed. Two issues deserve close attention. The first is the establishment of health and hygiene standards that street vendors must adhere to, particularly in the preparation and sale of perishable food. These should be paired with educational initiatives, the provision of improved water and electricity access, the distribution of sanitary and storage products, and non-punitive regulatory and inspection regimes. Higher standards will not only benefit vendors and customers, but also improve business at informal food outlets by making them more attractive and reliable shopping destinations. The second, and perhaps most fundamental, issue that the governance of street vending should address concerns the conditions under which trade on city streets is allowed to occur. If governments wish to regulate the times and locations at which street vending can take place, they must be careful to avoid setting unrealistic standards that are ignored or, if enforced, damaging to vendors and thus the broader urban food system. Any such regulations must be designed in consultation with vendors. If governments wish to pursue relocations to urban markets, they must similarly work with vendors to ensure that the convenience, accessibility, and affordability offered by trading on city streets – all of which are key to the competitive advantage of informality – are maintained, and that stable policies on the ownership and management of markets are put in place. When vendors are relocated to new markets, these should be decentralized and integrated into residential areas to provide easier access for customers and reduce congestion for deliveries, improving supply chain efficiency. When vendors are relocated to existing markets, realistic plans for market development should be in place that aim to improve physical structures, access to electricity and clean water, drainage and waste management systems and, more generally, the markets’ economic, social, and environmental impacts. The primary aim of market development must be to improve markets as places of

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business for vendors and customers; secondary benefits, including improved revenue collection, will follow if this goal is achieved. The effective governance of street vending also involves offering viable and attractive employment alternatives for those who wish to pursue livelihood activities other than trading on city streets. Governments should work with vendors to identify a collection of low-capital activities and identify what role(s) they can play in preparing vendors for and supporting them in desired employment transitions, including the provision of training, capital, and space. It is also crucial for governments to adopt macroeconomic policies that prioritize formal employment creation, along with more traditional objectives surrounding price stability and economic growth, as a means of ensuring that labour markets are able to absorb prospective entrants. The informal economy can provide a crucial source of livelihood support, particularly for the urban poor, but it is no substitute for formal job opportunities for those seeking secure employment.

8. FORMALIZATION A common objective of informal sector governance over the last two decades has been the promotion of formalization. This has gained even greater importance since the official endorsement of formalization efforts by the ILO, with the adoption of Recommendation No. 204 in 2015. The potential benefits of formalization logically follow from eliminating the apparent social and economic costs that widespread informality entails. Studying formal and informal firms in Vietnam, for example, Rand and Torm (2012) find that formalization improves incomes, investments, and working conditions. Formalization can also enhance states’ revenues by improving tax compliance, which, some argue, can promote economic growth and good governance (Joshi et al., 2014). Leal Ordóñez (2014) finds that complete tax enforcement in Mexico would improve labour productivity and output by 19 per cent under perfect competition, and 34 per cent under monopolistic competition, by reducing distortions related to capital–labour ratios, low productivity, and resource misallocation in the informal sector. However, formalization comes with major risks. If informality is the result of a rational cost–benefit analysis, adhering to tax and regulatory requirements may prove costly for firms and individuals surviving on minimal profits. Informal economic activity offers benefits that formality does not; if these benefits disappear, the impact on the informal sector may be significant (Cross, 2000). The low productivity of the sector suggests that firms and individuals will have difficultly competing with their counterparts in the formal economy (La Porta and Shleifer, 2014). If the informal food sector were to be harmed by

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poorly designed formalization initiatives, its ability to function as a source of urban food security, inclusive growth, and poverty reduction would be greatly diminished. Governments that wish to promote formalization must therefore redesign the incentives of formality to make it more attractive. Elected officials should work with tax and registration authorities to make it easier for informal businesses to register without penalty. Too often, the focus of improving regulatory and tax compliance is largely or exclusively on reducing costs; a frequently neglected part of the equation is to boost the benefits that formalization entails. Formalization should guarantee certain legal protections and access to finance, development programmes, and training initiatives designed in consultation with those they are intended to benefit. More broadly, improved compliance ultimately requires strengthening the social contract between governments and residents, particularly the urban poor, by addressing a broader set of concerns about political representation, corruption, the fairness of tax and regulatory systems, socioeconomic marginalization, and access to adequate housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and other forms of social insurance. If residents believe that their tax money is being spent on concrete social programmes and development projects that address their needs and improve their living standards, they are far more likely to be willing to meet their government’s revenue demands.

9. SUPPORTING THE INFORMAL FOOD SECTOR The informal food sector suffers from significant growth constraints, including access to products, capital, skills, technologies, and necessary infrastructure. Governments can take steps to address these issues. Microfinance and business training programmes may possess significant potential value (Adams et al., 2013; Nguimkeu, 2014), although concerns about high interest rates and excessive collateral requirements must be addressed for the former to be effective. Governments should play a more active role in providing financing for informal food vendors – whether individually, in groups, or through associations – at low interest rates and with low collateral requirements. Introducing, expanding and/or further capitalizing savings and loans associations could potentially have lasting benefits, as could efforts to improve vendors’ financial literacy and bookkeeping skills, enabling them to make sound decisions about savings and investments. It is important, however, to recognize the limitations of such interventions in the informal food sector. Easing access to credit and providing business training, while valuable, is not a panacea for the problems informal vendors face. As

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illustrated in Table 10.3, HCP data reveals that the primary concerns of vendors frequently surround excessive competition, a lack of customers, and the high cost of goods from suppliers, suggesting that a broader set of policy responses are necessary to support the urban informal food sector. These first two concerns are, of course, related as they contribute to market conditions in which too many sellers compete for too few customers. That these exist in a context of urban food insecurity reveals a central tension at the heart of the informal food economy: while demand for the food that vendors sell remains high, the low incomes of customers act as a major barrier to access. Questions of informality and urban food access are therefore fundamentally questions about poverty. Governments have two clear points of entry to ease the disconnect between the prices at which vendors are able to sell their goods while maintaining their narrow profit margins and the lower prices at which customers could afford to satisfy their demand for food. The first involves providing direct or indirect forms of support to customers to enable them to purchase food in the informal sector. Cash transfers could be a simple and effective means of increasing the purchasing power of the urban poor and deserve further attention in the context of food security in the Global South. A broader set of social programmes that allow households to reduce expenditures on healthcare, education, and transportation could also provide the urban poor with more income to spend on food, giving them a value beyond strengthening the social contract. The second approach that governments could adopt entails providing various forms of support for vendors that allow them to reduce their business costs. These go beyond traditional efforts to reduce taxes and regulatory costs as a means of promoting formalization, to encompass fundamental supply chain and infrastructure improvements. Governments should work with vendor associations to improve supply chains by connecting sellers with producers directly, particularly those in rural areas, and helping them bargain collectively for the purchase of large quantities of goods. Efficiency can be greatly improved through economies of scale that more effectively integrate vendors into local and regional food chains, lowering prices, increasing quality and reliability, and boosting incomes for producers. Effective infrastructure improvements range from basic electricity and water access (Gulyani and Talukdar, 2010), to transportation to and from areas where informal food outlets are concentrated, and the provision of desirable urban market space. The potential for using cell phones to facilitate the ordering and delivery of goods as an integral feature of large-scale urban food distribution networks should not be ignored, and governments should provide the necessary infrastructure. Perhaps the boldest step governments could take to support vendors would be to purchase goods from the informal food sector as a short-term stimulus measure when necessary. During periods of economic downturn, governments should explore the possibility of using their considerable counter-cyclical fiscal

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powers to purchase agricultural goods from vendors for distribution to groups experiencing food insecurity. Informal food vendors could then use the capital from such an exchange to reinvest in their businesses, promoting long-term growth when market demand recovers.

10. CONCLUSION The informal food sector plays a central role in urban food security in cities of the Global South. Its full potential, however, can only be realized through effective governance. National and city governments need to develop holistic food policy strategies for the urban food system (Haysom, 2015). Institutional reforms – such as the development of dedicated food strategy councils in cities such as Toronto, Canada, and the interdepartmental and cross-sector coordination initiatives advocated in the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact – are essential. Very few cities in the Global South have food security strategies and programming initiatives; and, where they do, they tend to default to support of urban agriculture (Crush et al., 2018; Frayne et al., 2016; Haysom and Battersby, 2016). These food policy strategies should incorporate the informal food sector and promote an enabling environment for their operation. While the specific content of these strategies should emerge from inclusive local consultation processes that incorporate the perspectives and balance the interests of stakeholders across the urban food system, some general principles can nevertheless be outlined to inform effective informal food sector governance. Governments must recognize the informal economy as a key source of food and incomegenerating activities, particularly for the urban poor, and seek to replace relationships defined by neglect, ambivalence, or coercion with cooperation, protection, and assistance. The regulation of street vending and urban markets, the promotion of formalization, and the provision of direct support can be ineffective or counterproductive if they are not properly designed and fail to prioritize vendors’ livelihoods. Informal food sector governance must not be a top-down process, but one that empowers those it seeks to benefit. At its core, informal sector governance cannot be separated from broader governance issues that define the relationship between the state and the urban poor. It is impossible to address issues of informality and food access without also confronting the structural conditions that characterize and reproduce poverty, including labour market exclusion, limited household incomes, minimal social and legal protections, inadequate infrastructure access, and political marginalization. Until this is done, the potential of the urban informal food sector will remain unrealized.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We wish to thank the SSHRC and IDRC for their support of the Hungry Cities Partnership and the QES-AS Program for providing the opportunity for collaboration between the authors.

REFERENCES Abrahams, C. (2010), ‘Transforming the region: supermarkets and the local food economy’, African Affairs, 109(434), 115–34. Abrahams, C. (2011), ‘Supermarkets and urban value chains: rethinking the developmental mandate’, Food Chain, 1(2), 206–22. Adams, A., S. de Silva and S. Razmara (2013), Improving Skills Development in the Informal Sector: Strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa, Washington, DC: The World Bank. Alderslade, J., J. Talmage and Y. Freeman (2006), ‘Measuring the informal economy − one neighborhood at a time’, Discussion Paper for Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, September. Altenberg, T., E. Kulke, A. Hampel-Milagrosa, L. Peterskovsky and C. Reeg (2016), ‘Making retail modernisation in developing countries inclusive: a development policy perspective’, Discussion Paper No. 2, German Development Institute. Arvin-Rad, H., A. Basu and M. Willumsen (2010), ‘Economic reform, informal–formal sector linkages and intervention in the informal sector in developing countries: a paradox’, International Review of Economics and Finance, 19(4), 662–70. Bénit-Gbaffou, C. (2016), ‘Do street traders have a “right to the city”? The politics of street trader organisations in inner city Johannesburg, post-Operation Clean Sweep’, Third World Quarterly, 37(6), 1102–29. Bhattacharya, P. (2011), ‘Informal sector, income inequality and economic development’, Economic Modelling, 28(3), 820–30. Bromley, R. (2000), ‘Street vending and public policy: a global review’, The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 20(1/2), 1–28. Cabrales Barajas, L. (2005), ‘The historic center of Morelia: a case of successful negotiation’, Journal of Latin American Geography, 4(2), 35–56. Cross, J. (2000), ‘Street vendors, modernity and postmodernity: conflict and compromise in the global economy’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 20(1/2), 30–52. Crush, J., A. Hovorka and D. Tevera (2018), ‘Farming the city: the broken promise of urban agriculture’, in B. Frayne, J. Crush and C. McCordic (eds), Food and Nutrition Security in Southern African Cities, New York, NY, US: Routledge Publishing, pp. 101–17. Dakora, E., A. Bytheway and A. Slabbert (2010), ‘The Africanisation of South African retailing: a review’, African Journal of Business Management, 4(5), 748–54. de Soto, H. (1989), The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, trans. by June Abbott, New York, NY, US: Harper & Row. Distinguin, I., C. Rugemintwari and R. Tacneng (2016), ‘Can informal firms hurt registered SMEs’ access to credit?’, World Development, 84(C), 18–40. Dobson, S. and C. Ramlogan-Dobson (2012), ‘Inequality, corruption and the informal sector’, Economics Letters, 115(1), 104–7. Donovan, M. (2008), ‘Informal cities and the contestation of public space: the case of Bogotá’s street vendors, 1988–2003’, Urban Studies, 45(1), 29–51. Farina, E., R. Nunes and G. de A. Monteiro (2005), ‘Supermarkets and their impacts on the agrifood system of Brazil: the competition among retailers’, Agribusiness, 21(2), 133–47. Fiess, N., M. Fugazza and W. Maloney (2010), ‘Informal self-employment and macroeconomic fluctuations’, Journal of Development Economics, 91(2), 211–26. Fox, L. and O. Pimhidzai (2011), ‘Is informality welfare-enhancing structural transformation? Evidence from Uganda’, Policy Research Working Paper 5866, The World Bank, October.

216  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Frayne, B., C. McCordic and H. Shilomboleni (2016), ‘The mythology of urban agriculture’, in J. Crush and J. Battersby (eds), Rapid Urbanization, Urban Food Deserts and Food Security in Africa, Dordrecht, NL: Springer Publishing, pp. 19–31. Gorton, M., J. Sauer and P. Supatpongkul (2011), ‘Wet markets, supermarkets and the “big middle” for food retailing in developing countries: evidence from Thailand’, World Development, 39(9), 1624–37. Grimm, M., P. Knorringa and J. Lay (2012), ‘Constrained gazelles: high potentials in West Africa’s informal economy’, World Development, 40(7), 1352–68. Gulyani, S. and D. Talukdar (2010), ‘Inside informality: the links between poverty, microenterprises, and living conditions in Nairobi’s slums’, World Development, 38(12), 1710–26. Haysom, G. (2015), ‘Food and the city: urban scale food system governance’, Urban Forum, 26(3), 263–81. Haysom, G. and J. Battersby (2016), ‘Why urban agriculture isn’t a panacea for Africa’s food crisis’, The Conversation Africa, 15 April. Herrera, J., M. Kuépié, C. Nordman, X. Oudin and F. Roubaud (2012), ‘Informal sector and informal employment: overview of data for 11 cities in 10 developing countries’, WIEGO Working Paper No. 9, January. Huang, C., K. Tsai and Y. Chen (2015), ‘How do wet markets still survive in Taiwan?’, British Food Journal, 117(1), 234–56. Humphrey, J. (2007), ‘The supermarket revolution in developing countries: tidal wave or tough competitive struggle?’, Journal of Economic Geography, 7(4), 433–50. ILO (International Labour Organization) (2018), Informal Employment, ILOSTAT. Joshi, A., W. Prichard and C. Heady (2014), ‘Taxing the informal economy: the current state of knowledge and agendas for future research’, Journal of Development Studies, 50(10), 1325–47. Kennedy, G., G. Nantel and P. Shetty (2004), ‘Globalization of food systems in developing countries: a synthesis of country case studies’, in G. Kennedy, G. Nantel and P. Shetty, Globalization of Food Systems in Developing Countries: Impact on Food Security and Nutrition, Rome, IT: FAO, pp. 1–26. La Porta, R. and A. Shleifer (2014), ‘Informality and development’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3), 109–26. Leal Ordóñez, J. (2014), ‘Tax collection, the informal sector, and productivity’, Review of Economic Dynamics, 17(2), 262–86. Loayza, N. V. and J. Rigolini (2011), ‘Informal employment: safety net or growth engine?’, World Development, 39(9), 1503–15. Louw, A., D. Chikazunga, D. Jordaan and E. Biénabe (2006), ‘Restructuring food markets in South Africa’, Regoverning Markets Project, University of Pretoria, December. Miller, B. J. (2007), ‘Living outside the law: how the informal economy frustrates enforcement of human rights regime for billions of the world’s most marginalized citizens’, Northwestern Journal of Human Rights, 5(1), 127–52. Minten, B. (2008), ‘The food retail revolution in developing countries: is it coming or is it over?’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 56(4), 767–89. Minten, B., T. Reardon and R. Sutradhar (2010), ‘Food prices and modern retail: the case of Delhi’, World Development, 38(12), 1775–87. Morange, M. (2015), ‘Street trade, neoliberalisation and the control of space: Nairobi’s central business district in the era of entrepreneurial urbanism’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 9(2), 247–69. Nguimkeu, P. (2014), ‘A structural econometric analysis of the informal sector heterogeneity’, Journal of Development Economics, 107(1), 175–91. Parnell, S. and S. Oldfield (ed.) (2016), The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, New York, NY, US: Routledge Publishing. Pieterse, E. and S. Parnell (ed.) (2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution. London, UK: Zed Books Ltd. Potts, D. (2008), ‘The urban informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa: from bad to good (and back again?)’, Development Southern Africa, 25(2), 151–67. Rand, J. and N. Torm (2012), ‘The benefits of formalization: evidence from Vietnamese manufacturing SMEs’, World Development, 40(5), 983–98. Reardon, T. and A. Gulati (2008), ‘The rise of supermarkets and their development implications: international experience relevant for India’, IFPRI Discussion Paper 00752, New Delhi.

The urban informal food sector in the Global South  217 Reardon, T. and R. Hopkins (2006), ‘The supermarket revolution in developing countries: policies to address emerging tensions among supermarkets, suppliers, and traditional retailers’, European Journal of Development Research, 18(4), 522–45. Reardon, T. and P. Timmer (2008), ‘The rise of supermarkets in the global food system’, in J. von Braun and E. Diaz-Bonilla (eds), Globalization of Food and Agriculture and the Poor, New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, pp. 189–214. Reardon, T. and P. Timmer (2012), ‘The economics of the food system revolution’, Annual Review of Resource Economics, 4(1), 225–64. Reardon, T., P. Timmer, C. Barrett and J. Berdegué (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 85(5), 1140–46. Riley, L. (2014), ‘Operation Dongosolo and the geographies of urban poverty in Malawi’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40(3), 443–58. Rogerson, C. (2016), ‘Responding to informality in urban Africa: street trading in Harare, Zimbabwe’, Urban Forum, 27(92), 229–51. Schipmann, C. and M. Qaim (2011), ‘Modern food retailers and traditional markets in developing countries: comparing quality, prices, and competition policy in Thailand’, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 33(3), 345–62. Setšabi, S. and R. Leduka (2008), ‘The politics of street trading in Maseru, Lesotho’, Urban Forum, 19(3), 221–41. Si, Z., S. Scott and C. McCordic (2018), ‘Wet markets, supermarkets and alternative food sources: consumers’ food access in Nanjing, China’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 40(1), 78–96. Siba, E. (2015), ‘Returns to physical capital in Ethiopia: comparative analysis of formal and informal firms’, World Development, 68(C), 215–29. Skinner, C. (2008), ‘The struggle for the streets: processes of exclusion and inclusion of street traders in Durban, South Africa’, Development Southern Africa, 25(2), 227–42. Skinner, C. and G. Haysom (2017), ‘The informal sector’s role in food security: a missing link in policy debates’, Discussion Paper No. 6, Hungry Cities Partnership, Waterloo, ON, Canada. Steel, W., T. Ujoranyi and G. Owusu (2014), ‘Why evictions do not deter street traders: case study in Accra, Ghana’, Ghana Social Science Journal, 11(2), 52–76. Suryadarma, D., A. Poesoro, A. Akhmadi, S. Budiyati, M. Rosfadhila and A. Survahadi (2010), ‘Traditional food traders in developing countries and competition from supermarkets: evidence from Indonesia’, Food Policy, 35(1), 79–86. Swanson, K. (2007), ‘Revanchist urbanism heads south: the regulation of indigenous beggars and street vendors in Ecuador’, Antipode, 39(4), 708–28. Tonda, N. and T. Kepe (2016), ‘Spaces of contention: tension around street vendors’ struggle for livelihoods and spatial justice in Lilongwe, Malawi’, Urban Forum, 27(3), 297–309. Tripp, A. (ed.) (1997), Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania, Berkeley, CA, US: University of California Press. Vanek, J., M. Chen, F. Carré, J. Heintz and R. Hussmanns (2014), ‘Statistics on the informal economy: definitions, regional estimates and challenges’, WIEGO Working Paper (Statistics) No. 2, April. Vink, N. (2014), ‘Commercialising agriculture in Africa: economic, social, and environmental impacts’, African Journal of Agricultural and Resources Economics, 9(1), 1–17. Weatherspoon, D. and T. Reardon (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa: implications for agrifood systems and the rural poor’, Development Policy Review, 21(3), 333–55. Williams, C., A. Martínez-Perez and A. Kedir (2017), ‘Informal entrepreneurship in developing economies: the impacts of starting up unregistered on firm performance’, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41(5), 773–99. Young, G. (2017), ‘From protection to repression: the politics of street vending in Kampala’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 11(4), 714–33. Young, G. (2018), ‘De-democratisation and the rights of street vendors in Kampala, Uganda’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 22(8), 1007–29. Young, G. (2019), ‘The State and the Origins of Informal Economic Activity: Insights from Kampala’, Urban Forum, 30(4), 407–23. Zhang, Q. and Z. Pan (2013), ‘The transformation of urban vegetable retail in China: wet markets, supermarkets and informal markets in Shanghai’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43(3), 497–518.

11. The gender–urban-food interface in the Global South Liam Riley and Belinda Dodson

1. INTRODUCTION Social categories that define men and women, boys, and girls, based on concepts of masculinity and femininity, play a key role in household food security in cities of the Global South, just as gendered economic, environmental, and demographic processes shape urban food systems. Food is fundamental to core development goals: healthy people and environments, vibrant cultural and community life, and inclusive societies. The particular ways in which gender, food, and urbanization intertwine varies by context, but their fundamental interdependence is true for all cities. The aim of this chapter is to bring together some vibrant threads of academic research linking gender, poverty, and food, specifically in the urban context. We begin by describing the gender–urbanfood interface, pointing out gaps and possibilities in theorizing this interconnection. In section 3, we interrogate conceptualizations of the household in household food security as it appears at the gender–urban-food interface. In section 4 we discuss household food security strategies and the urban contexts within which they operate. Section 5 examines nutrition and food choices: what do people eat and why? The chapter concludes by pointing to policy and research directions rooted in the gender–urban-food interface.

2. THE GENDER–URBAN-FOOD INTERFACE This chapter reflects a decade of collaborative research applying a gender lens to household food security in Southern African cities, led by the African Food Security Urban Network (Dodson et al., 2012; Riley and Dodson, 2014, 2016a, 2016b). At the outset, the prospect of applying a gender lens to this research seemed straightforward – expansive bodies of scholarship existed in urban development, food security, and gender inequality in the region – but we have found a lack of broad-based theorization drawing these rich areas of scholarship together. Alice Hovorka’s contributions to feminist research on urban and peri-urban agriculture in Botswana is a notable exception (Hovorka, 2006, 2012). Her “feminist foodscapes framework” has shown “that gender 218

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dynamics permeate all scales, realms, and actors associated with the urban food system, even when gender is not self-evident” (2013, p. 123). According to Hovorka, gender and food are “power-laden realms that produce and reproduce difference and inequality between men and women through their connections” (2013, p. 125). In this way, they are simultaneously universal and personal, material and ideological. The ubiquity, power, and changing characteristics of food and gender are matched by the urban component of the interface, which incredibly claims to describe the environments of more than half the world’s population as one “type” of place (Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Robinson, 2011). Carolyn Steele (2008, p. ix) wrote that “food and cities are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they are almost too big to see. Yet if you put them together, a remarkable relationship emerges.” The very existence of cities is predicated on food being available, and urbanization of economies, societies, and spaces has shaped the food system in myriad ways: from how food is produced and distributed, to what we eat, when, where, and why. Drawing further attention to the gender–urban-food interface entails summarizing academic debates and omitting some nuance for the sake of painting a larger picture. In this spirit, we submit the following: that urban food security literature has not adequately engaged with the field of gender and development, or with feminist food studies; that gender and urban poverty literature has not adequately engaged with the field of food studies; and that gender and food/gender and nutrition literature has not adequately considered the significance of urbanization. Addressing these heuristically staged gaps can help to foster an integrative understanding of food security, working to challenge the silos that characterize neoliberal approaches to development in the 21st century (Sen and Mukherjee, 2014; Struckman, 2018). The need for this integrative approach arises, in part, from the reality that urban populations in the Global South are increasingly female: increased female migration and the demographic reality that women outlive men mean that women will soon make up the majority of urban citizens (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). It is widely observed that gender and poverty are closely linked in urban environments, although the causal mechanisms implied by the intersecting trends of the feminization of poverty and the urbanization of poverty continue to generate debate (Bradshaw et al., 2017). There are many ways that urban life works against the economic interests of women, such as in urban labour market segmentation, built environments that separate home and work spaces, cities where women cannot travel safely, or the lack of infrastructure that greatly increases the time cost of reproductive tasks (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka and Kiwala, 2013). Food can be linked to each of these factors: lower incomes suppress food access, built environments shape the physical accessibility of food, constrained mobility limits food access options, and food preparation is one of the costliest reproductive tasks in terms of time. On the other hand, in

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contextually specific ways, urbanization is also associated with changing gender roles that can open up new economic, social, and political opportunities for women, and redefine gender identities for men and women (Chant, 2013; Evans, 2014). Pro-poor, gender-informed food systems can be instrumental in unlocking these potential benefits of urbanization for women. The gender–urban-food interface captures these multiple linkages. Its potential value is to expose the extensive effects of policies, practices, economic changes, and social conventions that reverberate across academic and development policy worlds. One of the constraints on connecting gender, food, and cities is the lack of disaggregated data, whether in terms of urban-specific data on food and poverty (Satterwaithe, 2014), food and nutrition security data on urban households (Ruel et al., 2017), or gender-disaggregated data on food and nutrition in cities of the Global South. The following section turns attention to a key challenge in understanding the current state of urban food security from a gender perspective: the use of the household as a social unit, which binds men and women together, and erases important intra-household differences.

3. GENDERING URBAN HOUSEHOLDS IN FOOD SECURITY RESEARCH An exploration of the gender–urban-food interface necessarily entails confronting perennial problems with the use of “household” as the basis for measuring and discussing food security prevalence in cities (Carr, 2006; Coates, 2013; Webb et al., 2006). Reflecting on our own experience of working with a large food security dataset of over 6000 urban households, we can attest to the challenge of teasing out gender differences between men and women from the differences between entire households (Dodson et al., 2012). Defined as the group of people who “normally eat from the same pot”, household-level data is predicated on the assumption that all members of a food secure household are food secure individuals, even though there is ample evidence that intra-household gender differences often map onto differing experiences of food security within households (Bargain et al., 2018; de Vreyer and Lambert, 2018; Quisumbing, 2013). These dynamics were more easily teased out in qualitative research we conducted in Blantyre, Malawi, during which residents were asked open-ended questions, including questions about how food was distributed and allocated within their households (Riley, 2013; Riley and Dodson, 2014, 2016a). The more detailed qualitative view illustrated the vast diversity of households – each subject to frequent changes in membership – even within a single small city. In many urban environments like Blantyre, economic precarity also means that households can experience dramatic changes in food security status.

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Despite the complexity of the household as a social unit for food security measurement, its importance in terms of daily food procurement and consumption practices justifies its central position in the food security literature. Researchers often use the concept of the “female-headed household” as a way of identifying gendered vulnerability to hunger and poverty in household-level data. The widespread adoption of female-headed households in global development literature came with the increased influence of feminist researchers who challenged conventional “Western” assumptions (Varley, 1996). A pioneering report on female-headed households in development found a “direct relationship between modernization and [the] rise of female-headed households” (Buvinić et al., 1978, p. 1). The report, which the authors acknowledged was based on very limited data, linked urbanization (a hallmark of “modernization”), female headship, and poverty. Subsequent empirical evidence has undermined these associations as a universal rule (Quisumbing et al., 2001) and female household headship in cities is now treated with more sophistication and complexity than the early form of nuclear households without men. In one study accounting for additional factors such as age, education level, number of members, income, and type of food security being measured, gender of the household head is shown to be one of several factors influencing which households are food secure (Riley and Legwegoh, 2018). Structural contextual factors such as the availability of social services, gender discrimination in employment, and social attitudes toward women’s independence, shape gendered access to the financial and other resources that allow households to be food secure. In keeping with this contextual diversity, the gender–urban-food interface highlights the different meanings of household in different parts of the world, which can be masked in large-scale data based on standardized definitions (Coates et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2015; Randall et al., 2011). Differences in the nature of households in Nanjing (China) and Maputo (Mozambique) were exposed in a comparative study of the two cities for the Hungry Cities Partnership (Riley and Caesar, 2018). In Nanjing, all households are registered with the state and this administrative definition of household membership and headship was used in the survey, whereas in Maputo, where there is no formal system of household registration, households were primarily defined by respondents in terms of who “eats from the same pot”. The example of administrative differences in Nanjing and Maputo is the tip of the iceberg of diverse cultural, religious, economic, and administrative factors that shape household definitions in cities across the Global South. Moreover, there is vast internal social and cultural diversity in many cities, along with rapidly changing social norms. Food security researchers need to be responsive to the changing nature of urban households, not only in empirical terms of size and composition, but also in how they are conceptualized, experienced, and reproduced. The ability for

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people to change their attitudes about gender roles and identities appears to be enhanced in the urban context, even if economic, legal, and political structures are much slower to change. One international study found that urban men in the Global South were far more likely than their rural counterparts to accept women’s expanded roles outside the home and men’s expanded roles in the domestic sphere (Barker, 2014). This finding resonated with our qualitative work in Blantyre, based on which we concluded that performing an urban masculinity entailed accepting changing gender roles, or at least saying so to the researcher if not actually taking more responsibility for daily food provisioning (Riley and Dodson, 2016a). In terms of the gender–urban-food interface, enlightened attitudes among urban men is insufficient change without the food component, such as real time invested by men in domestic tasks, and material changes to the food system to make it more gender equitable across a city. Nonetheless, it is encouraging that changing urban households could become more gender equitable and, in the process, more food secure. The following section builds on this notion by reviewing household strategies and how they shape, and are shaped by, urban spaces and environments.

4. HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY STRATEGIES IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS Moving on from what households are, this section explores the gendered nature of what households do – or rather what household members do, collectively and separately, to feed themselves. At the gender–urban-food interface, research on topics as diverse as urban livelihoods, household assets, labour market segmentation, infrastructure (including what tools, appliances, and energy sources are available in the home for cooking), social norms, and legal entitlements is relevant to understanding household food security. Internal and external power dynamics, and short- and long-term conditions, shape the calculus of how households strategize who goes (or is sent) out to work, who does what reproductive tasks, who earns what, who makes budget decisions, and who is responsible for purchasing, cooking, allocating, serving, and generally worrying about food. The diversity of urban environments means that there is geographical variability in how these decisions are conditioned, but contemporary urban life is generally characterized by rapid change, such that urban households are constantly adapting to new challenges and opportunities. The intra-household bargaining framework captures the internal politics of households, where members often have competing interests and control over resources, and decision making is gendered (Agarwal, 1997). Women’s bargaining power within the household is enhanced by increased levels of education, income, and assets (Doss, 2013). An increasing trend in low-income urban

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households, which dovetails with the discussion of female-headed households, is a shift toward female breadwinners and de facto female-headed households (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). There is reason to expect this trend to have some positive impact on urban food security outcomes. Our analyses of households in Southern African cities have shown that, when other factors are controlled for (such as household income and education of the household head), the disadvantage of having a female head of household disappears, and in some cases even becomes an advantage for household members (Dodson et al., 2012; McCordic et al., 2018; Riley and Legwegoh, 2018). Similar findings were observed in urban Brazil (Felker-Kantor and Wood, 2012), suggesting a global trend that builds on women’s changing economic opportunities in cities, their food knowledge and provisioning experience, and their conventional reproductive roles. These observations resonate with ample evidence from rural or rural/ urban aggregated studies showing a correlation between women’s control over financial and other household resources, and positive outcomes for children’s nutrition and education (Burroway, 2016; Carlson et al., 2015; Kennedy and Peters, 1992; Quisumbing et al., 1998). Yet, as Levin et al. (1999) noted, even though women household heads in Accra, Ghana, were relatively successful at minimizing household food insecurity on low incomes, there was a high cost in sacrifices of other long-term investments, such as health and education, and a chronic vulnerability to external shocks, such as food price spikes. Understanding urban household vulnerability requires understanding that the household food security strategies of the poor in many cities take place within a context of largely informal food systems and informal sector economies. Chen et al. (2016, p. 3) note that the informalization of urban livelihoods is a growing trend worldwide: “in today’s global economy, trends in trade and technology have led to a reduction in the employment intensity of growth”. This suggests that urban expansion and the rising prosperity of societies in the Global South is not translating into secure, well-paid employment as it did in industrialized countries in the 20th century. The majority of the world’s employed people (61.2 per cent) work informally and 43.7 per cent of the world’s urban employed people work informally (ILO, 2018, p. 20). More than half (52.6 per cent) of workers in urban areas of emerging and developing countries are employed informally, and the figure for African urban workers is three in four (76.3 per cent) (ILO, 2018, p. 26). Whereas a higher percentage of employed men (63 per cent) as compared to employed women (58.1 per cent) are employed informally, higher rates of women in informal employment are found in countries with lower GDP per capita, and informally employed women tend to be in more vulnerable and precarious positions (ILO, 2018, p. 20). It is also important to note that more women than men do not participate in the labour force and therefore are not counted in these figures. Informal work is diverse and not always correlated with poverty, but it is generally emblematic of

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economic precarity and a lack of formal support structures such as unemployment insurance, pension savings, and parental and medical leave. In general, informal employment is not a choice, but the result of a lack of opportunity for formal employment (ILO, 2018). The impact on food security is difficulty in earning money to access food in cities. Informality is an important concept in the gender–urban-food interface because urban food systems make up a large share of urban informal economies (Atkinson, 1995; Crush and Frayne, 2011; Skinner and Haysom, 2017). The food system provides livelihoods, especially for women, alongside food distribution and retailing systems that are important for urban residents, especially low-income residents, to access food. Perhaps ironically, the very informal systems that distribute food throughout urban neighbourhoods at affordable prices also produce the kinds of precarious informal employment that sustain high levels of poverty (Chen et al., 2016; Johnston-Anumonwo and Doane, 2011; Mupedziswa and Gumbo, 2001). Observing occupational choice and food security in 14 “predominantly slum communities” in cities across the Global South, Floro and Swain (2012, p. 89) found that “the fact that the majority of workers in these areas tend to find work in the informal sector, earn variable income, and have little or no access to private or social insurance, has made access to sufficient food a grave problem”. The cycle of low income, a reduced food budget, and food insecurity is gendered in the sense that women earn less for their informal labour and are expected to dedicate a larger share of their income to food. The gendered nature of informal urban food systems goes beyond their economic dimension. Markets, street vendors, neighbourhood shops, taverns, and restaurants are essential place-making elements of cities. Many cities have vibrant traditions of market women and prosperous street food vendors whose economic activities are technically informal, yet deeply embedded in urban economic and social life (Guyer, 1987; Tinker, 1997). Wardrop’s (2006) case study in Durban, South Africa, revealed the important role of women street vendors in reproducing urban culture while feeding people in public and private spaces. Kawarazuka et al. (2018) found that men and women operated differently within the urban food system in Hanoi, Vietnam, with women gaining access to resources though social networks and men preferring “capital-based access” with limited social interactions. This social dimension also extends to human-scale rural–urban linkages, with distinctly gendered roles of food production, trading, and transporting food “informally” between places (Agergaard et al., 2010; Bah et al., 2003; Flynn, 2005). An illustrative example of this dynamic, from our qualitative research in Blantyre, was the case of a retired man and his wife who attended all major social events in his wife’s village, such as weddings, funerals, and holidays, in part to maintain the social ties that underpinned her customary farmland entitlement in the matrilineal community

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(Riley, 2013). The maize they produced on this farmland was essential to their food security as an urban household living on income from a small publicsector pension. A discussion of the food security strategies of the urban poor would be incomplete without reference to the vast literature on urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global South (de Zeeuw and Drechel, 2015; Lee-Smith, 2013). The general impact of urban and peri-urban agriculture on food security appears to be context-specific rather than uniformly important (Crush et al., 2018). The scale of these activities ranges from the very small, such as table-top gardens (White, 2015), to large-scale commercial enterprises in and around cities (Hovorka, 2006). The scale and type of operation in urban food production tends to be gendered, with women engaging in small-scale subsistence production (Hovorka and Lee-Smith, 2006). This division reflects men’s control over resources, such as land and financial capital, required for large-scale enterprises (Hovorka et al., 2009). From the vantage point of the gender–urban-food interface, the socio-cultural function of urban food production comes into view. Slater (2001, p. 635) found the academic discourse on urban agriculture in Southern Africa to be overly focused on economic aspects of food production, arguing instead that: “women use [urban agriculture] in processes of empowerment, to establish social networks, to symbolise a sense of security and to encourage community development”. This social-network building is also reflected in urban placemaking in Shillington’s (2008, 2013) research in Managua, Nicaragua. She found that food-bearing trees planted in household gardens were not only a source of food, but also critical to the production of a sense of home within the city. Caring for the trees was an extension of women’s roles as food providers and producers of spaces that are recognizably homelike. In her analysis of micro-gardening in M’Bour, Senegal, White (2015) demonstrated that domestic food production is a performance co-constitutive of gender identities and of the city itself. The gender–urban-food interface reflects the broader significance of urban household food strategies beyond the question of household food security per se. These food strategies are shaped by the urban environments in which they take place and the often harsh economic conditions that the urban poor contend with. At the same time, activities derived from these strategies help to constitute the city, both in terms of what urban life means and the physical space itself. These, in turn, contribute to the reproduction of gender roles and identities in cities. Activities and processes driven by household food consumption are integral to understanding urban change, and are an important element of planning and policy responses to the challenges of sustainable and inclusive urbanism.

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5. GENDERED FOOD CONSUMPTION AND NUTRITION IN CITIES Moving on from what households are and do to what they eat, this section draws attention to nutrition security on the gender–urban-food interface. The nutritional transition from locally sourced, minimally processed traditional foods, to highly processed foods made from globally traded commodities, is a major challenge for urban food security in the Global South (Abrahams et al., 2011; Bloem and de Pee, 2017). The transition is associated with rising levels of obesity and non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, giving rise to the “triple burden of malnutrition – the coexistence of hunger (insufficient caloric intake to meet dietary energy requirements), undernutrition (prolonged inadequate intake of macro- and micronutrients), and overnutrition in the form of overweight and obesity” (IFPRI, 2017, p. 13). These apparently divergent trends are occurring within the same urban populations, with the health effects of malnourishment and obesity sometimes experienced in the same household or the same individual (Ruel et al., 2017). Women are more likely to be obese, particularly in developing countries and among the urban poor (Kantor and Caballero, 2012). The nutritional aspects of food security in cities intersect with gender concerns at the scale of the body; men and women have different nutritional needs over their life course and in relation to reproductive health. This is an important addition to the critique of the unitary “food secure household” in that the household could be food secure for a man, but lacking appropriate foods for pregnant or lactating women. Research in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (Becquey and Martin-Prevel, 2010) and Bamako, Mali (Kennedy et al., 2009) found evidence that urban women’s diets were not meeting the micronutrient needs for women of reproductive age. A South African study analyzed results disaggregated into five place-based categories of women – rural women living in deep rural areas, rural women from farms, women living in informal settlements, urban middleclass women, and urban upper-class women – and found that only urban upperclass women came close to meeting most of the measured micronutrient needs (Vorster et al., 2011). These findings went against the assumption that urban diets would provide adequate micronutrients because they contain a variety of foods and artificially enriched processed foods. While these types of foods are more widely available in cities, the findings suggest they are inaccessible, undesirable, or unincorporated into diets for other reasons. Legwegoh and Hovorka (2016) found that the benefits of a diverse and abundant availability of foods in Gaborone, Botswana, were outweighed by a cultural preference for beef, reliance on food eaten outside the home, and convenience foods with less nutritional benefit.

The gender–urban-food interface in the Global South  227

The increased share of food eaten outside the home, or chosen for convenience over taste or nutrition, is partly related to women’s changing economic roles in cities – more work outside the home and consequently less time for food-related tasks (Ruel et al., 2017). Convenience foods require less-frequent shopping trips because they are processed and preserved, take less time and energy to prepare, and require less cooking and preparation than traditional foods. These considerations make the trade-off in terms of nutrition worthwhile for women who are working outside the home and have less time to shop and cook. These changes are pronounced in middle-income countries in the Global South, where convenience foods are readily available due to global supply chain influence, supermarket penetration, and industrialized food processing. The availability of these options, and the tools for cooking and storing food that are more widely available in urban settings in middle-income countries, can have a liberating effect on women’s domestic labour. In these ways, global economic change, changing gender roles, and nutritional changes are intertwined in cities of the Global South. The nutritional transition thesis can sometimes imply an imposition of change from the outside, but it is mediated through additional local factors influencing consumer choice and food preferences. Urban diets are characteristically eclectic and diverse relative to rural diets (Ruel et al., 2017). Meat is widely seen to represent the prosperity associated with urban lifestyles. Processed foods are highly marketed to urban mass markets, and a common sales pitch is to associate these foods with outwardly oriented global cultures, prosperity, and leisure (Noack and Pouw, 2015). We explored these dynamics in terms of place- and gender-based associations of specific foods during focus-group discussions in Blantyre (Riley and Dodson, 2016b). The evolving meaning of foods in cities is intertwined with evolving gender identities, and, in the case of Malawi, this dynamic disrupts the linearity of the nutrition transition model. There was a clear overlap between foods associated with rurality and foods associated with women, but little parallel overlap of men’s foods and urban foods. We surmise that part of the reason for this is the colonial legacy of what “urban” signifies in the Malawian context (prosperous, cosmopolitan, English-speaking), and the limited relevance of this idea for people living in informal settlements. The gender–urban-food interface helps to expose localized complexity, which represents the real-world conditions in which people are making daily food choices – albeit still economically constrained. What people eat in cities of the Global South is a reflection of their intersecting identities as urban, gendered, classed, and belonging to contextually specific religious, regional, or ethnic groups. It is also a reflection of the globalized food system and the foods available and accessible in urban environments. The gender–urban-food interface brings the personal and the global into a single framework, prioritizing an integrated and multi-scalar understanding

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as the ultimate research goal. It provides a way of grappling with inter-related economic and socio-cultural factors that shape food choices and affect the outcomes of development interventions aimed at such goals as gender-sensitive nutrition security.

6. CONCLUSION Engaging with the gender–urban-food interface can help to build bridges among the silos of development theory and practice in order to show the intersecting dimensions of development challenges such as hunger and food insecurity, gender inequality, and urban poverty. This can support policy approaches that minimize unintended consequences and optimize added benefits. Achieving food security for cities in the Global South necessitates grappling with practical challenges (e.g. building market spaces, facilitating affordable food sources, strengthening urban livelihoods) and strategic elements (e.g. envisioning sustainability in the local environment, promoting democratic institutions for local decision making, realizing the right to food for the urban poor). The gender–urban-food interface and the integrative thinking it generates is useful not only for understanding the problem, but also for thinking through solutions with multiple benefits. Our exploration of the gender–urban-food interface has briefly covered a handful of topics that resonated with our gendered analysis of household food security in Southern Africa. These topics included female-headed households, intra-household inequalities, informal employment and informal food systems in cities, urban and peri-urban agriculture, nutrition, and food choice. The research we have reviewed demonstrates that gender shapes food practices and food security in cities of the Global South; that food and urban food systems shape gendered practices, roles, and identities in cities of the Global South; and that gendered food practices and consumption patterns shape and are shaped by urban environments, cultures, and economies. Our contribution sketches a broad picture that illustrates multiple conceptual and empirical inter-­ connections that can deepen overall understanding of urban food security in the Global South. We hope this will inspire further research exploring these connections in specific city contexts, including their embeddedness in the wider systems through which food is circulated, accessed, and consumed.

REFERENCES Abrahams, Z., Z. Mchiza and N. Steyn (2011), ‘Diet and mortality rates in Sub-Saharan Africa: Stages in the nutrition transition’, BMC Public Health, 11, 801.

The gender–urban-food interface in the Global South  229 Agarwal, B. (1997), ‘“Bargaining” and gender relations: Within and beyond the household’, Feminist Economics, 3(1), 1–51. Agergaard, J., N. Fold and K. Gough (eds) (2010), Rural–Urban Dynamics: Livelihoods, Mobility and Markets in African and Asian Frontiers, New York: Routledge. Atkinson, S. (1995), ‘Approaches and actors in urban food security in developing countries’, Habitat International, 19, 151–63. Bah, M., S. Cisse, B. Diyamett, G. Diallo, F. Lerise, D. Okali, E. Okpara, J. Olawoye and C. Tacoli (2003), ‘Changing rural–urban linkages in Mali, Nigeria and Tanzania’, Environment and Urbanization, 15, 13–23. Bargain, O., P. Kwenda and M. Ntuli (2018), ‘Gender bias and the intrahousehold distribution of resources: Evidence from African nuclear households in South Africa’, Journal of African Economics, 27(2), 201–26. Barker, G. (2014), ‘A radical agenda for men’s caregiving’, IDS Bulletin, 45(1), 85–90. Becquey, E. and Y. Martin-Prevel (2010), ‘Micronutrient adequacy of women’s diet in urban Burkina Faso is low’, The Journal of Nutrition, 140, 2079S–2085S. Bloem, S. and S. de Pee (2017), ‘Developing approaches to achieve adequate nutrition among urban populations requires an understanding of urban development’, Global Food Security, 12, 80–88. Bradshaw, S., S. Chant and B. Linneker (2017), ‘Gender and poverty: What we know, don’t know, and need to know for Agenda 2030’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 24(12), 1667–88. Burroway, R. (2016), ‘Empowering women, strengthening children: A multi-level analysis of gender inequality and child malnutrition in developing countries’, in Gender and Food: From Production to Consumption and After, Advances in Gender Research, 22, 117–42, Emerald Publishing. Buvinić, M., N. H. Youssef and B. Von Elm (1978), Women-Headed Households: The Ignored Factor in Development Planning, Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women. Carlson, G., K. Kordas and L. Murray-Kolb (2015), ‘Associations between women’s autonomy and child nutritional status: A review of the literature’, Maternal & Child Nutrition, 11, 452–82. Carr, E. (2006), ‘Development and the household: Missing the point?’, GeoJournal, 62, 71–83. Chant, S. (2013), ‘Cities through a “gender lens”: A golden “urban age” for women in the global South?’, Environment & Urbanization, 25(1), 9–29. Chant, S. and C. McIlwaine (2016), Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South: Towards a Feminised Urban Future, New York: Routledge. Chen, M., S. Roever and C. Skinner (2016), ‘Urban livelihoods: Reviewing the evidence in support of the New Urban Agenda’, Environment & Urbanization, 28(2), 1–5. Coates, J. (2013), ‘Build it back better: Deconstructing food security for improved measurement and action’, Global Food Security, 2, 188–94. Coates, J., E. Frongillo, B. Rogers, P. Webb, P. Wilde and R. Houser (2006), ‘Commonalities in the experience of household food insecurity across cultures: What are measures missing?’, The Journal of Nutrition, 136(5), 1438S–1448S. Crush, J. and B. Frayne (2011), ‘Supermarket expansion and the informal food economy in southern African cities: Implications for urban food security’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37, 781–807. Crush, J., A. Hovorka and D. Tevera (2018), ‘Farming the city: The broken promise of urban agriculture’, in B. Frayne, J. Crush and C. McCordic (eds), Food and Nutrition Security in Southern African Cities, New York: Earthscan/Routledge, pp. 101–17. De Vreyer, P. and S. Lambert (2018), By Ignoring Intra-Household Inequality, Do We Underestimate the Extent of Poverty?, PSE Working Papers 2018-12, Paris: Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques. De Zeeuw, H. and P. Dreschel (2015), Cities and Agriculture: Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems, New York: Routledge. Dodson, B., A. Chiweza and L. Riley (2012), ‘Gender and food insecurity in Southern African cities’, Urban Food Security Series No. 10, AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network), Cape Town, SA.

230  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Doss, C. (2013), Intrahousehold Bargaining and Resource Allocation in Developing Countries. Oxford: World Bank Research Observer. Evans, A. (2014), ‘“Women can do what men can do”: The causes and consequences of growing flexibility in gender divisions of labour in Kitwe, Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40(5), 981–98. Felker-Kantor, E. and C. Wood (2012), ‘Female-headed households and food insecurity in Brazil’, Food Security, 4, 607–17. Floro, M. and R. Swain (2013), ‘Food security, gender, and occupational choice among urban lowincome households’, World Development, 42, 89–99. Flynn, K. (2005), Food, Culture and Survival in an African City, New York: Palgrave. Guyer, J. (ed.) (1987), Feeding African cities: Studies in regional social history, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hovorka, A. (2006), ‘The No. 1 ladies’ poultry farm: A feminist political ecology of urban agriculture in Botswana’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 13, 207–25. Hovorka, A. (2012), ‘Women/chicken vs. men/cattle: Insights on gender–species intersectionality’, Geoforum, 43, 875–84. Hovorka, A. (2013), ‘The case for a feminist foodscapes framework: Lessons from research in urban Botswana’, Development, 56(1), 123–8. Hovorka, A. and D. Lee-Smith (2006), ‘Gendering the urban agriculture agenda’, in R. Veenhuizen (ed.), Cities Farming for the Future: Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities, Ottawa: IDRC, pp. 125–44. Hovorka, A., H. de Zeeuw and M. Njenga (eds) (2009), Women Feeding Cities: Mainstreaming Gender in Urban Agriculture and Food Security, Rugby: Practical Action Publishing. IFPRI (2017), Global Food Policy Report 2017, Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. ILO (2018), Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (Third Edition), Geneva: ILO. Johnston-Anumonwo, I. and D. Doane (2011), ‘Globalization, economic crisis and Africa’s informal economy women workers’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32, 8–21. Kantor, R. and B. Caballero (2012), ‘Global gender disparities in obesity: A review’, Advanced Nutrition, 3, 491–8. Kawarazuka, N., C. Béné and G. Prain (2018), ‘Adapting to a new urbanizing environment: Gendered strategies of Hanoi’s street food vendors’, Environment & Urbanization, 30(1), 233–48. Kennedy, E. and P. Peters (1992), ‘Household food security and child nutrition: The interaction of income and gender of household head’, World Development, 20(8), 1077–85. Kennedy, G., N. Fanou, C. Seghieri and I. Brouwer (2009), Dietary Diversity as a Measure of the Micronutrient Adequacy of Women’s Diets: Results from Bamako, Mali Site, Washington, DC: FANTA. Lee-Smith, D. (2013), ‘Which way for UPA in Africa?’, City, 17(1), 69–84. Legwegoh, A. and A. Hovorka (2016), ‘Exploring food choices within the context of nutritional security in Gaborone, Botswana’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 37, 76–93. Levin, C., M. Ruel, S. Morris, D. Maxwell, M. Armar-Klemesu and C. Ahiadeke (1999), ‘Working women in an urban setting: Traders, vendors and food security in Accra’, World Development, 27, 1977–91. Liu, H., T. Wahl, J. Seale and J. Bai (2015), ‘Household composition, income, and food-away-fromhome expenditure in urban China’, Food Policy, 51, 97–103. McCordic, C., L. Riley and I. Raimundo (2018), The Food Security Implications of Gendered Access to Education and Employment in Maputo. Hungry Cities Series No. 15, Cape Town: Hungry Cities Partnership. Mupedziswa, R. and P. Gumbo (2001), Women Informal Traders in Harare and the Struggle for Survival in an Environment of Economic Reform, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Noack, A. and N. Pouw (2015), ‘A blind spot in food and nutrition security: Where culture and social change shape the local food plate’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32, 169–82. Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, O. and L. Kiwala (2013), State of Women in Cities 2012–2013: Gender and the Prosperity of Cities. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.

The gender–urban-food interface in the Global South  231 Parnell, S. and J. Robinson (2012), ‘(Re)theorizing cities from the global south: Looking beyond neoliberalism’, Urban Geography, 33, 592–617. Quisumbing, A. (2013), ‘Generating evidence on individuals’ experience of food insecurity and vulnerability’, Global Food Security, 2(1), 50–55. Quisumbing, A., L. Haddad and C. Peña (2001), ‘Are women overrepresented among the poor? An analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries’, Journal of Development Economics, 66, 225–69. Quisumbing, A., L. Haddad, R. Meinzen-Dick and L. Brown (1998), ‘Gender issues for food security in developing countries: Implications for project design and implementation’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 19(4), 185–208. Randall, S., E. Coast and T. Leone (2011), ‘Cultural constructions of the concept of the household in sample surveys’, Population Studies: A Journal of Demography, 65(2), 217–29. Riley, L. (2013), Gendered Geographies of Food Security in Blantyre, Malawi, PhD Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Riley, L. and M. Caesar (2018), ‘Urban household food security in China and Mozambique: A gender-based comparative approach’, Development in Practice, 28(8), 1012–21. Riley, L. and B. Dodson (2014), ‘Gendered mobilities and food access in Blantyre, Malawi’, Urban Forum, 25, 227–39. Riley, L. and B. Dodson (2016a), ‘“Gender hates men”: Untangling gender and development discourses in food security fieldwork in urban Malawi’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 23(7), 1047–60. Riley, L. and B. Dodson (2016b), ‘Intersectional identities: Food, space and gender in urban Malawi’, Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 30(4), 53–61. Riley, L. and A. Legwegoh (2018), ‘Gender and food security: Household dynamics and outcomes’, in B. Frayne, J. Crush and C. McCordic (eds), Food and Nutrition Security in Southern African Cities, New York: Earthscan/Routledge, pp. 86–100. Robinson, J. (2011), ‘Cities in a world of cities: The comparative gesture’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35, 1–23. Ruel, M., J. Garrett, S. Yosef and M. Olivier (2017), ‘Urbanization, food security and nutrition’, in S. de Pee, D. Taren and M. Bloem (eds), Nutrition and Health in a Developing World 3rd Edition, New York: Springer and Humana Press, pp. 705–36. Satterthwaite, D. (2014), ‘Urban poverty in low- and middle-income countries’, in S. Parnell and S. Oldfield (eds), The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, London: Routledge, pp. 569–85. Sen, G. and A. Mukherjee (2014), ‘No empowerment without rights, no rights without politics: Gender-equality, MDGs and the post-2015 development agenda’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal for People-centred Development, 15, 188–202. Shillington, L. (2008), ‘Being(s) in relation at home: Socio-natures of patio “gardens” in Managua, Nicaragua’, Social & Cultural Geography, 9, 755–76. Shillington, L. (2013), ‘Right to food, right to the city: Household urban agriculture, and socio­ natural metabolism in Managua, Nicaragua’, Geoforum, 44, 103–11. Skinner, C. and G. Haysom (2017), The Informal Sector’s Role in Food Security: A Missing Link in Policy Debates?, Hungry Cities Series No 6. Cape Town: Hungry Cities Partnership. Slater, R. (2001), ‘Urban agriculture, gender and empowerment: An alternative view’, Development Southern Africa, 18(5), 635–50. Steele, C. (2008), Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, London: Chatto and Windus. Struckman, C. (2018), ‘A postcolonial feminist critique of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: A South African application’, Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 32(1), 12–24. Tinker, I. (1997), Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varley, A. (1996), ‘Women heading households: Some more equal than others?’, World Development, 2(3), 505–20.

232  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Vorster, H., A. Kruger and B. Margetts (2011), ‘The nutrition transition in Africa: Can it be steered in a more positive direction?’, Nutrients, 3, 429–41. Wardrop, J. (2006), ‘Private cooking, public eating: Women street vendors in South Durban’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 13(6), 677–83. Webb, P., J. Coates, E. Frongillo, B. Rogers, A. Swindale and P. Bilinsky (2006), ‘Measuring household food insecurity: Why it’s so important and yet so difficult to do’, The Journal of Nutrition, 136(5), 1404S–1408S. White, S. (2015), ‘A gendered practice of urban cultivation: Performing power and well-being in M’Bour, Senegal’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 22(4), 544–60.

12. Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries Piero Conforti, Giulia Ponzini and Alberto Zezza

1. INTRODUCTION The topic of urban agriculture has attracted considerable attention of late. This is hardly surprising given the centrality of urbanization and food systems in many global debates on issues related to socio-economic development, public health, global food security and the environment. One aspect that is missing in this burgeoning literature is a truly global account of the extent of the urban agriculture phenomenon, and its role in urban livelihoods. This chapter aims to fill that gap by taking a snapshot of the urban agricultural landscape across a sample of 31 low- and middle-income countries in five regions. Whereas the focus of much of the urban agriculture literature aims at assessing whether these activities contribute to urban livelihoods, the environment and the sustainability of food systems, the stance taken in this chapter is mostly descriptive. Like any economic activity, urban agriculture can be more or less pro-poor and more or less environmentally friendly, depending on the overall structure of the economy, the policy settings, an entire host of factors that drive productivity growth, the distribution of resources within a society, and interactions between the economy and the environment. Needless to say, these vary greatly over time and space. We take a more detached view than much of the policy-oriented literature on urban agriculture, and aim to provide a purely descriptive picture of what national data say about the prevalence of urban agriculture in low- and middleincome countries, who practises it, its importance for livelihoods, and a few basic facts around its features and the characteristics of households that engage in it. In particular we will focus on (i) the extent of participation in and income from urban agriculture; (ii) the importance of the urban sector in agricultural production; (iii) the importance of urban agriculture across expenditure quintiles; and (iv) a profile of living standards of urban farmers. Getting these basic facts right, grounded in hard, good-quality data, is an important first step in framing actionable policy questions. To achieve this goal, we utilize a sample of national household surveys that collectively represent 2.3 billion people, or close to one-third of the 7.6 billion world population figure estimated by UN World Population Prospects 2018. In 233

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terms of the urban population residing in low- and middle-income countries, the sample accounts for about 809 million urban residents, or a quarter of the 3.2 billion people living in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries. While still partial in coverage, this represents by far the most comprehensive global assessment of the extent of urban agriculture in developing regions that we are aware of. In the next section we introduce the main domains of the analysis, putting them in the context of recent literature on urban agriculture. Section 3 describes the data set used for the analysis, and Section 4 presents the results. Section 5 concludes.

2. QUANTIFYING THE IMPORTANCE OF URBAN AGRICULTURE The first step in quantifying the urban agriculture phenomenon has to be its definition. Most studies define urban agriculture as the production of crop and livestock goods within or on the fringes of cities and towns. Some authors adopt a more extended vision and include forestry and aquaculture production in the set of agricultural activities practised in urban areas (Drescher and Iaquinta, 1999; Egal et al., 2001; Ghosh, 2004; Mougeot, 1994). More recently, Thebo et al. (2014, p. 2) introduced a definition based on “the spatial coincidence of urban extents (with populations exceeding 50 000) and areas of crop cultivation”. In this chapter we adopt the same definition as Zezza and Tasciotti (2010), who define urban agriculture as any self-employed agricultural activity practised by urban residents. While somewhat imprecise, as urban residents may be farming plots of land or rearing livestock located outside urban and periurban areas, this is the only practical definition that can be used with nationally representative household surveys. With few exceptions, these surveys include information on the residence, not on the location of agricultural activities. As discussed in Zezza and Tasciotti (2010), the definition aligns with national definitions of urban and rural areas. One drawback, however, is that these are highly heterogeneous across countries. Early attempts to quantify the global diffusion of agriculture in urban areas include the UNDP (1996) and FAO (1996). The divergence between the two sources testifies to the confusion that surrounds the few global estimates that are available, with the former estimating 800 million people engaged in urban agriculture, of which 200 million were producing goods for market sale, and a full-time job equivalent estimate in production and processing of 150 million. These are possibly the most widely cited figures on global diffusion of urban agriculture, even though it has repeatedly been noted how they are little more

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than guesstimates based on “expert knowledge” rather than hard numbers (Ellis and Sumberg, 1998; Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010; Orsini, 2013; Hamilton et al., 2014). At the same time, FAO (1996) had put forward an estimate of just 100 million people generating some income from agricultural activities in urban areas. Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) use nationally representative household survey data from 15 developing countries from four regions to estimate the rate of participation of urban households in agriculture and the income share that these households derive from agricultural activities. Participation rates varied from 11 per cent in Indonesia to 70 per cent in Nicaragua, with a median of 30 per cent of households involved in urban agriculture. Hamilton et al. (2014) assume that the urban agriculture participation rates for the 15 countries included in the Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) study are representative at continental level, and based on that assumption extrapolate global totals for developing regions to arrive at a global estimate of 265 million households engaged in urban crop production in developing countries: 29 million in Africa, 182 million in Asia, 39 million in Latin America and 15 million in Eastern Europe. The 90 per cent confidence interval for their global estimates is quite large, ranging from 207 to 349 million households. Focusing on land rather than people, and using geographic data for the location of cultivated areas, Thebo et al. (2014) conclude that the global area of urban irrigated croplands is about 24 million ha (11.0 per cent of all irrigated croplands), while urban rainfed croplands cover approximately 44 million ha (4.7 per cent of all rainfed croplands). Despite the lack of recent, global and comparable figures on urban agriculture, the literature is vast, and the topic is garnering increasing interest. A few key thematic areas have attracted most of the attention of the literature on the socio-economic implications of urban agriculture. An important part of the literature focuses on the significance of urban agriculture in providing access to diversified diets and nutritionally rich food (Mawoneke and King, 1998; Maxwell, 1995; Warren et al., 2015; Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010). Some studies focus on the importance of urban agriculture for urban development through its role as a source of income for urban households or increasing the stability of household food consumption patterns (Mougeot, 2000; Redwood, 2008; Zezza and Tasciotti, 2010), in generating employment opportunities (Agbonlahor et al., 2007) and stimulating the development of local markets for agricultural inputs and related agricultural activities (Mougeot, 2000; van Veenhuizen, 2006). To characterize the socio-economic implications of the urban agriculture phenomenon beyond the number of people and the amount of land connected to it, we also investigate the role of agriculture in urban household income and the socio-economic characteristics of the households involved. As reviewed in Zezza and Tasciotti (2010), the production of agricultural goods by urban

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residents is a significant source of income, although income shares are lower than participation figures. In the sample for that study, agricultural income shares of urban households vary from 1 per cent to 27 per cent, and are less than 10 per cent in most of the cases. African countries are the exception, with shares of around 20 per cent or more. It is also argued that poor households are those most involved in urban agriculture, lacking other means of subsistence (Enete and Achike, 2008; Lado, 1990; Rogerson, 1993; Ruel et al., 1998). However, in Dossa et al. (2011) the picture is more mixed and urban agriculture is a livelihood strategy adopted across all socio-economic groups in their study of West Africa. Indeed, households of different socio-economic status participate in urban agriculture with different purposes. While poorest households use urban agriculture to improve their nutritional status and as a source of income (Cissé et al., 2005; Gbadegesin, 1991; Maxwell, 1995; Mwangi and Foeken, 1996; Simatele and Binns, 2008), for higher-income households in urban areas, agriculture constitutes a way of diversifying their incomes (Binns and Lynch, 1998; May and Rogerson, 1995; McClintock, 2010; Page, 2002; Smit et al., 1996; Smith, 2001) or saving on the amount spent for food consumption, thus increasing disposable income (Dossa et al., 2011; Maxwell, 1995; Rose and Charlton, 2002). Much of the literature investigating the importance of urban agriculture describes its role in shaping the well-being of urban households based on case studies or narrow geographical regions (Armar-Klemesu, 2000; AsomaniBoateng, 2007; Birley and Lock, 1998; Cissé et al., 2005; Danso et al., 2002; de Bon et al., 2010; Diogo et al., 2010; Egal et al., 2001; Egziaber et al., 1994; Ellis and Sumberg, 1998; Graefe et al., 2008; Hallett et al., 2017; Maxwell, 2003; Maxwell et al., 2000; McMichael, 2000; Memon and Lee-Smith, 1993; Moustier and Danso, 2006; Orsini, 2013; Predotova et al., 2010; Smit et al., 1996; van Veenhuizen, 2006). Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) is the only study, to our knowledge, that has attempted to assess the importance of urban agriculture in terms of household participation and the income derived from it, using national representative data from household surveys that are comparable in terms of their definition of agricultural activities. The study covered 15 countries, selected to ensure geographic coverage across developing regions. The present study revisits and expands on the Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) paper using similar data and a similar analytical approach, but utilizes a new data set with expanded coverage as described in the next section.

3. DATA DESCRIPTIONS AND DEFINITIONS The motivation for revisiting Zezza and Tasciotti’s (2010) analysis came from the release of the Rural Livelihoods Information System (RuLIS) a joint

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  237

initiative of FAO, the World Bank and IFAD, in which household survey data are used to compute standardized livelihoods indicators, and disseminate a set of standardized micro-variables on households’ incomes and livelihoods. This data set offers much wider coverage by including surveys on 31 countries, compared with the 15 surveys from the Rural Income Generating Activities (RIGA) data set used in Zezza and Tasciotti (2010). In terms of the global population, the new data set offers even greater coverage than suggested by the mere difference in the number of countries. It includes India, which alone accounts for a substantial share of the world population, and Mexico, the second largest country in Latin America. The key advantages of this type of data set, compared to the approach taken in the city case studies, is that it uses nationally representative data, a comparable definition of agricultural activities, and a comparative international perspective. As noted earlier, one weakness in terms of comparability is the definition of what constitutes an urban area. Countries have their own unique mechanisms for defining what constitutes urban or rural, which determines the definitions used in the dataset. However, using government definitions has the advantage of reflecting local information about what constitutes the urban, and reflects the approach that may be used by national and local governments in designing policies and administering programmes governing or regulating urban agriculture. An additional important caveat is that, given the information available, we identify an agricultural activity to be urban from the domicile of the household as, with few exceptions, the surveys do not include information on the location of the activity. This makes it likely that the agricultural production activities of some of the urban farm households we identify in this study may actually be taking place in nearby rural areas. In that sense, the study focuses on urban households’ involvement in agriculture, rather than strictly urban agricultural activities. For that reason, results may not be fully comparable with those of other studies on urban agriculture that include only crop and livestock activities taking place within the boundaries of urban areas. The RuLIS database harmonizes the construction of variables on income and household characteristics by using uniform definitions and data-handling protocols, drawing on data that are collected using broadly similar survey instruments. The definition of household income is based on international standards, and in particular on the resolution about household income and expenditure statistics adopted by the 17th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in 2003. It defines total household income as being composed of the sum of income from wage employment (agricultural and non-agricultural), self-employment, crop and livestock production, fishery and forestry activities, transfers, and other sources, such as non-labour earnings (RuLIS, 2018).

238  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

In this analysis, we use two main indicators of interest from RuLIS data: the rate of participation in agriculture and the share of agricultural income on total income. In particular, we classify as participating in agriculture any household earning revenues (including outputs for own consumption) or facing costs related to crop and livestock activities. In computing the income share, our definition of agricultural income deviates somewhat from the one disseminated on the RuLIS public dissemination platform. We only include income from self-employment in crop and livestock activities, excluding agricultural wages and incomes from fishery and forestry activities. We treat the share according to the RuLIS methodology and exclude from the analysis of income shares all those values lower than 0 and higher than 1. The socio-demographic and dwelling characteristics variables used here are also derived from the RuLIS data set. While there are differences in questionnaire design across countries, the degree of comparability in the RuLIS data is still high. Most of the data included in the analysis were collected within the last decade, the older surveys being collected in Albania in 2005; Kenya in 2005; Bulgaria in 2007; Serbia in 2007; and Mozambique in 2009. In the presence of rapid urban transformation, the picture we paint for these countries may, therefore, have become somewhat outdated. In the dataset, participation in agriculture is defined at the household level. Throughout the chapter when we refer to people or individuals associated with or relying on urban agriculture, we are in fact referring simply to members of households participating in agriculture. The total number of observations of the entire RuLIS sample is 642,492. Our study is restricted to urban areas and includes only the most recent year for countries represented with more than one survey in the database, since the aim is providing a snapshot of urban agriculture rather than describing its dynamics. A few countries were excluded from the analysis because their data sets were under revision at the time of writing. The final sample includes 155,838 households from 31 countries. Table 12.1 reports the full list of countries and surveys used in the analysis, the total number and percentage of urban households for each survey, and the percentage of observations excluded from the computation of income shares (those with values of shares outside the 0–1 interval).

4. URBAN AGRICULTURE IN LOW- AND MIDDLEINCOME COUNTRIES The objective of this chapter is to assess the importance of urban agriculture and describe its socio-economic role in 31 countries in four geographic areas: Sub-Saharan Africa, (Central and Southern) Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. To do that, in this section we characterize urban agriculture in the

239

Living Standard Measurement Survey Household Income-Expenditure Survey Encuesta de los Hogares Multitopic Household Survey Enquête Multisectorielle Continue Enquête Niveau de Vie des Ménages Encuesta sobre Condiciones de Vida Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey Integrated Household Survey Ghana Living Standards Survey Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida India Human Development Survey Iraq household socio-economic survey Integrated Household Budget Survey Integrated Sample Household Budget and Labor Survey Fourth Integrated household Survey Enquête Agricole de Conjoncture Intégrée aux Conditions de Vie des Ménages Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los hogares

Albania Bangladesh Bolivia Bulgaria Burkina Faso Ivory Coast Ecuador Ethiopia Georgia Ghana Guatemala

Mexico

Malawi Mali

India Iraq Kenya Kyrgyzstan

Survey

Country

Table 12.1  RuLIS Sample

2014

2013 2014/15

2012 2012 2005/2006 2013

2005 2010 2008 2007 2014/15 2008 2014 2014/15 2015 2012/13 2011

Year

19,479

4,000 3,804

42,129 24,944 13,212 5,013

3,638 12,240 3,940 4,300 10,800 12,600 28,970 4,954 10,999 16,772 13,482

Nb of HHs

73%

26% 37%

35% 59% 36% 57%

55% 36% 59% 70% 39% 52% 48% 34% 39% 44% 41%

% urban HH according to survey definition

2%

9% 12%

4% 2% 20% 9%

2% 8% 1% 5% 15% 13% 16% 16% 10% 11% 3%

(Continued)

% of HH share on-farm income 1

240

Socioeconomic Survey Inquérito sobre Orçamento Familiar Nepal Living Standards Survey Enquête Nationale sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages et l’Agriculture General Household Survey Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey Encuesta de Niveles de Vida Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey Enquête de Suivi de la Pauvreté au Sénégal Living Standards Measurement Survey Integrated Household Survey National Panel Survey Uganda National Panel Survey

Mongolia Mozambique Nepal Niger

Serbia Sierra Leone Tanzania Uganda

Senegal

Panama Rwanda

Nigeria Pakistan

Survey

Country

Table 12.1  (Continued)

2007 2011 2012/13 2013/14

2011

2008 2013

2015/16 2013–14

2014 2009 2011 2014

Year

5,557 6,727 5,004 3,117

5,953

7,044 14,419

4,612 17,989

16,174 10,832 5,988 3,617

Nb of HHs

53% 36% 36% 26%

51%

54% 16%

32% 35%

56% 48% 35% 36%

% urban HH according to survey definition

13% 24% 11% 11%

16%

16% 22%

15% 2%

2% 17% 11% 10%

% of HH share on-farm income 1

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  241

RuLIS dataset in terms of (i) participation in and income from agriculture; (ii) importance in total agricultural production; (iii) differential participation in households at different points in the welfare distribution; and (iv) demographic and living condition profiles of urban farmers. On average 34 per cent of the population in our sample live in urban areas (Table 12.2). 4.1 Participation in and Income from Urban Agriculture The first key finding of our analysis is that 25 million urban households in these 31 countries are involved in crop or livestock activities. That corresponds to 136 million people associated with urban agriculture. This number represents about one-fifth of the 800 million farmers estimated by UNDP (1996) as the global total, but is based on a sample of about one-third of the global population. Our estimates are also about one-tenth of the total 265 million households extrapolated by Hamilton et al. (2014) based on the Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) study. Large differences in the distribution of urban agriculture are, as expected, observed across regions and GDP per capita levels. Latin American and Caribbean countries, on average, are the most urbanized. In these countries 65 per cent of the population live in urban areas and a total of 2 million households are involved in agriculture. Mexico, where the share of urban dwellers reaches 80 per cent, alone contributes to the total number of persons associated with agriculture with 3.8 million individuals. In several of the Asian countries in the sample the majority of people live in rural areas, with only 40 per cent of the population residing in cities. Despite its relatively lower rate of urbanization, this is the most populous region globally and in our sample it is where we find the highest absolute number (13 million) of urban agricultural households and individuals associated with urban agriculture (74 million). In India, even though only 32 per cent of the total number of residents are urban, we find the highest number of urban populations living in agricultural households in any one country (53 million). Sub-Saharan African countries also contribute extensively to the total number of urban households engaged in agriculture, with 9 million households and 52 million people. Nigeria, with some 2.6 million urban households (15.4 million people) involved in agricultural activities, contributes the lion’s share. Several other countries do also account for globally significant numbers, with 1.4 million urban agricultural households in Ethiopia, and with Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda above or approaching 1 million households each. The participation rates in agricultural activities reported in Table 12.3 give further insight into the role that agriculture plays for urban residents. The table unpacks the incidence of participation in urban agriculture by type of activity (crop and livestock production) as a total and it provides, as an item for comparison, the rate of participation in agriculture for rural households.

242  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 12.2  Population engaged in urban agriculture and share of total urban population Urban households engaged in agriculture (millions)

Urban population engaged in agriculture (millions)

% of urban population

0.3 0.3 1.4 1.0 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.7 0.1 2.6 0.2 0.1 0.1 1.0 0.9 9.3

2.2 1.6 6.5 4.7 1.4 1.2 0.6 3.5 1.2 15.4 1.2 1.3 0.5 5.4 5.1 51.6

23% 41% 22% 50% 20% 16% 23% 30% 16% 36% 17% 43% 38% 27% 23% 28%

2.3 9.4 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.6 0.7 13.3

10.9 53.2 0.8 0.5 0.2 2.9 5.1 73.6

26% 32% 68% 34% 64% 19% 35% 40%

Albania 2005 Bulgaria 2007 Georgia 2015 Serbia 2007 Eastern Europe

0.1 0.3 0.1 0.2 0.6

0.3 0.9 0.2 0.5 2.0

44% 69% 48% 58% 55%

Bolivia 2008 Ecuador 2014 Guatemala 2011 Mexico 2014 Panama 2008 Latin America

0.1 0.8 0.3 0.9 0.1 2.1

0.4 2.8 1.5 3.8 0.3 8.8

66% 68% 48% 77% 64% 65%

Burkina Faso 2014 Ivory Coast 2008 Ethiopia 2015 Ghana 2013 Kenya 2005 Malawi 2013 Mali 2014 Mozambique 2009 Niger 2014 Nigeria 2016 Rwanda 2013 Senegal 2011 Sierra Leone 2011 Tanzania 2013 Uganda 2013 Sub-Saharan Africa Bangladesh 2010 India 2012 Iraq 2012 Kyrgyzstan 2013 Mongolia 2014 Nepal 2011 Pakistan 2014 Asia

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

As the rural household participation shares indicate, agriculture plays an important role in the economy of most of the countries in the sample. While nowhere close to the rural participation rates, the incidence of households involved in agriculture in urban areas is higher than 20 per cent on average. Participation

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  243 Table 12.3  Household participation in urban agriculture by activity Crop production – urban

Livestock production – urban

Agricultural production – urban

Agricultural production – rural

Burkina Faso 2014 Ivory Coast 2008 Ethiopia 2015 Ghana 2013 Kenya 2005 Malawi 2013 Mali 2014 Mozambique 2009 Niger 2014 Nigeria 2016 Rwanda 2013 Senegal 2011 Sierra Leone 2011 Tanzania 2013 Uganda 2013 Sub-Saharan Africa

17% 15% 15% 27% 11% 46% 8% 48% 23% 16% 50% 6% 17% 28% 47% 25%

7% 6% 20% 10% 11% 20% 7% 14% 10% 13% 27% 13% 4% 22% 28% 14%

20% 17% 26% 28% 15% 46% 10% 51% 28% 21% 54% 16% 18% 35% 50% 29%

92% 86% 97% 81% 88% 95% 91% 95% 87% 78% 98% 85% 87% 89% 92% 90%

Bangladesh 2010 India 2012 Iraq 2012 Kyrgyzstan 2013 Mongolia 2014 Nepal 2011 Pakistan 2014 Asia

16% 5% 2% 19% 2% 41% 6% 13%

18% 9% 2% 7% 7% 36% 3% 12%

26% 12% 3% 20% 8% 49% 8% 18%

76% 69% 33% 92% 71% 93% 51% 70%

Albania 2005 Bulgaria 2007 Georgia 2015 Serbia 2007 Eastern Europe

17% 12% 12% 7% 12%

10% 9% 9% 8% 9%

19% 16% 15% 11% 15%

96% 71% 89% 61% 79%

Bolivia 2008 Ecuador 2014 Guatemala 2011 Mexico 2014 Panama 2008 Latin America

5% 14% 15% 3% 4% 8%

5% 25% 9% 1% 8% 10%

6% 25% 17% 4% 11% 13%

80% 36% 60% 39% 65% 56%

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

rates vary from 3 per cent to 54 per cent. Sierra Leone is the median country, with 18 per cent of urban agricultural households. Sub-Saharan Africa is the subregion showing, on average, the highest participation of urban households in agriculture, with particularly high rates in Rwanda (54 per cent), Mozambique (51

244  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

per cent), Uganda (50 per cent) and Malawi (46 per cent). These incidences are mostly driven by participation in crop production, but the engagement in livestock activities is also high in some countries, namely Nepal (36 per cent), Uganda (28 per cent), Rwanda (27 per cent) and Ecuador (25 per cent). This is shown more clearly in Figure 12.1, which reports the share of urban households engaged exclusively in crop or livestock and those active in both. In the vast majority of cases urban farmers specialize in crop production. Exceptions are Ethiopia, Senegal, Ecuador, Panama, India, Bangladesh and Mongolia, where we find substantial numbers of urban farmers specialized in livestock keeping. Figure 12.2 suggests the presence of patterns across regions and GDP level. Correlating participation rates and the log of GDP per capita reveals that urban households in poorer countries are more likely to rely on urban agriculture compared to those in wealthier ones. The trend seems to hold across geographical areas. However, East African and Latin American countries appear to have higher participation rates than West African or Asian countries at comparable levels of GDP per capita. The importance of urban agriculture is also illustrated by the proportion of income that urban households obtain from agricultural activities, that is, the extent to which urban residents rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Figure 12.3 presents the income shares from agricultural activities in urban areas Rwanda 2014 Mozambique 2009 Uganda 2013 Nepal 2011 Malawi 2013 Tanzania 2013 Ghana 2013 Niger 2014 Ethiopia 2015 Bangladesh 2010 Ecuador 2014 21.0 Nigeria 2016 Kyrgyzstan 2013 20.5 Burkina Faso 2014 20.3 Albania 2005 18.9 18.1 Sierra leone 2011 Guatemala 2011 17.2 16.9 Côte d’lvoire 2008 Senegal 2011 16.3 Bulgaria 2007 15.6 15.3 Kenya 2005 Georgia 2015 14.8 11.6 India 2012 10.9 Serbia 2007 10.9 Panama 2008 Mali 2014 10.3 8.3 Mongolia 2014 Pakistan 2014 7.7 Bolivia 2008 5.7 Mexico 2014 -=:.3.6 Iraq 2012 -- 2.9 I

0

20 Only crop

28.4 27.7 25.6 25.6 25.5

45.7

35.1

I

40 Crop and livestock

50.9 50.2 49.1

53.7

I

60 Only livestock

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.1 Participation in urban agriculture and specialization in the crop and livestock activities

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  245

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.2  Participation in urban agriculture and GDP per capita

averaged over the total urban population and for urban farmers only. Table 12.4 reports the figures the graph is based on, as well as income shares in rural areas for comparison. In most countries, the contribution of agriculture to overall

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.3  Share of total income from agriculture (urban sample)

246  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 12.4  Share of income from agriculture Income shares in agriculture – urban area

Income shares in agriculture – urban farmers

Income shares in agriculture – rural area

Burkina Faso 2014 Ivory Coast 2008 Ethiopia 2015 Ghana 2013 Kenya 2005 Malawi 2013 Mali 2014 Mozambique 2009 Niger 2014 Nigeria 2016 Rwanda 2013 Senegal 2011 Sierra Leone 2011 Tanzania 2013 Uganda 2013 Sub-Saharan Africa

10% 9% 6% 9% 5% 9% 5% 25% 5% 8% 8% 3% 15% 12% 15% 10%

51% 49% 33% 31% 40% 23% 56% 51% 23% 46% 20% 22% 70% 36% 33% 39%

76% 67% 79% 42% 60% 56% 75% 73% 42% 55% 38% 52% 74% 59% 50% 60%

Bangladesh 2010 India 2012 Iraq 2012 Kyrgyzstan 2013 Mongolia 2014 Nepal 2011 Pakistan 2014 Asia

3% 3% 0% 3% 2% 12% 3% 4%

14% 29% 19% 16% 25% 28% 38% 24%

23% 31% 11% 44% 41% 38% 29% 31%

Albania 2005 Bulgaria 2007 Georgia 2015 Serbia 2007 Eastern Europe

3% 2% 2% 1% 2%

17% 13% 21% 17% 17%

41% 17% 40% 14% 28%

Bolivia 2008 Ecuador 2014 Guatemala 2011 Mexico 2014 Panama 2008 Latin America

2% 3% 3% 1% 0% 2%

41% 15% 21% 25% 11% 22%

51% 5% 19% 10% 19% 21%

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

urban incomes is below 20 per cent, with the exception of Mozambique (25 per cent). The income share from agricultural activities for urban farmers, on the other hand, reveals that for these households agriculture can be an important source of income. This is especially the case in Africa, where income shares are

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  247

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.4 Income share from agriculture in urban areas (left panel) and for urban farmers (right panel) and GDP per capita

above 40 per cent in Nigeria (46 per cent), Ivory Coast (49 per cent), Burkina Faso (51 per cent), Mozambique (51 per cent), Mali (56 per cent) and Sierra Leone (70 per cent). As with participation rates, income shares also display a negative correlation with GDP per capita (Figure 12.4). The African countries just listed are clustered at the lower end of the GDP per capita spectrum and record the highest shares of income from agricultural production, but so do some Asian and Latin American countries that are much further to the right in the distribution of GPD per capita. Even at high levels of GDP, it is not unusual for households engaged in urban agriculture to receive in excess of 20 per cent of their income from farming.

248  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

4.2 Agricultural Production in Urban Areas Another perspective for framing the socio-economic importance of urban agriculture, is to examine its role in production vis-à-vis the overall agricultural sector. In this section we look at the share of total agricultural production originating in urban areas and at whether this is mainly destined to own consumption or sold. Since the data comes from household surveys, the portion of agricultural production coming from the commercial farm sector is not accounted for and the results should be interpreted to refer to the household sector only. Regional averages for the share of total agricultural production originating in urban areas, and the percentage of it that is marketed are reported in Table 12.5. The contribution of urban farmers to national agricultural production ranges from 10 per cent in African countries to 27 per cent in the Latin American ones. The market orientation of urban farms also appears to increase with GDP per capita levels. In Eastern European countries and in Latin America the share of production sold is higher than 50 per cent on average, and is just below that in Asia (49 per cent). In African countries on the other hand urban agriculture is mostly destined for home consumption. In the Eastern African countries in our sample the average production that is sold is 31 per cent, and in East Africa only 18 per cent. The high standard deviations of both indicators, however, point to significant variability around the means across countries within the same region. Figure 12.5 helps dig deeper into the utilization of production by urban households engaged in agriculture. In 11 out of the 27 countries for which we have data for the utilization of crop production, households practise agriculture mostly for own consumption. This is particularly evident in some low-income countries: in Burkina Faso, Mali, Sierra Leone, Niger, Malawi and Ethiopia, Table 12.5  Urban agriculture: share in total production and percentage marketed

West Africa East Africa Asia Eastern Europe Latin America

% of urban ag. production in total

% of urban ag. production marketed

10 (4) 10 (5) 13 (8) 16 (10) 27 (16)

18 (10) 31 (19) 49 (35) 52 (38) 63 (25)

Note: Standard deviations in parenthesis. Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  249

Note: Three countries with incomplete information on sales and consumption (India, Mozambique and Serbia) are not included in the figure. Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.5  Crop production utilization

more than 60 per cent of agricultural households in urban areas consume the totality of their production at home. This pattern is not limited to countries in Africa, as the majority of urban agricultural households in Georgia, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Guatemala also report consuming all their agricultural production. In general, the data point to a high degree of heterogeneity in the motivation for urban households to engage in urban agriculture, with no clear patterns along levels of GDP per capita or regions. In Asia, households in Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia, produce crops mostly for own consumption, whereas a large share of households in Pakistan (58 per cent) and Iraq (22 per cent) produce only for sales. In Latin America, households orienting their production exclusively towards market sales are mostly found in Panama (11 per cent) and Mexico (15 per cent). In general, the sample confirms that it is hard to characterize urban agriculture as an homogenous phenomenon: the consumption and marketing motives are both present virtually everywhere, and rather than a dichotomy the graph points to a gradient of situations. In-depth, country-specific studies are needed to evaluate individual situations and policy options.

250  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

4.3 Participation in Urban Agriculture at Different Income Levels The RuLIS data allow going beyond averages to look at how households in different socio-economic groups participate in and benefit from involvement in urban agriculture. Figure 12.6 reports rates of participation in urban agriculture by quintiles of consumption expenditure. Countries are ranked in descending order by share of households participating in agriculture in the poorest quintile. For most countries the poorest quintile has the highest rate of participation in agriculture, and several countries show a gradient in participation rates from rich (low participation) to poor (high participation). This is a result that points to urban agriculture as being particularly important to the poor. In the majority of countries in the sample more than 25 per cent of households in the bottom quintile are involved in urban agriculture. African countries stand out from those in other regions as having the highest share of households in the poorest expenditure quintile participating in agriculture. In particular, more than half of the poorest households residing in urban areas of Mozambique, Rwanda, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Niger and Ghana are involved in agricultural activities. Nepal is the only non-African country in the top ten in this list, with Bangladesh and Guatemala also displaying rates of participation among the poorest quintile above 30 per cent. The only cases where participation rates Uganda 2013 Mozambique 2009 Rwanda 2014 Nepal 2011 Malawi 2013 Tanzania 2013 Burkina Faso 2014 Niger 2014 Ghana 2013 Ethiopia 2015 Bangladesh 2010 Guatemala 2011 Nigeria 2016 Sierra leone 2011 Côte d’lvoire 2008 Kenya 2005 Senegal 2011 Albania 2005 Ecuador 2014 Kyrgyzstan 2013 Georgia 2015 Mali 2014 India 2012 Panama 2008 Serbia 2007 Bolivia 2008 Mongolia 2014 Pakistan 2014 Bulgaria 2007 Mexico 2014 Iraq 2012

0

.2 ePoorest quintile

+2nd quintile

.4

■3rd quintile

.6 •4th quintile

.8

05th quintile

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.6  Rates of participation in agriculture in urban areas by expenditure quintiles

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  251

Mozambique 2009 Burkina Faso 2014 Sierra leone 2011 Tanzania 2013 Uganda 2013 Nepal 2011 Côte d’lvoire 2008 Ghana 2013 Malawi 2013 Nigeria 2016 Rwanda 2014 Kenya 2005 Mali 2014 Ethiopia 2015 Niger 2014 Senegal 2011 Guatemala 2011 Bolivia 2008 Pakistan 2014 Albania 2005 Bangladesh 2010 Kyrgyzstan 2013 Mongolia 2014 Ecuador 2014 Georgia 2015 India 2012 Serbia 2007 Mexico 2014 Bulgaria 2007 Iraq 2012 Panama 2008

··········•···················································································· ··!!t··•························································································ ... ...........................................................................................

::o"l#::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:..0.1.,:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::�:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

............................................................................................

.............................................................................................

0

.1 ePoorest quintile

.nd quintile

.2

■3rd quintile

.3 A.4th quintile

.4 05th quintile

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.7 Contribution of agricultural income to total income in urban areas by expenditure quintiles (%)

are higher in one of the higher quintiles than in the bottom one are Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Bulgaria. Similarly, Figure 12.7 reports the income share from agriculture in urban areas by expenditure quintile. Countries are ranked in descending order, based on shares in the poorest quintile. The picture that emerges is one that reinforces the observations made above based on participation rates. With the exception of Bangladesh and Bulgaria, income shares from agriculture are consistently higher in the poorest quintile. In almost all countries in Africa, agricultural income constitutes at least 10 per cent of the total income of the poorest quintiles, with peaks above 30 per cent in Mozambique and Burkina Faso. Outside Africa, only Nepal displays shares above 10 per cent. Based on both income and participation, therefore, urban agriculture can be characterized as an activity predominantly practised by the poorer strata of the population. All the countries in our sample households in the richest quintile derive less than 10 per cent of income from urban agriculture. This is particularly visible in those countries where urban agriculture is more prevalent, which show larger gaps in participation and income share between the poorest and richest quintiles.

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Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Figure 12.8 Urban households participation (left panel) and income shares (right panel) from urban agriculture – ratio of 1st and 5th expenditure quintile, by GDP per capita

To further investigate these gaps, Figure 12.8 plots the ratios of participation rates and income shares of the 1st over the 5th quintile over the log of GDP per capita. The higher the ratio, the higher the participation in or income share from agriculture of the poorest compared to the richest households. A ratio equal to 1 indicates equal values for the 1st and 5th quantiles (horizontal reference line). The chart confirms that, bar a few exceptions discussed above,

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  253

both participation and income shares are higher in the poorest quintile. The difference is of several orders of magnitude, particularly when it comes to income shares (note the different scale on the vertical axes). The largest disparities are found at the bottom of the GDP per capita distribution, which tend to be the African countries where we have seen agricultural activities to be of special importance for households in the lower expenditure quintiles. 4.4 A Socio-Economic Profile of Urban Farmers Besides characterizing the relative level of involvement in urban agriculture of households at different points of the consumption expenditure distribution, household survey data also allow a deeper look into key demographic and socio-economic characteristics, thus providing a more complete profile of urban farmers in low- and middle-income countries. Table 12.6 presents regional averages for some key demographic characteristics (household size, age, female headship), education, prevalence of poverty, and livelihoods and living standards indicators (income diversification, material of the dwelling’s walls, sanitation), separately for agricultural and non-agricultural households in urban areas. As in much of the analysis in this chapter, the data point to several regularities across countries. On average, agricultural households are larger, older and less likely to be headed by a woman. Differences in household sizes are marked, especially in West Africa, where farming households have, on average, two more members than non-agricultural households. The heads of households involved in agriculture are 2 to 5 years older than the heads of non-agricultural households, and households headed by women are more likely to be involved in nonagricultural activities. In urban areas, as is the case in rural areas (Winters et al., 2010), agriculture is associated with lower levels of education. Across all regions, household members of working age (15−64 years old) have one or two years of education fewer than non-agricultural households. Earlier in the chapter we referred to participation in urban agriculture by households in the bottom, poorest quintiles. Table 12.6 complements that by reporting on the prevalence of poverty among urban agricultural households. RuLIS has computed as a comparable poverty indicator the societal poverty line based on Jolliffe and Prydz (2017), defined as a national poverty threshold of USD1 plus half of the median value of per capita expenditure in the country. This parametrization reflects a “typical national poverty line”, given the level of income. In the African, Asian and Latin American samples, poverty rates among agricultural households are around double those of non-agricultural households. Poverty rates in the African countries included in the study average 47 per cent in East Africa and 39 per cent in West Africa, against rates of 25 and 18 per cent in non-agricultural households. In both Asia and Latin America

254

Latin America

EE

Asia

East Africa

West Africa

7.69 (2.19) 5.22 (0.40) 5.55 (1.59) 3.75 (0.64) 4.41 (0.87)

Household size

50.91 (3.83) 44.82 (2.27) 48.87 (2.46) 57.72 (4.12) 51.40 (4.09)

Age of household head 19.37 (10.60) 26.82 (5.60) 15.19 (10.81) 16.80 (8.48) 21.43 (9.80)

Female household head

Agricultural households

5.99 (2.41) 7.53 (1.54) 7.73 (2.84) 11.63 (2.27) 7.87 (2.73)

Education of adult members (years)

Table 12.6  Comparison of selected household characteristics

5.69 (1.39) 4.00 (0.38) 4.56 (1.19) 3.28 (0.51) 3.75 (0.34)

Household size 45.98 (3.71) 38.06 (1.92) 45.77 (2.48) 54.66 (1.78) 47.09 (1.09)

Age of household head

24.49 (9.93) 29.11 (8.36) 20.96 (12.56) 28.73 (10.85) 29.30 (2.99)

Female household head

Non-agricultural households

7.59 (2.27) 8.89 (1.34) 9.15 (2.60) 12.37 (1.64) 9.75 (2.04)

Education of adult members (years)

255

39.53 (11.02) 47.40 (9.03) 27.70 (12.77) 17.26 (11.50) 28.58 (12.69)

26.98 (19.20) 46.88 (15.39) 33.48 (11.47) 2.78 — 11.03 (13.75)

Dirt-floor (%) 64.52 (25.77) 67.45 (21.01) 82.28 (16.99) 91.04 (3.64) 81.60 (17.77)

Flushing toilet (%)

Agricultural households

0.71 (0.05) 0.72 (0.06) 0.66 (0.07) 0.67 (0.04) 0.68 (0.08)

Income diversification index 17.61 (4.97) 25.47 (6.23) 16.89 (5.26) 15.07 (6.13) 15.63 (4.20)

Poor household (%) 20.79 (32.49) 21.13 (10.90) 18.39 (10.59) 1.16 — 3.74 (4.43)

Dirt-floor (%) 81.07 (16.99) 73.55 (22.40) 91.58 (8.79) 97.93 (1.34) 92.70 (3.37)

Flushing toilet (%)

Non-agricultural households

0.84 (0.05) 0.85 (0.06) 0.83 (0.09) 0.82 (0.04) 0.85 (0.03)

Income diversification index

Source: Authors’ calculation based on surveys in the RuLIS database.

Note: Regional means are the arithmetical mean of countries’ weighted means. Standard deviations in parenthesis. In EE countries the dirt floor (%) indicator is available only for Georgia.

Latin America

EE

Asia

East Africa

West Africa

Poor household (%)

256  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

rates among agricultural households are around 28 per cent, against 16–17 per cent in non-agricultural households. In the group of Eastern European countries included in the study the difference is much smaller. Non-monetary indicators of living standards, such as housing floor material and the presence of improved sanitation in the dwelling, also confirm the nature of agricultural households as more deprived than the average urban household. Once again, there are clear regularities in the data across countries and regions. Differences are large across the board, with both indicators faring particularly poorly in Africa, and disparities with non-agricultural households particularly pronounced in West Africa (where non-agricultural households fare better than in East Africa). Finally, the Herfindahl Index in columns 2 and 5 of the bottom panel in Table 12.6 measures the degree of income diversification in the households. The closer the index is to 0, the more diversified the household income. As expected, households participating in agriculture diversify more than non-agricultural households, their engagement in agriculture being one dimension of that diversification. Values of the index for agricultural households across regions are surprisingly close, and in fact closer than to the value the index takes for nonagricultural households in the same region.

5. CONCLUSIONS The literature on food security and urban food systems lacks a truly global account of the extent of the urban agriculture phenomenon, and its role in urban livelihoods. In this chapter, we provide a snapshot of what national data say about the prevalence of urban agriculture in low- and middle-income countries, who practises it, its importance for livelihoods, and a few facts around its features and the characteristics of the households that engage in it. To achieve this, the chapter utilizes a sample of national household surveys that collectively represent 2.3 billion people, or a little less than one-third of the world’s 7.6 billion population. We define urban agriculture as any self-employed agricultural activity practised by urban residents. While somewhat imprecise, as urban residents may be farming plots of land or rearing livestock located outside of urban and periurban areas, this is the only practical definition possible when relying on nationally representative household surveys. As discussed in Zezza and Tasciotti (2010), the definition aligns with national definitions of urban and rural areas. One drawback, however, is that these are highly heterogeneous across countries. The first key finding is that 25 million urban households are involved in crop or livestock activities. This number represents about one-fifth of the farmers

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  257

estimated by UNDP (1996) and one-tenth of the estimates in Hamilton et al. (2014) as the global total, but is based on a sample that accounts for about onethird of the global population. The incidence of urban households involved in agriculture in urban areas is far from negligible, but probably not as extensive as is implied in those studies. For almost half of these countries, more than 20 per cent of households in urban areas are involved in agricultural activities. The picture is, however, highly heterogeneous across countries, as participation rates vary from 3 to 54 per cent, with 18 per cent in Sierra Leone, the median country. The second set of findings concerns the degree to which agriculture contributes to urban incomes. While income shares from agricultural activities in urban areas are lower than participation rates, for households that engage in farming the average income share is always non-negligible and in a vast majority of cases is well above 20 per cent. In terms of both incomes and participation, therefore, urban agriculture is a phenomenon that needs to be acknowledged by policy-makers and urban planners. This is particularly the case in poorer economies, as the importance of both participation in and income from urban agriculture tends to decrease as GDP per capita increases. Moreover, farmers in urban areas contribute significantly to agricultural production in most of the regions, accounting for up to 27 per cent of national agricultural production coming from the household sector in Latin America. In most of the countries, a large proportion of urban households use the totality of their production for own consumption. In 15 out of 31 countries, households practise agriculture mostly for household consumption. For the poorest of these countries, it is plausible to hypothesize a subsistence role for urban agriculture, but in others the sector has substantial portions of market-oriented farmers. Besides characterizing the importance of urban agriculture in the aggregate, the analysis of participation rates and income shares by expenditure quintiles provides information on the role of urban agriculture across different socioeconomic groups. The poorest quintile participates the most in agriculture, with the majority of countries showing rates higher than 35 per cent for this group. The analysis of the income share from agriculture in urban areas by expenditure quintile leads to similar considerations: the poorest quintiles are those who depend on agriculture for a larger fraction of their incomes. Finally, the data offer an overview of the socio-demographic characteristics of urban agricultural households, as they compare to other urban dwellers. On average, agricultural households are larger, less educated, older and less likely to be headed by a woman. They are also poorer and more deprived along non-monetary dimensions of welfare, having worse dwelling and sanitation conditions. One striking feature of the results in this chapter is the regularity with which some results hold across countries that are extremely different in so many

258  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

respects. Regardless of income levels and geography, the data at hand point to urban agriculture as a phenomenon that is associated with higher levels of poverty and deprivation than in the general urban population. Also, when active in urban agriculture, the urban poor tend to rely on this activity as an important source of income and livelihoods. Any policy aiming to govern and manage urban agriculture should therefore be clearly based on a sound understanding of the possible distributional and food security implications, whether the aim is to promote or curb the practice of agriculture within urban boundaries. The degree of heterogeneity within and across regions that also is evident calls for indepth country studies to frame and evaluate relevant policy options. National household survey data constitute a grossly under-exploited source of available data for urban agriculture researchers and policy analysts to look into.

REFERENCES Agbonlahor, M., S. Momoh and A. Dipeolu (2007), ‘Urban vegetable crop production and production efficiency’, International Journal of Vegetable Science, 13(2), 63–72. Armar-Klemesu, M. (2000), ‘Urban agriculture and food security, nutrition and health’, in N. Bakker, M. Dubbeling, S. Guendel, U. Koschella and H. de Zeeuw (eds), Growing Cities, Growing Food: Urban Agriculture on the Policy Agenda, Feldafing, Germany: German Foundation for International Development, pp. 99–118. Asomani-Boateng, R. (2007), ‘Closing the loop: community-based organic solid waste recycling, urban gardening, and land use planning in Ghana, West Africa’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 27(2), 132–45. Binns, T. and K. Lynch (1998), ‘Feeding Africa’s growing cities into the 21st century: the potential of urban agriculture’, Journal of International Development, 10(6), 777–93. Birley, M. and K. Lock (1998), ‘Health impacts of peri-urban natural resource development’, Environment and Urbanization, 10(1), 89–106. Cissé, O., N. Gueye and M. Sy (2005), ‘Institutional and legal aspects of urban agriculture in French-speaking West Africa: from marginalization to legitimization’, Environment and Urbanization, 17(2), 143–54. Danso, G., P. Drechsel, T. Wiafe-Antwi and L. Gyiele (2002), ‘Income of farming systems around Kumasi’, Urban Agriculture Magazine, 7, 5–6. De Bon, H., L. Parrot and P. Moustier (2010), ‘Sustainable urban agriculture in developing countries: A review’, Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 30(1), 21–32. Diogo, R., A. Buerkert and E. Schlecht (2010), ‘Resource use efficiency in urban and peri-urban sheep, goat and cattle enterprises’, Animal, 4(10), 1725–38. Dossa, L.H., A. Buerkert and E. Schlecht (2011), ‘Cross-location analysis of the impact of household socioeconomic status on participation in urban and peri-urban agriculture in West Africa’, Human Ecology, 39, 569. Drescher, A. and D. Iaquinta (1999), ‘Urban and peri-urban agriculture: a new challenge for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’, FAO, Rome, Italy. Egal, F., A. Valstar and S. Meershoek (2001), ‘Urban agriculture, Household Food Security and Nutrition in Southern Africa’, FAO, Rome, Italy. Egziaber, A., D. Lee-Smith, D. Maxwell, P. Memon, L. Mougeot and C. Sawio (eds) (1994), Cities Feeding People: An Examination of Urban Agriculture in East Africa, Ottawa, Canada: IDRC. Ellis, F. and J. Sumberg (1998), ‘Food production, urban areas and policy response’, World Development, 26(2), 213–25.

Urban agriculture in low-income and middle-income countries  259 Enete, A. and A. Achike (2008), Urban agriculture and urban food insecurity/poverty in Nigeria: the case of Ohafia, South-East Nigeria’, Outlook on Agriculture, 37(2), 131–4. FAO (1996), ‘The State of Food and Agriculture’, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy. Gbadegesin, A. (1991), ‘Farming in the urban environment of a developing nation – a case study from Ibadan metropolis in Nigeria’, Environmentalist, 11(2), 105–11. Ghosh, S. (2004), ‘Food production in cities’, Acta Horticulturae, 643, 233–9. Graefe, S., E. Schlecht and A. Buerket (2008), ‘Opportunities and challenges of urban and periurban agriculture in Niamey, Niger’, Outlook on Agriculture, 37(1), 47–56. Hallett, Steve, Lori Hoagland and Emily Toner (2017), Urban Agriculture: Environmental, Economic, and Social Perspectives, Horticultural Reviews, Volume 44, First Edition. Hamilton, A., K. Burry, H. Mok, S. Barker, J. Grove and V. Williamson (2014), ‘Give peas a chance? Urban agriculture in developing countries. A review’, Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 34(1), 45–73. Jolliffe, D. and E.B. Prydz (2017), ‘Societal Poverty: A Relative and Relevant Measure’, Policy Research Working Paper No. 8073. World Bank, Washington, DC. Lado, C. (1990), ‘Informal urban agriculture in Nairobi, Kenya: problem or resource in development and land-use planning?’, Land Use Policy, 7(3), 257–66. Mawoneke, S. and B. King (1998), ‘Impact of urban agriculture research study in Zimbabwe’, ENDA, Harare, Zimbabwe. Maxwell, D. (1995), ‘Alternative food security strategy: a household analysis of urban agriculture in Kampala’, World Development, 23(10), 1669–81. Maxwell, D. (2003), ‘The importance of urban agriculture to food and nutrition’, in W. Bruinsma and W. Hertog (eds), Annotated Bibliography on Urban Agriculture, Sida and ETC, Leusden, Netherlands, pp. 22–129. Maxwell, D., C. Levin and J. Csete (2000), ‘Does urban agriculture help prevent malnutrition? Evidence from Kampala’, Food Policy, 23(5), 411–24. May, J. and C. Rogerson (1995), ‘Poverty and sustainable cities in South Africa: the role of urban cultivation’, Habitat International, 19(2), 165–81. McClintock, N. (2010), ‘Why farm the city? Theorizing urban agriculture through a lens of metabolic rift’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3(2), 191–207. McMichael, A. (2000), ‘The urban environment and health in a world of increasing globalization: issues for developing countries’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 78(9), 1117–26. Memon, P. and D. Lee-Smith (1993), ‘Urban agriculture in Kenya’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 27(1), 25–42. Mougeot, L. (1994), ‘Urban food production: evolution, official support and significance’, Cities Feeding People series, Report no. 8, Ottawa, Canada: IDRC. Mougeot, L. (2000). ‘Urban agriculture: definition, presence, potentials and risks, and policy challenges’, Cities Feeding People series, Report no. 8, Ottawa, Canada: IDRC. Moustier, P. and G. Danso (2006), ‘Local economic development and marketing of urban produced food’, in R. van Veenhuizen (ed.), Cities Farming for the Future: Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, Ottawa, Canada: RUAF Foundation, IDRC and IIRR, pp. 171–206. Mwangi, A. and D. Foeken (1996), ‘Urban agriculture, food security and nutrition in low income areas in Nairobi’, African Urban Quarterly, 11(2–3), 170–79. Orsini, F., R. Kahane, R. Nono-Womdim and G. Gianquinto (2013), ‘Urban agriculture in the developing world: a review’, Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 33(4), 695–720. Page, B. (2002), ‘Urban agriculture in Cameroon: an anti-politics machine in the making’, Geoforum, 33(1), 41–54. Predotova, M., E. Schlecht and A. Buerkert (2010), ‘Nitrogen and carbon losses from dung storage in urban gardens of Niamey, Niger’, Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems, 87(1), 103–14. Redwood, M. (2008), Agriculture in Urban Planning: Generating Livelihoods and Food Security, Ottawa, Canada: IDRC. Rogerson, C. (1993), ‘Urban agriculture in South Africa: scope, issues and potential’, GeoJournal, 30(1), 21–8. Rose, D. and K. Charlton (2002), ‘Quantitative indicators from a food expenditure survey can be used to target the food insecure in South Africa’, Journal of Nutrition, 132(11), 3235–42.

260  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Ruel, M., J. Garrett, S. Morris, D. Maxwell, A. Oshaug, P. Engle, P. Menon, A. Slack and L. Haddad (1998), ‘Urban challenges to food and nutrition security: a review of food security, health, and care giving in the cities’, Washington, DC, US: IFPRI. RuLIS – The Rural Livelihoods Information System (2018), ‘A joint Initiative of FAO, the World Bank and IFAD’, accessed 6 September 2020 at www.fao.org/in-action/ rural-livelihoods-dataset-rulis. Simatele, D. and T. Binns (2008), ‘Motivation and marginalization in African urban agriculture: the case of Lusaka, Zambia’, Urban Forum, 19(1), 1–21. Smit, J., A. Ratta and J. Nasr (1996), Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities, New York, NY, US: UNDP. Smith, O. (2001), ‘Overview of urban agriculture in Western African cities’, Ottawa, Canada: IDRC. Thebo, A., P. Drechsel and E. Lambin (2014), ‘Global assessment of urban and peri-urban agriculture: irrigated and rainfed croplands’, Environmental Research Letters, 9(11), 1–9. UNDP (1996), Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities, Publication Series for Habitat II, vol. 1, New York, NY, US: UNDP. Van Veenhuizen, R. (2006), Cities Farming for the Future: Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities, Ottawa, Canada: RUAF Foundation, IDRC, and IIRR. Warren, E., S. Hawkesworth and C. Knai (2015), ‘Investigating the association between urban agriculture and food security, dietary diversity, and nutritional status: systemic literature review’, Food Policy, 53(1), 54–66. Winters, P., B. Davis, G. Carletto, K. Covarrubias, E. Quinones, A. Zezza, K. Stamoulis, G. Bonomi, and S. DiGiuseppe (2010), ‘A cross country comparison of rural income generating activities’, World Development, 38(1), 48–63. Zezza, A. and L. Tasciotti (2010), ‘Urban agriculture, poverty, and food security: empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries’, Food Policy, 35(1), 265–73.

13. Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South Abel Chikanda, Jonathan Crush and Godfrey Tawodzera

1. INTRODUCTION The relationship between international migration and food security, a neglected subject until recently, is starting to attract growing interest from researchers and policy makers (Chikanda et al., 2018, Choitani, 2017; Craven and Gartaula, 2015; Crush, 2013; Crush and Caesar, 2017; FAO, 2018; Zezza et al., 2011). The case study literature has tended to focus on South-to-North migration, especially the nutritional, dietary, and health impacts on immigrants and refugees in cities in the North (Bailey, 2017; Moffat et al., 2017; Tarraf et al., 2017). The “healthy immigrant” hypothesis posits that migrants are generally more food secure and healthier than those they leave behind, as well as the population of receiving societies (Dean and Wilson, 2010; Fennelly, 2007; Girard and Sercia, 2013; Kennedy et al., 2015; Vang et al., 2017). Over time, the gap with local populations closes as the quality of the diets of immigrants markedly declines (Ayala et al., 2008; Holmboe-Ottesen and Wandel, 2012; Lesser et al., 2014; Martinez, 2013; Sanou et al., 2014). Research on migrants in the Global North from Asia (Nguyen et al., 2015; Oh and Saito, 2015), Latin America (Guarnaccia et al., 2012; Vahabi et al., 2011; Vera-Becerra et al., 2015), and Africa (Delisle et al., 2009; Méjean et al., 2007; Okafor et al., 2014; Renzaho and Burns, 2006) suggests that there is an accompanying increase in over-nutrition or obesity (Guendelman et al., 2011). Similar findings have been reported from a sub-set of studies focused on the experience of refugee populations (Dharod et al., 2013; Hadley et al., 2007, 2010; Nunnery and Dharod, 2017). There is little research of comparable geographical breadth or thematic reach among South–South migrants. Several studies have tested the healthy migrant hypothesis in the context of internal migration to cities in the South (Carioca et al., 2017; Chen, 2011; Dodd et al., 2017; Ginsburg et al., 2017; Lu, 2008), but, with a few isolated exceptions, there are no comparable studies of international migrants (Mathee and Naicker, 2015). The research silence on the South– South migration and food security nexus is symptomatic of a broader problem. 261

262  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

Compared to the vast number of studies of migration from the Global South to Europe and North America, there has been a serious neglect of i­ntra-regional movements within the Global South (the so-called South–South migration) (Crush and Chikanda, 2019). While there have been a number of programmatic calls for more attention to South–South migration (Anich et al., 2015; Bakewell, 2009; Campillo-Carrete, 2013; De Lombaerde et al., 2014; Hujo and Piper, 2007; Ratha and Shaw, 2007), the silence is a product of “the Northern discourse on South–North migration, which has traditionally attracted widespread attention from scholars based in the North and has been assumed to have greater developmental value relative to other migration flows” (Crush and Chikanda, 2019, p. 394). Growing intra-South migration movements are taking place within the context of accelerating urbanization in the Global South (IOM, 2015; Lerch, 2017). Rapidly growing cities are the destination for the vast majority of migrants, and a significant proportion of the over 120 million South–South migrants live in cities in other countries. New migrants in most countries are “overwhelmingly city-bound” (Benton-Short et al., 2005), and attracted to larger “gateway” cities where the opportunities for pursuing a livelihood are greater (Price and Benton-Short, 2008). The proportion and significance of the foreign born varies greatly from country to country, and from city to city (Price and BentonShort, 2007 p. 114). Over time, migrants may also move down the urban hierarchy to secondary cities in search of other livelihood opportunities. As Price and Benton-Short (2007, p. 104) observe, it is a mistake to think of gateway cities as sites of permanent settlement: “a more accurate metaphor may be that of a turnstile, where immigrants enter for a period of time and then leave for other cities” in that or another country. There are also “revolving door cities”, such as those in the Gulf states, characterized by large numbers of migrants on temporary work permits, who are legally obliged to return home at the end of the contract (Fargues, 2011). South–South migration is highly dynamic and cannot be reduced to a single format. One recent typology identified as many as 13 different types of South– South migration (Crush and Chikanda, 2019; Hugo, 2009). The most important common characteristic of these different types of migration is that the vast majority of migrants retain close transnational ties with their countries and communities of origin. In general, however, the transnational connections of migrants living in cities of the South mean that “global immigrant destinations are the nodes from which complex linkages are formed with the economic periphery” (Benton-Short et al., 2005, p. 957). Most attention has been paid to remittance flows, although the specific character of South–South remitting has yet to be fully unravelled (Ratha and Shaw, 2007). A recent overview suggests that the remittances literature ignores flows of goods – and foodstuffs in particular

Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  263

– in favour of quantifiable flows of cash (Crush and Caesar, 2018). The food security impacts of cash remittances in countries of migrant origin in the South have commanded increasing attention (Anton, 2010, Combes and Ebeke, 2011; Ebadi et al., 2018; Fabrouk and Mekni, 2018; Romano and Traverso, 2017; Sulemana et al., 2018; Thow et al., 2016). However, macro-economic national studies of the food security–remittances linkage do not generally specify where remittances emanate from, or whether the benefits are primarily felt by rural or urban households. This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of South–South migration and the movement of migrants from one country in the South to live and work in urban areas of another. Although there is considerable debate on how to define the South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, 2019), the chapter takes a broad geographical approach to defining the countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the Middle East as constituents of South–South migration. Research on the socio-economic and cultural integration and exclusion of migrants and refugees in cities in the Global South is starting to grow (Bakewell and Landau 2018; Crush et al., 2015; Jenkins, 2012; Whitehouse, 2012), but there is limited knowledge on how their migration experience interacts with their food security status and challenges. Several pertinent questions arise: Does food insecurity act as a driver of migration to cities in another country in the Global South? What is the food security status of migrants in the Southern city and does it improve or deteriorate over time? How does the migration of some family members to a city in another country impact on the food security of those left behind? And how does remitting impact on the food security of migrant remitters?

2. SOUTH–SOUTH MIGRATION DIMENSIONS AND DIRECTIONS UNDESA (2017) estimates that the global stock of international migrants increased from 153 million in 1990 to 258 million in 2017 (Table 13.1). The number of migrants in “developing regions” (the Global South) increased from 70 million to 112 million over the same period. In 2017, therefore, 43 per cent of all migrants globally lived in the Global South. Of these, 80 million were in Asia, 25 million in Africa, and 10 million in LAC. In total, 97 million (or 87 per cent) of migrants in these regions are from other countries in the South (Table 13.2). Intra-regional South–South migration is strongest in Asia. Around 81 per cent of African South–South migrants move to other countries within the continent. Figure 13.1 shows that South–South migration grew rapidly after 2005 and became the single largest of the four general forms of intra-regional

264  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 13.1  International migrant stock, 1990−2017 International migrant stock (millions) World Developed regions (North) Developing regions (South) Africa Asia Europe Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) North America Oceania

1990

2000

2010

2017

152.5 82.4 70.2 15.7 48.1 49.2 7.2 27.6 4.7

172.6 103.4 69.2 14.8 49.2 56.3 6.6 40.4 5.4

220.0 130.7 89.3 17.0 65.9 70.7 8.2 51.0 7.1

257.7 146.0 111.7 24.7 79.6 77.9 9.5 57.7 8.4

Source: Data from UNDESA (2017).

Table 13.2 Migrant stock in Global South by origin and destination region, 2017 (millions) Origin Destination

North

South

Africa

Asia

LAC

Oceania

South Africa Asia LAC

14.4 2.3 9.2 2.9

97.4 22.3 70.4 6.6

23.8 19.4 4.4 0.1

63.1 1.2 63.3 0.3

6.3 0.0 0.4 6.1

0.2 0.0 0.1 0.0

Source: Data from UNDESA (2017).

migration around 2011, when it became more voluminous than South–North migration. Although South–North and South–South migration have been increasing in volume, Figure 13.1 shows that the gap has been widening over time. Most countries in the Global South receive and send migrants. In 2015, there were 161 South–South migrant origin countries and 158 migrant destination countries (Table 13.3). There were 19 migrant origin countries with more than a million out-migrants, and 23 migrant destination countries with a similar number of in-migrants. Table 13.4 lists the top 20 South–South destination countries, the number of migrants in each, and the number of countries from which those migrants originate. Table 13.5 shows the top 30 bilateral migration corridors ranked by the number of migrants in the destination country. The primary conclusion from these data sets is that, when South–South migration

Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  265 120

Number of migrants (millions)

110 100 90

South-South South-North North-North North-South

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

Source: Data from UNDESA (2017).

Figure 13.1 Volume of South–South migration, 1990–2017 Table 13.3  South–South migration origin and destination countries, 2015 No. of countries No. of migrants

Migrant origin

Migrant destination

>5 million 3−5 million 1−3 million 500,000−1 million 250,000−500,000 100,000−250,000 20,000−100,000 50,000 refugees)

Number of refugees

% Urban

% Rural

Asia/Middle East Pakistan Lebanon Iran Jordan Bangladesh Yemen Iraq India Thailand Malaysia

1,352,560 1,012,969 979,435 685,197 276,207 269,783 261,864 197,851 106,447 92,262

67.8 100.0 97.2 80.0 0.0 39.1 46.4 12.4 3.6 100.0

32.2 0.0 2.8 20.0 12.0 60.9 0.0 31.9 96.4 0.0

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 88.0 0.0 53.6 48.7 0.0 0.0

Africa Uganda Ethiopia DRC Kenya Sudan Chad Cameroon Tanzania South Sudan Niger Rwanda Algeria South Africa Mauritania Burundi

940,835 791,631 451,956 451,099 421,466 391,251 375,415 281,498 262,560 166,093 156,065 94,232 91,043 74,148 57,469

6.4 2.5 2.1 9.6 33.8 1.0 6.4 0.1 5.0 2.8 20.2 4.5 100.0 2.0 37.9

93.6 87.3 46.6 90.4 66.2 99.0 93.6 99.9 95.0 97.2 79.8 0.0 0.0 62.9 62.1

0.0 10.2 51.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 95.5 0.0 35.1 0.0

Latin America Venezuela Ecuador

172,053 102,848

0.0 0.0

0.5 0.0

99.5 100.0

% Other/unknown

Source: UNHCR (2017).

3. URBAN MIGRANTS AND FOOD SECURITY: A CASE STUDY The food security situation of South–South migrants and refugees has recently emerged on the research agenda in South Africa (Crush and Tawodzera, 2017; Maharaj et al., 2017; Napier et al., 2018). The country became a major destination for South–South migration after the end of apartheid in 1994 (Crush, 2015). Far from arriving in a more food secure state than local populations,

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many migrants are extremely impoverished and suffering acute food insecurity. At the height of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis in 2008, for example, IOM (2009) interviewed 1155 Zimbabwean respondents in Musina, a South African town south of the Zimbabwean border (IOM, 2009). There was an intense level of food insecurity among the newly arrived migrants: 8 per cent had eaten nothing the previous day, while 42 per cent had eaten only once the previous day. Many relied exclusively on food distribution programmes run by local faith organizations, while private citizens also donated food to migrants or offered them ad hoc employment so that they would be able to buy food. In another study, Maharaj et al. (2017) interviewed 355 adult refugees in Durban, South Africa, and found that 23 per cent often did not have enough food and 54 per cent were often eating less. The proportion with a significant level of anxiety and depressive symptomatology was 49 per cent and 55 per cent respectively. Not eating enough and eating less were significantly associated with anxiety and depression. Cape Town, South Africa, has become a key terminus for internal and international migrants (Jacobs and du Plessis, 2016; Rule, 2018). At the time of the 2011 Census, there were 125,000 foreign-born migrants in this city of 3.4 million people. Of these, 88 per cent were South–South migrants, with the remainder coming from Europe. The numbers have continued to rise ever since. While the migrants originate from an increasingly diverse set of countries, the primary source is the rest of Africa, particularly Zimbabwe (45,000 in 2011), the DRC (8100). Namibia (7500), Somalia (6700), Mozambique (3200), and Nigeria (2600) (Table 13.9). There were also sizable pockets of migrants from non-African countries including India, China, and Bangladesh. There are a growing number of studies exploring the migrant experience of Cape Town including social networks (Brown, 2015; Morreira, 2010; Owen, 2015), identities (Buyer, 2008; Tewold, 2019), victimization by xenophobia (Dodson, 2010; Peberdy and Jara, 2011), precarious work (Dodson, 2018), informal self-­employment (Crush et al., 2017a; Northcote and Dodson, 2015; Rogerson, 2018), housing strategies (Williams, 2017), and remittance behaviour (Nzabamwita, 2018). Research specifically on the food security of migrants provides insights into several fundamental questions related to the subject of this chapter. This includes a 2016 study of Zimbabwean migrants in Cape Town and Johannesburg that surveyed 500 migrants and conducted 50 in-depth interviews (Crush and Tawodzera, 2016), focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 71 Congolese, Somali, and Zimbabwean migrants (Hunter-Adams, 2017; HunterAdams et al., 2016; Hunter-Adams and Rother, 2016), and a study of 60 young migrants from Zimbabwe (Sithole and Dinbabo, 2016). First among the important reasons for migrating to South African cities are hunger and food insecurity in home countries. In the case of the Zimbabwean

Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  273 Table 13.9  Country of origin of migrants in Cape Town, 2011 Country of birth

No.

% of total population

% of foreign-born

Zimbabwe Europe DRC Namibia Somalia Mozambique Nigeria India China Lesotho Bangladesh Ghana Botswana Swaziland Other*

44,722 14,820 8,101 7,549 6,663 3,209 2,568 2,010 1,430 1,044 797 623 526 344 30,014

1.27 0.42 0.23 0.21 0.09 0.04 0.07 0.06 0.04 0.03 0.02 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.9

36.0 11.9 6.5 6.1 5.4 2.6 2.1 1.6 1.2 0.8 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 24.1

Note: * Includes Pakistan, Malawi, Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Algeria. Source: Rule (2018).

migrants, reasons for migration were dominated by a comparison of overall living conditions in the two countries (cited by 84 per cent of respondents). As many as 44 per cent explicitly mentioned hunger and food insecurity as a reason for migrating to South Africa (Crush and Tawodzera, 2016). Sithole and Dinbabo’s (2016) study of youth migrants found that 63 per cent had moved from Zimbabwe as a result of food shortages. Hunter-Adams (2017), however, suggests that migrants in Cape Town also tend to romanticize the food environment from which they came, particularly when they compare the supposed “naturalness” of home diets with the ultra-processed nature and expense of their Cape Town diet. There is also the question of the economic, social, and political determinants of food security for migrants in destination cities. Crush and Tawodzera (2016, p. 17) note that “migrants are a great deal more vulnerable to food insecurity than their local counterparts in the poorer areas of these cities”. The majority of migrant households in Cape Town and Johannesburg were either moderately (24 per cent) or severely food insecure (60 per cent). Only 11 per cent were completely food secure. As one migrant noted: “life is really difficult. The food is never enough and I have gone hungry many times” (Crush and Tawodzera, 2017, p. 97). Diets were also lacking in diversity and extremely monotonous: “It is difficult to afford the food we want. We eat the same kind of food day in

274  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

and day out. Usually we eat pap (maize porridge) and offal because that is what is cheap … it is the same food over and over again. There is no variety” (Crush and Tawodzera 2017, p. 96). Migrants do not have access to land to grow any of their own food, so food security is very directly linked to income and expenditure choices (Hunter-Adams, 2017). Nor do they have easy access to the formal labour market; only half of the migrants were in formal employment – primarily low-paying, unskilled work – while many of the rest were employed or self-employed in the informal sector. Given the very precarious nature of the food security of migrants, what strategies do they employ to help mitigate food insecurity? Zimbabwean migrants adopt various coping strategies during periods of food scarcity, including reliance on less expensive foodstuffs (84 per cent of households), eating food of poorer quality (78 per cent), and consuming less preferred but cheaper foods (74 per cent) (Figure 13.2). In addition, slightly more than half indicated that they had reduced the number of meals eaten per day, borrowed money to buy food, or sought help from a friend or relative. Slightly less than half had reduced portion sizes consumed by household members, and 20 per cent had reduced the amount of food consumed by adults in the household or purchased food on credit. The unaffordability of healthy food was identified as a key challenge: “We know a lot about food quality and the desirability for us to have such good food. That we know. Our only problem as a household is that we do

90

Percentage of households

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Rely on less Rely on Rely on less expensive lower quality preferred foods food foods

Borrow money to purchase food

Reduce Rely on help Limit portion number of from a friend size at meal meals eaten or relative times per day

Purchase food on credit

Source: Data from Crush and Tawodzera (2016).

Figure 13.2 Dietary strategies used by households during shortages

Restrict consumption by adults

Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  275

Percentage of households

not have the money to buy such foods … In some of the shops they sell food that is about to expire and if we are lucky we get some before other people grab the lot.” (Crush and Tawodzera, 2017, p. 96). Another important issue is the relationship between food access and social protection for migrants and refugees. All migrants and refugees fend for themselves as little material assistance is forthcoming from the state or UNHCR. South Africa’s system of social grants is critical in providing income and mitigating severe food insecurity among poor households. Migrants are usually precluded from accessing grants and have to rely on social networks and informal social protection mechanisms. “We are a community of sharing,” said one, “(and) if you are unable to help others when they are in dire need, they will also not help you when you are in trouble. Our communities and networks have memories – very long memories and we know who gives and who doesn’t … if I have some food, then my neighbour won’t starve.” (Crush and Tawodzera, 2016, pp. 22–3). These studies raise the question of the connection between the food security of migrants and those they leave behind. Crush and Tawodzera (2016) and Sithole and Dinbabo (2016) found high rates of remitting from paltry income. Few migrants indicated that remitting had a positive effect on their own food security status. On the contrary, 60 per cent said it had a negative or very negative impact (Figure 13.3). One of the primary reasons for coming to South Africa and Cape Town is to earn money to support those left behind. Migrants remit what they can when they can. While this may have a positive impact on the food security of family left behind, it makes them more vulnerable to food insecurity themselves (Crush and Tawodzera, 2016, p. 36). Many migrants and refugees in Cape Town, and South Africa more generally, are forced to make a living in the informal economy, and in the food sector in particular (Crush et al., 2015; Gastrow and Amit, 2015). A recent HCP survey of 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Positive

Neither positive nor negative

Negative

Very negative

Source: Data from Crush and Tawodzera (2016).

Figure 13.3 Impact of remitting money on Zimbabwean migrant household food security in South Africa

276  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

informal food vending in Cape Town, for example, found that 52 per cent of the city’s food vendors were South–South migrants from other countries (Tawodzera and Crush, 2019). In addition, nearly 40 per cent of Zimbabwean migrants in Cape Town and Johannesburg were working in the informal sector, engaging in activities such as selling foodstuffs, household goods, clothing, shoes, and arts and crafts (Crush and Tawodzera, 2017). Income-earning opportunities in the informal sector clearly play an important role in mitigating food insecurity of the migrants. However, the informal food sector is also a vital cog in the city’s food system, making food accessible to households in low-income areas of the city more generally (Battersby et al., 2016). The role of South–South migrants in mitigating food insecurity is obvious, but also underappreciated. Migrant food vendors in Cape Town are vulnerable to crime and have been the victims of waves of xenophobic violence (Crush and Ramachandran, 2015; Crush et al., 2017b; Gastrow, 2018; Uwimpuhwe and Ruiters, 2018). Ironically, the destruction and looting of migrant-owned food businesses not only destroys their food security, but undermines that of poor South Africans who depend on them for easy access to an affordable food supply.

4. CONCLUSION South–South migration is an important, though poorly researched, component of global migration. Migrants moving from one country to another within the Global South do so for a variety of reasons and with variable outcomes, but the vast majority move to cities in countries of destination where employment and livelihood opportunities are greatest. The stereotypical image of refugees cloistered in camps far from urban areas fails to do full justice to the fact that many asylum seekers and refugees in the Global South live in cities. As this chapter shows, the data for generating an overall picture of the global distribution of South–South migrants in cities is patchy and dated. Even less is known about the urban food insecurity experience and challenges confronting these highly mobile individuals. This is a dramatic contrast with the large research literature on food security, and associated nutrition and health outcomes, among migrants from the South in cities of the North. Through a case study of Cape Town, this chapter identifies a set of priority areas for future research on South–South migration and food security more generally. These include food insecurity as a driver of migration to cities; the levels, determinants, and experience of food insecurity by migrants in cities; migrant strategies to mitigate food insecurity; the relationship between food security and social protection for migrants; the role of remittances in promoting and undermining food security; and the place of migrants in transforming urban food systems, especially through their activities in the informal food sector in cities.

Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  277

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The support of the the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) is acknowledged.

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Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  279 Gastrow, V. and R. Amit (2015), ‘The role of migrant traders in local economies: a case study of spaza shops in Cape Town’, in J. Crush, A. Chikanda and C. Skinner (eds), Mean Streets: Migration, Xenophobia and Informality in South Africa, Ottawa, Canada: IDRC, pp. 162–77. Ginsburg, C., P. Bocquier, D. Béguy, S. Afolabi, O. Augusto, K. Derra, K. Herbst, B. Lankoade, F. Odhiambo, M. Otiende, A. Soura, P. Wamukoya, P. Zabré, M. White and M. Collinson (2017), ‘Healthy or unhealthy migrants? Identifying internal migration effects on mortality in Africa using health and demographic surveillance systems of the INDEPTH network’, Social Science & Medicine, 164(1), 59–73. Girard, A. and P. Sercia (2013), ‘Immigration and food insecurity: social and nutritional issues for recent immigrants in Montreal, Canada’, International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, 9(1), 32–45. Guarnaccia, G., T. Vivar, A. Bellows and G. Alcaraz (2012), ‘“We eat meat every day”: ecology and economy of dietary change among Oaxacan migrants from Mexico to New Jersey’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(1), 104–19. Guendelman, M., S. Cheryan and B. Monin (2011), ‘Fitting in but getting fat: identity threat and dietary choices among U.S. immigrant groups’, Psychological Science, 22(7), 959–67. Hadley, C., A. Zodhiates and D. Sellen (2007), ‘Acculturation, economics and food insecurity among refugees resettled in the US: a case study of West African refugees’, Public Health and Nutrition, 10(4), 405–12. Hadley, C., C.L. Patil and D. Nahayo (2010), ‘Difficulty in the food environment and the experience of food insecurity among refugees resettled in the United States’, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 49(5), 390–407. Holmboe-Ottesen, G. and M. Wandel (2012), ‘Changes in dietary habits after migration and consequences for health: a focus on South Asians in Europe’, Food & Nutrition Research, 56(1), 1–13. Hugo, G. (2009), ‘Best practice in temporary labour migration for development: a perspective from Asia and the Pacific’, International Migration, 47(5), 23–74. Hujo, K. and N. Piper (2007), ‘South–South migration: challenges for development and social policy’, Development, 50(4), 19–25. Hunter-Adams, J. (2017), ‘Exploring perceptions of the food environment amongst Congolese, Somalis and Zimbabweans living in Cape Town’, International Migration, 55(4), 78–87. Hunter-Adams, J. and H. Rother (2016), ‘Pregnant in a foreign city: a qualitative analysis of diet and nutrition for cross-border migrant women in Cape Town, South Africa’, Appetite, 103(1), 403–10. Hunter-Adams, J., L. Myer and H. Rother (2016), ‘Perceptions related to breastfeeding and the early introduction of complementary foods amongst migrants in Cape Town, South Africa’, International Breastfeeding Journal, 11(1), 1–9. IOM (2009), ‘Migrants’ needs and vulnerabilities in the Limpopo province, Republic of South Africa’, Pretoria, South Africa: International Organization for Migration. IOM (2015), ‘World Migration Report 2015: Migrants and Cities, New Partnerships to Manage Mobility’, Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Migration. Jacobs, W. and D. du Plessis (2016), ‘A spatial perspective of the patterns and characteristics of main- and substream migration to the Western Cape, South Africa’, Urban Forum, 27(2), 167–85. Jenkins, S. (2012), ‘Ethnicity, violence, and the immigrant-guest metaphor in Kenya’, African Affairs, 111(445), 576–96. Kennedy, S., M. Kidd, J. McDonald and N. Biddle (2015), ‘The healthy immigrant effect: patterns and evidence from four countries’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 16(2), 317–32. Lerch, M. (2017), ‘International migration and city growth’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, Technical Paper No. 2017/10, New York, NY, US: United Nations. Lesser, I., D. Gasevic and S. Lear (2014), ‘The association between acculturation and dietary patterns of South Asian immigrants’, PLoS One, 9(2), 1–6. Lu, Y. (2008), ‘Test of the “healthy migrant hypothesis”: a longitudinal analysis of health selectivity of internal migration in Indonesia’, Social Science and Medicine, 67(8), 1331–9.

280  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Maharaj, V., A. Tomita, L. Thela, M. Mhlongo and J. Burns (2017), ‘Food insecurity and risk of depression among refugees and immigrants in South Africa’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 19(3), 631–7. Martinez, A. (2013), ‘Reconsidering acculturation in dietary change research among Latino immigrants: challenging the preconditions of US migration’, Ethnicity & Health, 18(2), 115–35. Mathee, A. and N. Naicker (2015), ‘The socioeconomic and environmental health situation of international migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa’, South African Medical Journal, 106(1), 70–75. Méjean, C., P. Traissac, S. Eymard-Duvernay, J. El Ati, F. Delpeuch and B. Maire (2007), ‘Diet quality of North African migrants in France partly explains their lower prevalence of dietrelated chronic conditions relative to their Native peers’, Journal of Nutrition, 137(9), 2106–13. Moffat, T., C. Mohammed and B. Newbold (2017), ‘Cultural dimensions of food insecurity among immigrants and refugees’, Human Organization, 76(1), 15–27. Morreira, S. (2010), ‘Seeking solidarity: Zimbabwean undocumented migrants in Cape Town, 2007’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36(2), 433–48. Muggah, R. (2018), ‘Refugees and the city: the twenty-first-century front line’, World Refugee Council Research Paper No. 2, Waterloo, ON, Canada: Centre for International Governance Innovation. Napier, C., W. Oldewage-Theron and B. Makhaye (2018), ‘Predictors of food insecurity and coping strategies of women asylum seekers and refugees in Durban, South Africa’, Agriculture and Food Security, 7(67), 1–12. Nguyen, H., C. Smith, G. Reynolds and B. Freshman (2015), ‘The effect of acculturation on obesity among foreign-born Asians residing in the United States’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 17(2), 389–99. Northcote, M. and B. Dodson (2015), ‘Refugees and asylum seekers in Cape Town’s informal economy’, in J. Crush, A. Chikanda and C. Skinner (eds), Mean Streets: Migration, Xenophobia and Informality in South Africa, Ottawa, ON, Canada: IDRC, pp. 145–61. Nunnery, D. and J. Dharod (2017), ‘Potential determinants of food security among refugees in the US: an examination of pre- and post-resettlement factors’, Food Security, 9(1), 163–79. Nzabamwita, J. (2018), ‘African migrants’ characteristics and remittance behaviour: empirical evidence from Cape Town in South Africa’, African Human Mobility Review, 4(2), 1226–54. Oh, C. and E. Saito (2015), ‘Comparison of eating habits in obese and non-obese Filipinas living in an urban area of Japan’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 17(2), 467–73. Okafor, M., O. Carter-Pokras and M. Zhan (2014), ‘Greater dietary acculturation (dietary change) is associated with poorer current self-rated health among African immigrant adults’, Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 46(4), 226–35. Owen, J. (2015), Congolese Social Networks: Living on the Margins in Muizenberg, Cape Town, Lanham, MD, US: Lexington Books. Peberdy, S. (2013), ‘Gauteng: a province of migrants’, Data Brief No. 5, Gauteng City Regional Observatory (GCRO), Johannesburg, South Africa. Peberdy, S. and M. Jara (2011), ‘Humanitarian and social mobilization in Cape Town: civil society and the May 2008 xenophobic violence’, Politikon, 38(1), 37–57. Price, M. (2017), ‘Revisiting global immigrant gateways: hyper-diverse, established and emerging turnstiles of human settlement’, UN Expert Group Meeting on Sustainable Cities, Human Mobility and International Migration, New York, NY, US. Price, M. and L. Benton-Short (2007), ‘Immigrants and world cities: from the hyper-diverse to the bypassed’, Geojournal, 68(2–3), 103–17. Price, M. and L. Benton-Short (eds) (2008), Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities, Syracuse, NY, US: Syracuse University Press. Ratha, D. and W. Shaw (2007), ‘South–South migration and remittances’, Working Paper No. 102, World Bank, Washington, DC, US. Renzaho, A. and C. Burns (2006), ‘Post-migration food habits of sub-Saharan African migrants in Victoria: a cross-sectional study’, Nutrition & Dietetics, 63(2), 91–102. Rogerson, C. (2018), ‘Informality and migrant entrepreneurs in Cape Town’s inner city’, Bulletin of Geography. Socio-Economic Series, 40, 157–71.

Urban food security and South–South migration to cities of the Global South  281 Romano, D. and S. Traverso (2017), ‘Disentangling the effect of international migration on household food and nutrition security’, Working Paper No. 12, DISEI, University of Florence, Florence, Italy. Rule, S. (2018), ‘Migrants in Cape Town: settlement patterns’, HSRC Review, 16(4), 19–21. Sanou, D., E. O’Reilly, I. Ngnie-Teta, M. Batal, N. Mondain, C. Andrew, B. Newbold, and I. Bourgeault (2014), ‘Acculturation and nutritional health of immigrants in Canada: a scoping review’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 16(1), 24–34. Sithole, S. and M. Dinbabo (2016), ‘Exploring youth migration and the food security nexus: Zimbabwean youths in Cape Town’, African Human Mobility Review, 2(2), 512–37. Sulemana, I., E. Anarfo and P. Quartey (2018), ‘International remittances and household food security in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Migration and Development, 8(2), 1–17. Tarraf, D., D. Sanou and I. Giroux (2017), ‘Immigration and food insecurity: the Canadian experience. A literature review’, in I. Muenstermann (ed.), People’s Movements in the 21st Century: Risks, Challenges and Benefits, London, UK: InTechOpen. Tawodzera, G. and J. Crush (2019), ‘Inclusive growth and the informal food sector in Cape Town, South Africa’, HCP Report No. 16, Hungry Cities Partnership, Cape Town, South Africa and Waterloo, Canada. Tewolde, A. (2019), ‘Embracing colouredness in Cape Town: racial formation of first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa’, Current Sociology, 67(3), 419–37. Thow, A., J. Fanzo and J. Negin (2016), ‘A systematic review of the effect of remittances on diet and nutrition’, Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 37(1), 42–64. UNDESA (2017), ‘International migration report 2017’, New York, NY, US: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. UNHCR (2017), ‘UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2016’, Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Uwimpuhwe, D. and G. Ruiters (2018), ‘Organising Somalian, Congolese and Rwandan migrants in a time of xenophobia in South Africa: empirical and methodological reflections’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 19(1), 1119–36. Vahabi, M., C. Damba, C. Rocha and E. Montoya (2011), ‘Food insecurity among Latin American recent immigrants in Toronto’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 12(1), 929–39. Vang, Z., J. Sigouin, A. Flenon and A. Gagnon (2017), ‘Are immigrants healthier than nativeborn Canadians? A systematic review of the healthy immigrant effect in Canada’, Ethnicity & Health, 22(3), 209–41. Vera-Becerra, L., M. Lopez and L. Kaiser (2015), ‘Child feeding practices and overweight status among Mexican immigrant families’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 17(2), 375–82. Williams, J. (2017), ‘Dwelling discreetly: undocumented migrants in Cape Town’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37(3), 420–26. Whitehouse, B. (2012), Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, Belonging, Bloomington, Indiana, US: Indiana University Press. Zezza, A., C. Carletto, B. Davis and P. Winters (2011), ‘Assessing the impact of migration on food and nutrition security’, Food Policy, 36(1), 1–6.

14. Food remittances and food security Jonathan Crush and Mary Caesar

1. INTRODUCTION Globally, the transfer of funds by migrants to their home countries has grown rapidly over the past two decades and is at an all-time high. There is considerable debate among economists about what kinds of developmental impacts remittances have on the regions where migrants come from and the households that send the cash (Adams, 2011; Adams and Page, 2005; de Haas, 2007; Ngoma and Ismail, 2013). Some see remittances as a major driver of macro- and micro-economic development, poverty reduction, and human capital strengthening in receiving countries and areas of migrant origin (Adams, 2011; Combes and Ebeke, 2011; De and Ratha, 2012; Eversole and Shaw, 2010; Fajnzylber and Lopez, 2008; Orozco and Ellis, 2014; Ratha et al., 2011; Singh et al., 2010). Others have labelled cash remittances a “curse” with negative effects because they increase dependency, weaken institutional capacity, and rarely contribute to overall economic growth (Abdih et al., 2012; Azam and Gubert, 2006; Rao and Hassan, 2011, 2012). Recent global overviews of remitting practices and impacts define remittances to include both cash and goods flows (Adams, 2011; Yang, 2011). Yet, as is typical in much of the remittances literature, neither author gives any attention to the latter. The bias towards measurable flows means that most studies fail to consider the volume and impacts of goods and food remitting, both domestically and internationally. As Andersson Djurfeldt (2015b, p. 540) argues, food remittances are an essential but under-explored component of the “complex web” that characterizes economic and social life across the Global South, and are invisible mainly because they “run within the family and outside market channels”. Petrou and Connell (2017, p. 219) further suggest that food transfers make “little formal economic sense”, which may also account for their neglect in a field dominated by economists and economic theories of remitting behaviour. This draws attention to the fact that food remitting may combine both livelihood and social motivations. In this respect, some food remittances may be seen as a form of social remitting (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011). The growing interdisciplinary literature on internal migration and urban– rural linkages might be expected to focus on food remitting as these commonly involve the “reciprocal flows of people, goods, services, money and 282

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environmental services between rural and urban locations” (Berdegué et al., 2014, p. 26). But little attention has been paid to the practice. A seminal 1998 study of rural–urban linkages, for example, outlined a variety of bidirectional flows, but did not specifically discuss food remitting and its relationship to the food security of urban and rural households (Tacoli, 1998). Subsequent studies have tended to follow suit, mostly overlooking the potential importance of food remitting as a key link between rural and urban areas (Bah et al., 2003; Berdegué and Proctor, 2014; de Brauw et al., 2014; Proctor, 2014; Steinberg, 2011; Tacoli, 2006, 2007). Lacroix (2011, p. 34) maintains that “although there is a wealth of research on migrant remittances, none has investigated the relationships between their use at the domestic level and food security.” This situation is beginning to change, as evidenced by the papers in a special issue of International Migration (Crush and Caesar, 2017). Research in Africa and Asia has begun to acknowledge the importance of migration and cash remittances to improved food security among recipient households (Lacroix, 2011; Mendola, 2012; Zezza et al., 2011). However, most studies of the impact of remittances on food security focus on their investment in agriculture and the potential for improved food security through increased food production (Karamba et al., 2011; Lacroix, 2011; Moniruzzaman, 2016; Nguyen and Winters, 2011). There is case study evidence from countries such as Ghana and Nigeria that off-farm income, primarily cash remittances, improves levels of food security among rural households (Atuoye et al., 2017; Babatunde and Qaim, 2010). However, Karamba et al. (2011) argue that there is no national-level evidence that increased migration leads to better rural food security outcomes in Ghana. There is also evidence that a major use of cash remittances by rural recipients is for food purchase rather than investment in agriculture (Crush and Pendleton, 2009). Tacoli and Vorley (2015) suggest that many people in rural African communities buy more food than they sell, and that these “net food buyers” are typically from low-income groups who depend on cash to access affordable food. A study by Mahapatro et al. (2017, p. 92) found that, in three different areas of India, remittance and non-remittance receiving households spent a similar proportion of their household budget on food purchase (46–59 per cent), but the overall spend of remittance-receivers on food was significantly higher. In Bangladesh, Moniruzzaman (2016) shows that households receiving remittances are more food secure than non-receiving households. In particular, cash remittances are spent to maintain adequate consumption levels and improve the ability to acquire a sufficient quality and quantity of food to meet household members’ nutritional requirements. Remittances also improve dietary diversity and allow the households to cope with shocks that threaten their food security status.

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The standard definition of food security was developed at the 1996 World Food Summit as existing when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 2006). This definition has four main elements: (a) food availability, including the availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production or imports; (b) food accessibility, defined as access by individuals to adequate resources (entitlements) for acquiring appropriate foods for a nutritious diet; (c) food utilization, through adequate diet, clean water, sanitation, and health care, to reach a state of nutritional well-being where all physiological needs are met; and (d) food stability, which means access to adequate food at all times, including periods of sudden shocks (such as an economic or climatic crisis) or cyclical events (such as seasonal food supplies). There is broad agreement on the need to incorporate all these dimensions of food security into any analysis, but there is no consensus on how best to measure them (Carletto et al., 2013; de Haen et al., 2011; Leroy et al., 2015). Coates (2013, p. 188) concludes that “measurement efforts and the policies that flow from framing and quantification have advanced unevenly, stymied in part by the conceptual and technical challenges inherent in capturing a multi-dimensional problem.” As Crush and Caesar (2017) observe, part of the problem derives from the assumption that households and their members are static and fixed in space and, as a result, “there is failure to incorporate the lived realities of individual and household migration, cash and in-kind remittances and the spatially-divided household in which consumption in one place profoundly affects food security in the other and vice versa.” This chapter aims to review the current state of knowledge about migration and food remitting, with a particular focus on Africa, and the connection to the four pillars of food security at the household level. To date, there have been few large-scale studies of food remitting per se. Rather, information about the importance of food remitting has come to light in various national migration surveys, especially in Southern Africa. This chapter therefore extracts relevant data on food remittances from multi-country migration and food security household surveys conducted by the World Bank, the Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP), the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), and Lund University, Sweden. We first examine what is currently known about the connections between international migration and food remitting across borders, before focusing on internal migration and the ways in which rural and urban spaces are linked through food remitting. We then review the state of knowledge about the types and frequency of food remitting, and what is known about remitting households. Using a case study of Windhoek in Namibia, we consider the phenomenon of remittance reciprocity, in which cash remittances flow one way and food remittances the other. The chapter concludes with a call

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for a new research and policy agenda that refocuses attention from cash remittances and addresses the important phenomenon of food remitting.

2. INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION AND FOOD REMITTANCES Most countries in Africa send migrants to, and receive remittances from, other countries in the Global North and the Global South (Anich et al., 2014; Ratha et al., 2011). Of Africa’s 25 million international migrants, as many as 13 million (52 per cent) are estimated to live in other countries on the continent. Of the top 15 destinations for African migrants, 10 are in Africa (Table 14.1). In 2005, African countries received an estimated USD19 billion in cash remittances, of which USD2.1 billion came from other African countries (Chikanda and Crush, 2014). The volume of goods and food remitting to and within the continent is currently unknown. Most South–South migrants within Africa who remit cash and goods across borders earn income in the urban areas of the countries to which they have migrated, and remit to relatives in rural and urban areas through various formal and informal channels (Plaza et al., 2011). The significance of international cash remitting for household food security is indicated by two multi-country Table 14.1  Major destinations of international African migrants, 2015 Country

African-born migrants

France *Côte d’Ivoire Saudi Arabia Germany *Burkina Faso United States United Kingdom *Tanzania *Sudan *South Africa *Guinea *Nigeria *Ethiopia *Uganda *Ghana

3,048,721 2,261,097 1,341,232 1,086,997 1,033,450 931,241 842,246 828,234 774,350 729,498 669,052 643,234 635,176 511,907 502,496

Note: * African destination country. Source: Chikanda and Crush (2014, p. 71).

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national migration surveys. In 2010, the World Bank’s Africa Migration Project surveyed a representative sample of households in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda, and found that a significant, though variable, proportion of remittances was spent on physical and human capital investment, including food (Plaza et al., 2011). The proportion of cash remittances from outside the continent spent on food ranged from 13 per cent in Kenya to 63 per cent in Senegal. The range for South–South remittances from other African countries was 14 per cent in Kenya to 72 per cent in Senegal. An earlier (2005–2006) survey conducted by SAMP in five Southern African countries – Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe – found that 82 per cent of migrant-sending households had purchased food with cash remittances in the previous year, and that 81 per cent of household food purchases by value were paid with remittances (Pendleton et al., 2006). The proportion of cash remittances spent on food was 37 per cent, again with considerable inter-country variation from a high of 67 per cent in Mozambique to a low of 28 per cent in Lesotho (Table 14.2). Unfortunately, neither survey systematically explored whether the food purchased improved the food security of recipient households, or compared the levels of food security of households that received cash remittances and purchased food with those that did not. The SAMP survey found that goods made up a significant component of overall remittance receipts (Pendleton et al., 2006). Just over one-third of migrant-sending households across the five countries had received goods remittances in the previous year, with considerable variation from country to country. Goods remittances were most important to households in Zimbabwe (68 per cent) and Mozambique (65 per cent), and least important to households in Lesotho (20 per cent) and Swaziland (17 per cent). The average annual value of cash remittances was about three times as much as goods remittances, although in Mozambique they were similar, and in Zimbabwe only double. Clothing and food were by far the most important of the wide variety of goods that were remitted. In total, 28 per cent of migrant-sending households had received food remittances, with a high of 60 per cent in Mozambique and a low of 8 per cent in Lesotho. The low figure for Lesotho is surprising given the impoverished state and high levels of food insecurity in that country, but it also had the highest proportion of cash remittances spent on food of all the countries surveyed (Crush et al., 2010; Leduka et al., 2015; Turner, 2009). This suggests that the country’s integration into the South African economy means that food is readily available for purchase inside the country, provided that a household has the cash to purchase it. Other studies of international migrants in Southern Africa corroborate the importance of food remitting. One analysis of 487 households compared the remitting behaviour of internal and international migrants in Johannesburg (Vearey et al., 2009). Just over half of all migrants remitted money and another

287

Source: SAMP.

Food remittances Food remittances (% of households)

Goods remittances Goods remittances (% of households) Average annual value of goods remittances

Cash remittances Cash remittances (% of households) Average annual cash remittances % of cash remittances spent on food % of food expenditures paid with cash remittances

19.8

7.6

ZAR2,488

90.3

82.9

ZAR4,853

28.3

31.5

20.0

ZAR9,094

ZAR10,413

53.2

95.3

Lesotho

76.3

Botswana

60.4

ZAR2,272

64.8

78.1

66.7

ZAR2,607

76.8

Mozambique

Table 14.2  Cash, goods and food remittances in Southern Africa, 2006

22.0

ZAR1,838

16.6

72.3

59.5

ZAR6,279

64.4

Swaziland

44.5

ZAR1,307

68.1

79.7

34.2

ZAR2,760

83.5

Zimbabwe

28.5

ZAR2,274

33.6

80.8

37.0

ZAR6,407

66.3

Total

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21 per cent sent food. International migrants were more likely to remit both cash (60 per cent) and food (30 per cent) than internal migrants (38 per cent and 6 per cent). Another study of 500 Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa found that 82 per cent remitted cash and 50 per cent remitted food back to Zimbabwe (Crush and Tawodzera, 2017). This study also asked migrants about the impact of cash and food remitting on their own food security in South Africa. Sixty per cent said that the effect of cash remitting on their household food security was negative or very negative, and 39 per cent said that food remitting had a similarly negative impact. This finding is particularly suggestive since there has been little recognition in the literature that remitting cash and food may have positive and negative impacts on food security – improving that of source areas, while simultaneously having negative consequences for the migrants themselves.

3. INTERNAL MIGRATION AND FOOD REMITTANCES Because of transport costs, customs duties, and related difficulties in moving foodstuffs across international boundaries, it is likely that levels of food remitting are higher among internal than international migrants. However, unemployed or low-paid internal migrants may be more likely to lack the financial resources to purchase food to remit. The 2010 World Bank survey found that the proportion of cash remittances spent on food varied according to where the remittances originated. For example, in Kenya, 13–14 per cent of international cash remittances were spent on food, compared with 30 per cent of internal cash remittances. The 2007–2008 SAMP survey also compared internal and international remitting patterns in the Southern African region (Frayne and Pendleton, 2009). This survey canvassed a total of 9032 households in seven countries – Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe – and found that, of the 49 per cent with migrants, 42 per cent had international migrants, 48 per cent had internal migrants, and 10 per cent had both. Over one-third (36 per cent) of international and 19 per cent of internal migrant-sending households received goods (including food) remittances (Table 14.3). In this region then, contrary to expectations, international migrant households are more likely than internal migrant households to receive goods, including food, remittances. There is growing evidence that migrant households in destination areas rely to varying degrees on an informal, non-market supply of food from rural areas to survive in precarious urban environments (Crush and Caesar, 2017). This raises questions about reverse or two-way food remitting in which remittances flow from the migrant source area to the destination (and vice versa). Reverse remitting from source to destination has been documented in the case of

Food remittances and food security  289 Table 14.3  International and internal remittances in Southern Africa, 2008

No. of migrant households % receiving cash remittances % receiving goods remittances Mean cash remittances Mean value of goods remittances Importance to survival (%)

International

Internal

1,900 68 36 ZAR4,821 ZAR1,702 88

2,134 44 19 ZAR5,434 ZAR2,004 85

Source: SAMP.

international migration, but seems to be more common in the case of internal migration (Mazzucato, 2009). In Kenya, for example, there is evidence of extensive remitting of cash, clothing, building materials, agricultural equipment, and items for funerals, from town to countryside, and reciprocal remitting of foodstuffs from countryside to town. Food items remitted include green maize, local vegetables, sweet potatoes, cassava, maize and millet flour, groundnuts, fruits, and chicken (Owuor, 2003, 2010). None of these studies examined the impact of cash and food remitting on household food security in migrant destination and origin areas. However, a survey conducted in 2008–2009 by AFSUN of 6000 low-income urban households in 11 Southern African cities did make this connection. The prevalence of migrant origin to destination food remitting varied considerably from city to city (Frayne, 2010). Food remittance receipts were highest in Windhoek (Namibia), followed by Lusaka (Zambia), and Harare (Zimbabwe). The proportion of low-income urban households receiving food remittances was significantly lower in the three South African cities (Msunduzi, Cape Town, and Johannesburg), because this country is more urbanized and many urban households do not have strong links with rural areas. For those that do, smallholder farmers rarely produce enough for their own needs, much less have surplus to remit to the cities (Table 14.4). How important are food remittances to food security at migrant destinations? The AFSUN survey found that around 80 per cent of the urban households receiving food remittances from rural areas said that they were “important” or “very important” to household food security, while 9 per cent said they were critical to household survival. Some 77 per cent said that the food had been remitted to directly help the urban household’s food needs, while 20 per cent said the food was sent in the form of a gift. This seems to confirm that food remitting is driven by a combination of livelihood and social motivations. The importance of food remittances to urban food security is further illustrated by the fact that only 3 per cent of households receiving food sold it for cash income, while

290

Source: AFSUN.

Windhoek, Namibia Lusaka, Zambia Harare, Zimbabwe Maseru, Lesotho Blantyre, Malawi Manzini, Swaziland Msunduzi, South Africa Maputo, Mozambique Gaborone, Botswana Cape Town, South Africa Johannesburg, South Africa

47 44 42 37 36 35 24 23 22 18 14

% of all households receiving food remittances

Table 14.4  Food remittances to poor urban households

72 39 37 49 38 53 15 23 70 14 24

% of recipient households receiving remittances from rural areas 12 44 43 44 51 40 82 62 16 83 67

% of recipient households receiving remittances from urban areas only 16 17 20 7 11 7 3 15 14 3 9

% of recipient households receiving remittances from both rural and urban areas

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the rest consumed the food themselves. However, while food remittances may lower the vulnerability of migrants to food insecurity, they do not eliminate it entirely. Of the one-third of low-income households in cities that received food remittances, only 16 per cent were food secure as measured by the Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence (HFIAP) indicator (Frayne, 2010). In Africa, internal remitting is generally seen as an example of urban–rural linkage (Tacoli, 2006, 2007). However, the AFSUN survey identified another significant spatial form: food remitting from one urban area to another. Rural– urban food remitting was certainly significant (with 41 per cent of all households receiving transfers) but was exceeded by urban–urban food remitting (48 per cent of all households). Only a small number (around 11 per cent) received food remittances from rural and other urban areas. In three cities, more than half of the urban households received food remittances from rural areas: Windhoek (72 per cent), Gaborone (Botswana) (70 per cent) and Manzini (Swaziland) (53 per cent). Since these three cities are among the smaller centres surveyed, this suggests that rural–urban food remitting might be stronger in countries with lower rates of urbanization and more viable rural smallholder agriculture. There was considerable variation in the relative importance of urban–urban food remitting related to the degree of urbanization of the country (Table 14.4). For example, in Windhoek, only 12 per cent of recipient households obtained their food remittances from other urban households. At the other end of the spectrum, more than 80 per cent of recipient households in the three South African cities got their food remittances from other urban centres. High rates of urban–urban food remitting were also found in Maputo (Mozambique) (62 per cent of recipient households), Blantyre (Malawi) (51 per cent), Maseru (Lesotho) (44 per cent), Lusaka (44 per cent), and Harare (43 per cent). In each case, it is likely that a proportion of transfers came in the form of food remittances from migrants working in a city in another country, primarily South Africa. The phenomenon of urban–urban food remitting requires much further investigation, but it appears to reflect two things. First, rapid urbanization in Africa is leading to a situation of greater interaction and food remittances between cities, and draws attention to the importance of urban–urban linkages as populations become more urbanized. Second, unlike rural–urban remittances, urban–urban food remittances are unlikely to involve the production of food so much as its purchase and transfer, perhaps by a migrant in one city to a member of the same family living in another city. Furthermore, the reasons why so many urban households receive food remittances from either rural or urban areas, but not both, requires additional analysis and explanation. Is it a function of how long a migrant has lived in the city, with more recent migrants likely to retain stronger rural links? Or is it related to the fact that migrants receiving food remittances from other urban areas do so primarily from urban centres in other countries? And what is the relationship, if any, between the size of

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an urban centre and the frequency of food remitting? The existence of urban–­ urban food remitting suggests that we need a more nuanced notion of linkages and flows, which goes beyond the standard idea that rural–urban linkages are the only important influence on the food security of urban populations.

4. FREQUENCY AND TYPES OF FOOD REMITTANCES In the AFSUN survey, the geography of food remitting, whether rural–urban or urban–urban, was related to the frequency of food remittances. Households in one city receiving food from another did so far more often than those receiving food from rural areas. Around a quarter of recipients of food remittances from other urban areas did so at least once a week, compared with only 5 per cent of households receiving food from rural areas. Three-quarters of households receiving urban–urban remittances did so at least once every two months, compared with only 40 per cent of households receiving rural–urban remittances (Figure 14.1). This might suggest that urban–urban network support mechanisms are stronger than rural–urban ties. However, transportation is undoubtedly easier between urban areas, and urban–urban transfers are less likely to be affected by the seasonal agricultural cycle. Food remittances from both rural and other urban areas are dominated by cereals, primarily maize. All of the recipient urban households were sent cereals 60

Per cent of households

50 40 30 Urban-Urban

20

Rural-Urban

10 0

At least once per week

At least once Three to six At least once every two times per year per year months Frequency of remitting

Figure 14.1  Frequency of food remittances

Food remittances and food security  293 Table 14.5  Frequency of cereals remitting Food type

Frequency

Urban−Urban (%)

Rural−Urban (%)

Cereals

At least once a week At least once every 2 months 3–6 times a year At least once a year Total

27 52 12 9 100

2 25 36 37 100

at some point during the year, irrespective of whether the source was rural or urban. But there was a marked difference in the frequency of transfers, with a quarter of urban-sourced cereals arriving at least once a week and 80 per cent arriving at least once every couple of months (Table 14.5). In contrast, cereals from rural areas arrived less frequently, primarily because of the rural agricultural cycle. Urban–urban cereal transfers are not dependent on the cycle as cereals can be purchased and sent at any time of the year. The types of rural–urban food remittances are clearly related to the crops grown by smallholder farmers. All of the urban households received cereals – primarily maize and millet – which are staple foods in the region. Other agricultural products included beans/peas/lentils/nuts (40 per cent of recipient households), vegetables (37 per cent), roots/tubers (21 per cent), and fruit (9 per cent) (Table 14.6). Around one-quarter of households also received meat/ poultry. Urban–urban remittances were more likely to involve vegetables (51 per cent of recipient households), and meat/poultry (39 per cent). The difference between urban–urban and rural–urban food remittances was particularly marked for processed foods such as sugar/honey (40 per cent versus 5 per cent) Table 14.6  Types of food remitted

Cereals/grain Food from beans/peas/lentils/nuts Vegetables Meat/poultry Roots/tubers Cheese/milk products Fruit Foods made with oil/fat/butter Sugar/honey Eggs

Rural−Urban % of recipient households (N=753)

Urban−Urban % of recipient households (N=890)

100 40 37 23 21 10 9 6 5 4

100 30 51 39 35 18 19 33 40 14

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and foods made with oil/fat/butter (33 per cent versus 6 per cent). This suggests that urban–urban remitting is characterized by a greater variety of foodstuffs, and is more likely to enhance dietary diversity than rural–urban remitting. However, it is also more likely to involve the transfer and consumption of less healthy processed products.

5. FOOD REMITTERS IN RURAL AREAS The best general picture of food remitting households in rural areas in Africa comes from a Lund University study involving 3388 rural farm households in nine countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia (Abadi et al., 2013; Andersson Djurfeldt, 2015a, 2015b; Andersson Djurfeldt and Wambugu, 2011; Djurfeldt et al., 2011). The study found that 2,857 households (84 per cent) were maize producers and that 1,192 (35 per cent) remitted maize. The proportion of maize-remitting households ranged from 69 per cent in Nigeria to 22 per cent in Tanzania. The Lund study shows that the geography of remitting is more complex than suggested by traditional rural–urban or even urban–urban binaries (Table 14.7). For example, the most frequent type of remitting is rural–rural (to neighbouring villages and other rural areas). Also, rural–urban food remittances vary with the proximity and size of the destination. About the same proportion of households (just over one-third) send remittances to towns within and outside the district. Fewer remit to the capital city (23 per cent) and other major urban centres (17 per cent). The Lund researchers also found that food remitting varies with rural household income. As household income increases, so too does the propensity to remit and the frequency of remitting. The proportion of households with access to non-farm income (largely cash remittances) varied from 30 per cent in the lowest income quintile to 76 per cent in the highest income quintile (Table 14.8). Table 14.7  Maize remittance destinations % of remitting households Neighbouring villages Other rural areas Towns in same district Towns outside district Capital city Major urban centres Source: Andersson Djurfeldt (2015a, p. 538).

47 31 35 34 23 17

Food remittances and food security  295 Table 14.8  Maize remittances and rural household income

Quintiles

% with access Mean maize to non-farm production income (kg)

% of households remitting

% of total production remitted

Mean amount of maize remitted (kg)

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Total

30 35 45 53 76 51

27 36 42 49 55 42

18 15 15 11 10 13

117 121 192 195 321 227

649 805 1277 1768 3211 1746

Source: Andersson Djurfeldt (2015b).

The proportion of households remitting maize similarly increased from 27 per cent in the lowest quintile to 55 per cent in the highest quintile. The total amount of maize remitted also increased with household income. As the study concluded, “the notion that transfers are concentrated among the poorest is to some extent refuted” (Andersson Djurfeldt, 2015a). The study identified a positive relationship between access to household income and the amount of maize produced, which suggests that cash remitting may improve household food security through increased production. In addition, all households tend to remit a similar proportion of their maize production, irrespective of income. What this means for household food security is a “distributional dualism of food transfers: households in the lower income quintiles are clearly forfeiting their own food security to be able to feed family members and relatives outside the co-resident household and in this sense are not transferring according to their capacity” (Andersson Djurfeldt, 2015a, p. 536). In general, the implications of food remitting for food security in both migrant origin and destination areas require more research. However, the Lund research suggests some hypotheses for further exploration. One is that betteroff rural households remit surplus production, while the poorest households support vulnerable family members by sacrificing their own food needs. The impacts of food remitting seem to be more severe on poorer households. A study of six rural villages in the Nyeri and Kakamega districts of Kenya concluded that between one-third and a half of households remitted maize, and that this “may represent a mechanism for counteracting food shortages, price shocks and volatility for receiving households under a system in which markets cannot be trusted to deliver, or do so at seasonally inflated prices” (Andersson Djurfeldt and Wambugu, 2011, pp. 457–8).

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Another study of eight villages in Malawi found that between one- and twothirds of maize producers were remitters (Andersson, 2011). Maize sellers were more likely to remit than non-sellers, and both selling and remitting were positively correlated with total household production. Among poorer households “remittances take out a relatively large proportion of total production for already food-insecure households, pushing them below their non-remitting counterparts”. There were thus two very different scenarios, as indicated by Andersson (2011, p. 19): “the sending of remittances appears to point in two different directions on the part of the senders: on the one hand the most affluent and food secure households engage in remittances as a widening of family consumption over space, without compromising the resident household’s ability to feed itself. On the other hand, the more vulnerable households undermine the food security of the co-resident household unit to support family members outside the village.” In the Upper West Region of Ghana, Kuuire et al. (2013) found that food remitting had a major influence on the amount of food consumed, and on the frequency and type of food eaten. The importance of this study is the suggestion that food remitting is not just about livelihoods, but can also play an important social function, with food remittances symbolizing the continuity and strength of kin relationships with relatives who live elsewhere. Women “left behind” by migrant spouses also “gauged their husbands’ affection from the regularity and amount of food flows they received”. The study also found that food from migrant men is shared with in-laws to build stronger bonds and strengthen marital ties.

6. RECIPROCAL REMITTING: A CASE STUDY Research in Windhoek, Namibia, has shown that internal migration can be accompanied by reciprocal remitting, in which food is remitted from rural households to migrants in the city who, in turn, remit cash to their rural homes (Frayne, 2001, 2004, 2005b; Nickanor, 2013; Nickanor et al., 2016; Pendleton et al., 2014). Levels of household food insecurity in Windhoek were lower than predicted given pervasive poverty, high unemployment, a relatively small informal economy, and minimal urban agriculture (Frayne, 2005a, 2005b, 2007). Frayne (2001) found that 62 per cent of the urban households had received food remittances from rural relatives in the previous year. Produce remitted included millet (received by 42 per cent), wild foods (41 per cent), and meat and fish (9 per cent). In Windhoek, food security for economically marginal households was dependent to a large degree on these food remittances. Equally, the reciprocal flow of cash remittances from Windhoek was critical for rural livelihoods. Over one-third (37 per cent) of urban households had

Food remittances and food security  297

remitted cash to rural areas in the previous year (Frayne, 2004). Remittances were largely spent on school fees, healthcare, and the purchase of food in rural areas. As Frayne (2005b) concluded: “flow of goods between the urban and rural areas is truly reciprocal. With about two-thirds of urban households both sending money to the rural areas and receiving food from rural households, the rural–urban symbiosis is well established. Unless there is rapid economic growth with jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled workers in Windhoek, the flow of food into the urban areas is likely to continue as urban households continue to diversify their sources of food and income.” The practice of reciprocal remitting was confirmed in AFSUN’s 2008 survey of households in low-income formal and informal settlements in Windhoek (Pendleton et al., 2014). A total of 41 per cent of surveyed households had received food remittances from relatives in rural areas in the previous year (down from 62 per cent in 2001). Of the urban food recipients, nearly 80 per cent received cereals (primarily millet), 27 per cent meat and poultry, and 19 per cent milk and milk products (Table 14.9). The frequency of remitting varied with the type of food involved. For example, more than half of the households received cereals three to six times per year, which suggests that remitting not only occurs after the harvest, but also at other times of the year, probably from household stores (Table 14.10). The practice of rural–urban food remitting has positive implications for migrants on all dimensions of food security: increasing availability and access, improving dietary diversity, and stabilizing consumption. Migrant households receiving food remittances emphasized that they were important for household survival, with as many as 52 per cent saying they were “very important” and 15 per cent that they were “critical to survival” (Figure 14.2). Of the 11 Southern African cities surveyed by AFSUN in 2008, Windhoek residents spent the lowest proportion of their income on food. It appears, paradoxically, that in

Table 14.9  Types of rural−urban food remittance to Windhoek % of recipient households Cereals Meat/poultry Milk and milk products Legumes Vegetables Oils/fats/butter Fruits Eggs Roots/tubers

79 27 19 13 12 4 3 1 0.5

298  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Table 14.10  Frequency of rural−urban food remitting to Windhoek

Cereals % of recipient households At least once 1 per week At least every 24 two months 3−6 times per 56 year At least once 19 per year

Meat/poultry % of recipient households

Milk products % of recipient households

Fish % of recipient households

Vegetables % of recipient households

2

0

0

0

56

42

17

17

29

30

38

26

13

12

45

57

60 50

Per cent

40 30

Windhoek

20 10 0

Unimportant Somewhat important

Important

Very important

Critical to survival

Figure 14.2  Self-assessment of importance of food remittances in Windhoek

proportional terms “the poorer you are the less you actually spend on food” (Nickanor, 2013, pp. 108–9). Cross-tabulation of the amount of millet received with household income found that the poorest households received the greatest average amounts of millet (Frayne, 2007). At the same time, the relationship was relatively weak as households receiving millet were spread across income categories, prompting

Food remittances and food security  299

the overall conclusion that, in poor areas of the city, higher wage incomes do not necessarily translate into lower transfers of food (Frayne, 2005a, p. 66). In the 2008 AFSUN survey, there was a slight decline in the importance of food remitting with increasing income. For example, 35 per cent of households receiving food remittances from rural relatives were in the lowest income tercile, 33 per cent in the middle tercile, and 31 per cent in the upper tercile. Broadening out from the Windhoek case study, the AFSUN regional dataset found that food remittances were particularly important for food-insecure households and that this relationship was statistically significant (Frayne, 2010, p. 300). In total, only 16 per cent of recipient households were food secure, compared with 84 per cent who were food-insecure. Cross-tabulating household food security with food remittances in Windhoek gave exactly the same results as the 11-city data-set as a whole. This suggests that while food remittances probably make migrant households less food-insecure, they are a response to acute insecurity, and insufficient in quantity and regularity to guarantee a household’s overall food security. Is food remitting tied to the strength of the links that urban households maintain with rural areas? Over the generational long term, as the South African case makes clear, permanent urbanization and the loosening of rural linkages is likely to lead to the decline and eventual demise of food remitting. At the other end of the spectrum, as in Namibia, linkages remain very strong, not only in terms of material transfers, but also through personal visits and interactions. Over 80 per cent of urban households send someone to visit their relatives in rural areas at least once per year, and many even more frequently. Reasons include special family events and participation in farming-related activities. While there is an argument that the length of time spent in Windhoek has no impact on the strength of ties to rural areas (Pomuti and Tvedten, 1998), this contrasts with the view of one migrant that “in today’s life you cannot rely on your own family elsewhere to support you because when you are working you are regarded as family but when you are not working then you are on your own” (Nickanor, 2013, p. 173) (see Table 14.11). In-depth interviews with female household heads in Windhoek as part of the AFSUN research found a consistent pattern of exclusion, labour-market discrimination, and economic hardship among female-centred migrant households in poorer areas of the city. As a result, “female-centred households are far more vulnerable than nuclear, male, and extended households. Gender discrimination in the labour market means female heads of households are forced to adopt other livelihood strategies including informal selling of food as well as beer brewing, wood selling and sex work” (Nickanor, 2013, p. 189). Extremely high levels of food insecurity translate into anxiety and uncertainty about household food supply. Asked how often over the previous month they had worried about whether the household would have enough food, 56 per cent

300

Food secure Mildly foodinsecure Moderately food-insecure Severely foodinsecure

29 7 14 50

18 5

14

63

Windhoek % of households

Formal housing % of households

Table 14.11  Levels of food insecurity in Windhoek

76

13

8 4

Informal housing % of households

85

7

4 3

% of femalecentred households

72

15

10 3

% of male-centred households

71

12

9 9

% of nuclear households

Types of household in informal settlements

71

18

8 2

% of extended households

Food remittances and food security  301

of female household heads said they were often or sometimes worried. Most households had adjusted their food intake in some way: 62 per cent had sometimes or often eaten smaller meals because of a lack of resources; 55 per cent had cut the number of meals due to a lack of food; 55 per cent had sometimes or often had no food in the house; 47 per cent had gone to sleep hungry; and 45 per cent had gone a whole day and night without eating. However, the proportion of migrant households receiving food remittances was not significantly higher for female-centred households (Nickanor, 2013). Another study in the rural north found no evidence of gender discrimination in the amounts of food remitted to Windhoek (Guettou and Djurfeldt, 2014, p. 45).

7. CONCLUSION The explosion of research on the impact of migrant remittances – at global, regional, and national scales – focuses almost exclusively on cash remitting. Connections between remittances and food security tend to be confined to discussions of the impact of cash remittances on rural agricultural production, and the use of cash remittances by recipients to purchase food (Crush, 2013; Crush and Caesar, 2017). The remitting of food across international boundaries and within countries has received little attention, primarily because these flows occur outside market channels and are harder to quantify. The result is that there is little solid information on the volume, value, and impacts of food remitting in migration and development or food security literatures. Similarly, the growing literature on internal migration and urban–rural linkages has highlighted the complexity and dynamism of connectivity in the context of the rapid urbanization of the Global South. However, informal food remitting as a form of linkage has been neglected in favour of discussions of formal, market-based interactions, and other types of flows. This chapter has sought to establish whether food remitting is an important corollary of international and internal migration with particular reference to African evidence, and whether or not it deserves more attention from migration and development researchers. Using data extracted from five migration-related, cross-national household surveys, and a detailed case study from Namibia, the chapter has established that food remitting is an important by-product and consequence of migration. It is also clear that food remitting is a major research gap that demands greater attention and a systematic, comparative programme of primary research. The evidence presented and discussed here suggests that there are at least three key questions about food remitting practices that require further research. First, unlike cash remittances that tend to flow from migrant destinations to migrant origins, food remittances can flow in both directions. Migrants may

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purchase food and send it back to their home areas, sometimes with cash remittances, to support family members who remain behind. Equally, agricultural produce is sent through non-market channels to support migrants at their destinations. In countries with higher levels of urbanization and more than one major city (such as South Africa), another form of food remitting has emerged: between different urban centres (and possibly between migrants from the same household working and living in different destinations). Further research in source and destination areas is necessary to fully unpick the complex geography of food remitting, involving variegated and overlapping movement of food along four channels (urban–rural, rural–urban, urban–urban, and rural–rural). There have been no large-scale systematic studies that look simultaneously at the rural and urban nodes of a household, and chart the food pathways between them. Most of the existing research has been conducted in cities or the countryside, but not both, and certainly not between migrants in different destination cities. Unlike the cash remittances literature, which has devoted considerable attention to remittance channels and the costs of remitting, there has been no systematic exploration of food remitting channels and costs. Second, there is consensus in cash remittances literature that they are sent primarily to support the livelihoods of sending households, and are invested in education, health, and the purchase of consumer goods such as clothing and food. The potential uses of food remittances are more constrained since they are essentially limited to individual and household consumption. While a small proportion of food remitting is motivated by social concerns, it is clear from the evidence presented here that most food remitting is undertaken for livelihood reasons, and in this sense is another positive development impact of remittance regimes. The Namibia case study of reciprocal cash and food remitting is an important corrective to the conventional wisdom that remittances only flow from migrant destination to source areas. However, more comparative research is needed to establish whether this is common practice. Third, the Namibia case study raises a set of hypotheses about food remittance impacts that need further elaboration and testing. These include the relationship between urban poverty and the level of food remitting; whether food remittances substantially reduce levels of urban and rural food insecurity; if the volume and frequency of food remitting is related to the strength of the other links that migrants maintain with their areas of origin; the reasons for interhousehold variation in levels of food security and food receipts; and whether food remitting patterns change over time with increased migration and urbanization. As noted earlier, there are at least four dimensions of food access and consumption that need to be fulfilled for a state of food security to exist. While the phenomenon of food remitting can be verified from existing surveys, the questions of whether and how food remittances impact on the four dimensions of food security remain largely unanswered.

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The global attention paid to cash remittances over the past decade has provided a solid evidence base for understanding remitting behaviour at international, regional, and national levels. There is growing consensus that remittances can also be mainstreamed into development for the benefit of senders and recipients, whether individuals, communities, or whole countries. No equivalent knowledge base exists for food remittances. Much additional research on this important, yet neglected, aspect of migration and development is therefore required. By drawing attention to the importance of food remittances for urban and rural food security, and identifying current knowledge gaps, this chapter seeks to create a platform for a new research agenda.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to acknowledge the support of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) for our work on food remitting, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their support of the Hungry Cities Partnership. A version of this chapter first appeared in Migration and Development, 7(2) (2018) and is used here with the editor’s permission.

REFERENCES Abadi, N., A. Techane, G. Tesfay, D. Maxwell and B. Vaitla (2013), ‘The impact of remittances on household food security: a micro perspective from Tigray, Ethiopia’, Mekele: Department of Natural Resource Economics and Management, Mekelle University. Abdih, Y., R. Chami, J. Dagher and P. Montiel (2012), ‘Remittances and institutions: are remittances a curse?’, World Development, 40(4), 657–66. Adams, R. (2011), ‘Evaluating the economic impact of international remittances on developing countries using household surveys: a literature review’, Journal of Development Studies, 47(6), 809–28. Adams, R. and J. Page (2005), ‘Do international migration and remittances reduce poverty in developing countries?’, World Development, 33(10), 1645–69. Andersson, A. (2011), ‘Maize remittances, smallholder livelihoods and maize consumption in Malawi’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 49(1), 1–25. Andersson Djurfeldt, A. (2015a), ‘Multi-local livelihoods and food security in rural Africa’, Journal of International Development, 27(4), 528–45. Andersson Djurfeldt, A. (2015b), ‘Urbanization and linkages to smallholder farming in sub-Saharan Africa: implications for food security’, Global Food Security, 4(1), 1–7. Andersson Djurfeldt, A. and S. Wambugu (2011), ‘In-kind transfers of maize, commercialization and household consumption in Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5(3), 447–64. Anich, R., J. Crush, S. Melde and J. Oucho (eds) (2014), A New Perspective on Human Mobility in the South, London, UK and Geneva, Switzerland: Springer and IOM.

304  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Atuoye, K., V. Kuuire, J. Kangmennaang, R. Antabe and I. Luginaah (2017), ‘Residential remittances and food security in the Upper West Region of Ghana’, International Migration, 55(4), 18–34. Azam, J. and F. Gubert (2006), ‘Migrants’ remittances and the household in Africa: a review of evidence’, Journal of African Economies, 15(2), 426–62. Babatunde, R. and M. Qaim (2010), ‘Impact of off-farm income on food security and nutrition in Nigeria’, Food Policy, 35(4), 303–11. Bah, M., S. Cissè, B. Diyamett, G. Diallo, F. Lerise, D. Okali, E. Okpara, J. Olawoye and C. Tacoli (2003), ‘Changing rural–urban linkages in Mali, Nigeria and Tanzania’, Environment and Urbanization, 15(1), 13–24. Berdegué, J. and F. Proctor (2014), ‘Inclusive rural–urban linkages’, Territorial Cohesion for Development Program Working Paper No. 123, Santiago, Chile: Rimisp. Berdegué, J., T. Rosada and A. Bebbington (2014), ‘The rural transformation’, in B. Currie-Alder, R. Kanbur, D. Malone and R. Medhora (eds), International Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 463–78. Carletto, C., A. Zezza and R. Banerjee (2013), ‘Towards better measurement of household food security: harmonizing indicators and the role of household surveys’, Global Food Security, 2(1), 30–40. Chikanda, A. and J. Crush (2014), ‘Diasporas of the South’, in R. Anich, J. Crush, S. Melde, and J. Oucho (eds), A New Perspective on Human Mobility in the South, London, UK and Geneva, Switzerland: Springer and IOM, pp. 65–88. Coates, J. (2013), ‘Build it back better: deconstructing food security for improved measurement and action’, Global Food Security, 2(3), 188–94. Combes, J. and C. Ebeke (2011), ‘Remittances and household consumption instability in developing countries’, World Development, 39(7), 1076–89. Crush, J. (2013), ‘Linking migration, food security and development’, International Migration, 51(5), 61–75. Crush, J. and M. Caesar (2017), ‘Cultivating the migration–food security nexus’, International Migration, 55(4), 19–27. Crush, J. and W. Pendleton (2009), ‘Remitting for survival: rethinking the development potential of remittances’, Global Development Studies, 5, 1–28. Crush, J. and G. Tawodzera (2017), ‘South–South migration and urban food security: Zimbabwean migrants in South African cities’, International Migration, 55(4), 88–102. Crush, J., B. Dodson, J. Gay, T. Green and C. Leduka (2010), ‘Migration, remittances and “development” in Lesotho’, SAMP Migration Policy Series No. 52, Cape Town, South Africa: SAMP. de Brauw, A., V. Mueller and H. Lee (2014), ‘The role of rural–urban migration in the structural transformation of sub-Saharan Africa’, World Development, 63(C), 33–42. de Haas, H. (2007), ‘Remittances, migration and social development: a global perspective’, Programme Paper No. 34, Geneva, Switzerland: UNRISD. de Haen, H., S. Klasen and M. Qaim (2011), ‘What do we really know? Metrics for food insecurity and under nutrition’, Food Policy, 36(6), 760–69. De, P. and D. Ratha (2012), ‘Impact of remittances on household income, asset and human capital: evidence from Sri Lanka’, Migration and Development, 1(1), 163–79. Djurfeldt, G., E. Aryeetey and A. Isinika (eds) (2011), African Smallholders: Food Crops, Markets and Policy, Cambridge, MA, US: CAB International. Eversole, R. and J. Shaw (2010), ‘Remittance flows and their use in households: a comparative study of Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 19(2), 175–202. Fajnzylber, P. and J. Lopez (ed.) (2008), Remittances and Development: Lessons from Latin America, Washington, DC, US: World Bank. FAO (2006), ‘The state of food insecurity in the world’, Rome, Italy: FAO. Frayne, B. (2001), Survival of the Poorest: Food Security and Migration in Namibia (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation), Kingston, ON, Canada: Queens University. Frayne, B. (2004), ‘Migration and urban survival strategies in Windhoek, Namibia’, Geoforum, 35(4), 489–505.

Food remittances and food security  305 Frayne, B. (2005a), ‘Rural productivity and urban survival in Namibia: eating away from home’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 23(1), 51–76. Frayne, B. (2005b), ‘Survival of the poorest: Migration and food security in Namibia’, in L. Mougeot (ed.), Agropolis: The social, Political and Environmental Dimensions of Urban Agriculture, Ottawa, ON, Canada: IDRC, pp. 32–50. Frayne, B. (2007), ‘Migration and the changing social economy of Windhoek, Namibia’. Development Southern Africa, 24(1), 91–108. Frayne, B. (2010), ‘Pathways of food: mobility and food transfers in Southern African cities’, International Development Planning Review, 32(3–4), 291–310. Frayne, B. and W. Pendleton (2009), ‘The development role of remittances in the urbanization process in Southern Africa’, Global Development Studies, 5(3–4), 85–132. Guettou, N. and A. Djurfeldt (2014), Gender and Access to Food: A Case Study on Gender Differences in Access to Food through Rural to Urban Food Transfers, and its Impact on Food Security in Moses//Garoëb, Windhoek, Namibia, (Unpublished MSc Thesis), Lund University, Sweden. Karamba, W., E. Quiñones and P. Winters, (2011), ‘Migration and food consumption patterns in Ghana’, Food Policy, 36(1), 41–53. Kuuire, V., P. Mkandawire, G. Arku and I. Luginaah (2013), ‘“Abandoning” farms in search of food: food remittance and household food security in Ghana’, African Geographical Review, 32(2), 125–39. Lacroix, T. (2011), Migration, Rural Development, Poverty and Food Security: A Comparative Perspective, Oxford, UK: International Migration Institute, Oxford University. Leduka, R., J. Crush, B. Frayne, C. McCordic, T. Matobo, T. Makoa, M. Mphale, M. Phaila and M. Letsie (2015), ‘The state of poverty and food insecurity in Maseru, Lesotho’, AFSUN Urban Food Security Series No. 21, Cape Town, South Africa: African Food Security Urban Network. Leroy, J., M. Ruel, E. Frongillo, J. Harris and T. Ballard, (2015), ‘Measuring the food access dimension of food security: a critical review and mapping of indicators’, Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 36(2), 167–95. Levitt, P. and D. Lamba-Nieves (2011), ‘Social remittances revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(1), 1–22. Mahapatro, S., A. Bailey, K. James and I. Hutter (2017), ‘Remittances and household expenditure patterns in India and selected states’, Migration and Development, 6(1), 83–101. Mazzucato, V. (2009), ‘Informal insurance arrangements in Ghanaian migrants’ transnational networks: the role of reverse remittances and geographic proximity’, World Development, 37(6), 1105–15. Mendola, M. (2012), ‘Rural out-migration and economic development at origin: a review of the evidence’, Journal of International Development, 24(1), 102–22. Moniruzzaman, M. (2016), Debt Financed Migration to Consumption Smoothing: Tracing the link between migration and food security in Bangladesh (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation), Laurier University, Waterloo. Ngoma, A. and N. Ismail (2013), ‘Do migrant remittances promote human capital formation? Evidence from 89 developing countries’, Migration and Development, 2(1), 106–16. Nguyen, M. and P. Winters (2011), ‘The impact of migration on food consumption patterns: The case of Vietnam’, Food Policy, 36(1), 71–87. Nickanor, N. (2013), Food deserts and household food insecurity in the informal settlements of Windhoek, Namibia (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation), University of Cape Town, South Africa. Nickanor, N., J. Crush and W. Pendleton (2016), ‘Migration, rural–urban linkages and food insecurity’, in J. Crush and J. Battersby (eds), Rapid Urbanization, Urban Food Deserts and Food Security in Africa, Geneva, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 127–42. Orozco, M. and C. Ellis (2014), ‘Impact of remittances in developing countries’, in R. Anich, J. Crush, S. Melde and J. Oucho (eds), A New Perspective on Human Mobility in the South, London, UK and Geneva, Switzerland: Springer and IOM, pp. 89–118. Owuor, S. (2003), ‘Rural livelihood sources for urban households: a study of Nakuru town’, Working Paper No. 51, Leiden, Netherlands: African Studies Centre.

306  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Owuor, S. (2010), ‘Migrants, urban poverty and the changing nature of urban–rural linkages in Kenya’, in J. Crush and B. Frayne (eds), Surviving on the Move: Migration, Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, Midrand, South Africa: DBSA, pp. 117–31. Pendleton, W., J. Crush, E. Campbell, T. Green, H. Simelane, D. Tevera and F. de Vletter (2006), ‘Migration, remittances and development in Southern Africa’, SAMP Policy Series No. 44, Cape Town, South Africa: Southern African Migration Programme. Pendleton, W., J. Crush and N. Nickanor (2014), ‘Migrant Windhoek: rural–urban migration and food security in Namibia’, Urban Forum, 25(2), 191–205. Petrou, K. and J. Connell (2017), ‘Food, morality and identity: mobility, remittances and the translocal community in Paama, Vanuatu’, Australian Geographer, 48(2), 219–34. Plaza, S., M. Navarrete and D. Ratha (2011), ‘Migration and remittances household surveys: methodological issues and new findings from sub-Saharan Africa’, Washington, DC, US: World Bank. Pomuti, A. and I. Tvedten (1998), ‘Namibia: urbanization in the 1990s’, Windhoek, Namibia: NEPRU. Proctor, F. (2014), ‘Rural economic diversification in sub-Saharan Africa’, IIED Working Paper, London, UK: IIED. Rao, B. and G. Hassan (2011), ‘A panel data analysis of the growth effects of remittances’, Economic Modelling, 28(1), 701–9. Rao, B. and G. Hassan (2012), ‘Are the direct and indirect growth effects of remittances significant?’, The World Economy, 35(3), 351–72. Ratha, D., S. Mohapatra, C. Ozden, S. Plaza, W. Shaw and W. Shimeles (2011), ‘Leveraging migration for Africa: remittances, skills, and investments’, Washington, DC, US: World Bank. Singh, R., M. Haacker, K. Lee and M. Le Goff (2010), ‘Determinants and macroeconomic impact of remittances in sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of African Economies, 20(2), 312–40. Steinberg, F. (2011), ‘Rural–urban linkages: an urban perspective’, Territorial Cohesion for Development Program Working Paper No. 128, Santiago, Chile: RIMISP. Tacoli, C. (1998), ‘Rural–urban interactions: a guide to the literature’, Environment and Urbanization, 10(1), 147–66. Tacoli, C. (ed.) (2006), The Earthscan Reader in Rural–Urban Linkages, London, UK: Earthscan. Tacoli, C. (2007), ‘Poverty, inequality and the underestimation of rural–urban linkages’, Development, 50(2), 90–95. Tacoli, C. and B. Vorley (2015), ‘Reframing the debate on urbanisation, rural transformation and food security’, IIED Briefing, London, UK: IIED. Turner, S. (2009), ‘Promoting food security in Lesotho: issues and options’, Priority Support Programme Report, Maseru, South Africa. Vearey, J., L. Núñez and I. Palmary (2009), ‘HIV, migration and urban food security: exploring the linkages’, Forced Migration Studies Programme Report, Johannesburg, South Africa: University of the Witwatersrand. Yang, D. (2011), ‘Migrant remittances’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(3), 129–52. Zezza, A., C. Carletto, B. Davis and P. Winters (2011), ‘Assessing the impact of migration on food and nutrition security’, Food Policy, 36(1), 1–6.

15. Industrialization, food safety and urban food security in the Global South Jodi Koberinski, Zhenzhong Si and Steffanie Scott

1. INTRODUCTION Accelerating urbanization in the Global South imposes new challenges for food security. On the one hand, maintaining sufficient food supply in cities has been an ongoing challenge; on the other hand, new forms of food safety threats – influenced by industrialization – threaten food security. How foods are grown and processed has fundamentally changed with the industrialization of urban diets in the Global North and, increasingly, the Global South. The rapid introduction of new agricultural and food-processing technologies raises new food safety issues that current regulatory processes are ill-designed to characterize, let alone address (Brown, 2013; Collins and Lappé, 2015; IPES-Food, 2017; Krimsky, 2015; UNCTAD, 2013). Food safety is traditionally thought of as an umbrella term for prevention of food-related injury or illness from chemical, physical, and microbiological contaminants (Hanning et al., 2012). Its significant role in food security is reflected in the definition developed at the World Food Summit in 1996: “all people, at all times, have(ing) physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. This chapter first introduces core concepts, then presents three prominent food safety scandals as case studies through which to explore the food safety/food security nexus in the Global South. The purpose of this chapter is to make connections between food safety and food security as they relate to the structural changes in food systems. The chapter includes examples of formal and informal responses that address urban food safety and security challenges.

2. THE FOOD SAFETY/FOOD SECURITY NEXUS The FAO has identified four major pillars of food security – physical availability of food, economic and physical access to food, food utilization and temporal 307

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stability of the other three dimensions – with food safety an inherent component of all pillars (FAO, 2008). While maintaining sufficient food production and supply is the primary agenda of agri-food policies in most countries in the Global South, food safety and food security are also essentially public health issues (Chattu, 2015). Understanding the food safety/food security nexus in a way that is inclusive of all people requires a food system perspective that fosters characterizations of episode-specific and long-term health outcomes. Food security in government policy has historically emphasized the supply side of the food equation. The question of food security is simplified to principally consider a population’s access to sufficient calories. Yet, such a focus on availability “does not assure access, and enough calories do not assure a healthy and nutritional diet” (Pinstrup-Andersen, 2009, p. 5). This supply-side conceptualization is favoured by industry and represented by industry food security research centres such as the Global Institute for Food Security, whose mission is “creating technologies that will have commercial utility in advanced agricultural nations and the developing world alike” (GIFS, 2019). Technological responses tend to predominate as they feed neoliberal “export farmer” narratives (IPES-Food, 2016), obscuring collective, localized political and social solutions to food security. An overly technical understanding of food security leads to several consequences. First, it shapes food security policies as rural-focused and productioncentred, sidelining emerging issues of urban food security in an increasingly urbanizing world (Crush and Riley, 2017). Second, the emphasis on food availability is a legitimate yet narrow focus that overshadows other critical dimensions of food security, including the physical and economic accessibility of food, food utilization and the stability of these over time. Food availability will not necessarily translate into food security, especially for urban residents who typically purchase all of their food and are therefore at risk of market shocks. Third, a focus exclusively on sufficient food availability places technological solutions ahead of political ones for food safety and security. When policy to address food security focuses on, for example, producing more yield per hectare, without addressing land grabs that rob peasant farmers of their lands, the difficult political dimensions are ignored for the foreign-investment-friendly technological ones. A food systems perspective of the food safety/food security nexus is required to capture these trade-offs and make informed policy decisions. With this understanding, in recent years, the concept of food security has evolved from one focused on sufficient production and supply at the national level, to reflect a food systems perspective that includes accessibility, safety and nutrition to meet international, national, regional, municipal, household, and individual needs (Clapp, 2016). Avoiding an overly technical understanding of food security is essential as the emergence of many urban food safety problems reflects socio-economic

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structural changes driven by urbanization. These changes include an increasing volume of international food trade; legal obligations arising from expanding international and regional bodies that affect what can be sold and where; increasing complexity of food ingredients and sourcing used in packaged goods; agricultural intensification and industrialization (including livestock in confinement feeding operations and increased reliance on chemicals); increasing travel and tourism speeding the spread of zoonotic diseases and other foodborne illness; changes in food handling practices and patterns; shifts in dietary and food preparation preferences from traditional foods to packaged, processed convenience foods; new food-processing methods such as fractionation and microwaves; new food and agricultural technologies; increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics; changes in human/animal interactions, increasing zoonotic disease risk (WHO, 2006, p. 3). These trends shape the nature and scale of food safety problems, and the strategies to cope with them. The following sections discuss the types of food safety problems and their associations with these broad trends.

3. TYPES OF FOOD SAFETY CONTAMINANTS Food safety challenges faced by the Global South are both similar and different to those faced by the Global North during its industrialization and urbanization periods. Recently, concern about food safety in the Global South has been shifting from microbiological contaminant risks associated with a lack of modern technologies (e.g. clean running water in processing facilities) towards risks connected to uptake of modern technologies (IPES-Food, 2017; Krimsky and Gillam, 2018). There are three key categories of food safety contaminants: microbiological, chemical, and physical (Table 15.1). Yet, when taking a food systems view, industrialization of urban food systems contributes to long-term health impacts through exposure to processing additives, pollutants and pesticides. Therefore, we propose that a fourth category of food safety contaminants is required when examining the food safety/food security nexus: diet-related non-communicable diseases. 3.1 Microbiological Contaminants The first category is microbial contamination, which includes most acute food poisonings, and is due to improper handling, preparation and storage methods. Similar to the Global North, which has encountered significant ­microbiological-related food safety problems since the 19th century, the Global South also experiences various microbiological food safety problems. Infectious diseases are implicated as a food safety/food security nexus issue for the

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Global South, in particular emerging infectious diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), bacterial food-borne illnesses, H1N1 (swine flu), and avian flu (IPES-Food, 2017; Waltner-Toews, 2017). Many of these emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in nature, meaning they cross from animal species to humans through the food value chain. Outbreaks caused by zoonotic diseases represent the majority of recently emerging infectious diseases recorded for humans (75 per cent) and are a likely source of new pandemics (Lee-Gammage et al., 2018). 3.2 Chemical and Genetic Contaminants The second category of food safety contaminants relates to chemicals and food additives. Environmental contaminants connected to industrial agriculture are at the centre of the food safety/food security nexus. Pollution generated from industrialization contaminates soils and water-bodies with heavy metals that can lead to brain damage, nervous system damage, organ failure, and cancers (IPES-Food, 2017, p. 28), affecting people in urban and rural settings. Livestock agriculture contributes to concentrations of arsenic, zinc, and copper in water systems (Mateo-Sagasta et al., 2017), while wastewater from regions with mining and smelting operations that is used in agriculture also results in dangerous lead, cadmium, and mercury levels (IPES-Food, 2017). Food additives, which in some cases are illegal, are another kind of chemical contamination that subjects processed food to safety risks. Genetically engineered food is also recognized by some researchers as a food safety risk. We have elected to include genetic engineering (GE) with chemical contamination in Table 15.1. GE is governed by Novel Food regulations in most countries, which are intended to address chemical/structural changes to foods as a result of new technologies (Eckerstorfer et al., 2019; Heinemann et al., 2013). Food safety concerns associated with GE include unpredictable allergenic effects from the new proteins produced by transgenes, and changes in metabolism due to the presence of new enzymes (Bawa and Anilakumar, 2013; IPES-Food, 2017; UNCTAD, 2013). The food safety risks of GMOs centre on three issues: the unpredictability of the natural environment in which products of GE interact; the inability to adequately observe, confine or control the expression of products of GE once out of the lab; and the lack of compulsion for corporations to self-monitor the effects of products of GE in the marketplace (McAfee, 2008, p. 154). 3.3 Physical Contaminants The third key category of food safety contamination relates to physical contaminants in food, including the accidental inclusion of objects, and the purposeful

311

Food safety compromised by

Chemical and genetic contaminants Pesticides, chemi- • Pesticide use and residue exposure cal additives • Poor regulatory and enforcement environments in Global South put profits before public health (Roesel and Grace, 2015) • Chemical additives and processing aids permitted in food production • Inadequate regulation and lack of data

Microbiological contaminants Food poisoning and • Meat from diseased animals • Spoiled food; improper food preparation microbiological • Unsafe food in restaurants, street vendors or superissues markets • Unhygienic canteens; toxic plants • Zoonotic diseases

Food safety issue

Table 15.1  Categories of food safety contaminants

(Continued)

• Agricultural intensification and industrialization (including livestock) • Increasing volume of international trade • Application of novel technology ahead of society’s capacity for oversight

• Increasing volume of international trade • Increasing complexity of food types and sourcing • Agricultural intensification and industrialization (including livestock) • Increasing travel and tourism • Changes in food handling practices and patterns • New food-processing methods • Increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics as a result of overuse in agriculture • Changes in human/animal interactions increases zoonotic disease risk

Trends driving food safety issue

312

Food safety compromised by

• New food and agricultural technologies • Legal obligations arising from expanding international and regional bodies • Most countries see products of GE as requiring only a risk assessment (Eckerstorfer et al., 2019), considered “novel foods” in Canada – a category created to address chemical additives and structural alterations to foods new to the diet

Trends driving food safety issue

Source: Compiled by the authors, with trends informed by WHO (2006).

Ingredient substitution to cut costs; includes non-food • Increasing volume of international trade • Increasing complexity of food types and sourcing ingredients and food ingredients that are not what is • New food and agricultural technologies on the label Use of non-food substances in food production and processing • Intentional mislabelling of a food allergenicity and inherent plant/animal toxicity for humans (Si, 2015)

Physical contaminants Food adulteration • and fake foods; physical contamination •

Novel foods and • Genetic contamination of seed stocks (drift from genetic contaminagenetic engineering) tion • Creation of novel allergenic proteins • Unintended consequences as a result of genetic manipulation processes

Food safety issue

Table 15.1  (Continued)

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adulteration of food – such as the use of non-food or illegal ingredients in food processing. Food fraud is committed in various ways by food producers or processors seeking economic gains. The complex and lengthy supply chains associated with the consolidated, globalized food system creates safety issues due to the varying capacity of suppliers to engage food safety protocols, and various jurisdictions’ capabilities for monitoring and enforcing food safety guidelines effectively (Holdaway and Husein, 2014). Besides adulteration, food fraud includes counterfeiting, mislabelling, diversion, over-running, simulation, tempering, and theft (Kendall et al., 2019). Fraudulent food generates public health risks that could be more hazardous to food security than traditional food safety threats, due to the unknown nature and health consequences of many adulterants (Spink and Moyer, 2011). 3.4 New Food Safety Risks: Urban Industrial Diets and Rising NonCommunicable Diseases Food safety is not only an issue of agriculture, but also an urban public health issue. Given the persistence and complexity of food safety problems, a more holistic view of food safety is required. A more holistic framing connects food safety and urban public health through various disciplines and perspectives, including agriculture, food science and technology, manufacturing, processing, microbiology, epidemiology and human and veterinary medicine. This perspective is modelled through the UN’s “One Health” initiative, in which plant health, livestock health, ecosystems health, and human health are approached as one interrelated health system (Craddock and Hinchcliffe, 2015; WaltnerToews, 2017). Food safety involves more than what can harm you within days of eating a given food product. The changes in food quality, digestibility and nutritional composition that result from food processing are unprecedented in the human diet. City dwellers are eating and drinking products made from ingredients that have never been in the diet, with unknown impacts on health and wellness, displacing whole foods that have sustained cultures for millennia. Brazil’s most recent food guide is an attempt to reverse this trend, highlighting whole foods over processed foods (FAO, 2015). When applying a systems view, diet-related non-communicable diseases – including diabetes, cancers and heart disease – are recognized as food safety issues driven by the industrialization of urban food systems. Globalized food corporations have power over food environments, placing downward pressure on nutritional quality and ingredient variety, while shaping what is affordable and acceptable to consumers (Clapp and Scrinis, 2016). Changes in urban dietary patterns in the Global South, such as the adoption of ready-to-eat foods and fast food outlets from the Global North, are reshaping traditional diets and leading to a rise in adult-onset diabetes and heart

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disease in countries like Brazil and India (Hu, 2011). A food systems view of food safety includes recognizing the impacts of changing dietary patterns on long-term health outcomes and non-communicable diseases. For instance, when governments allow certain junk foods to be sold to children, there are food safety impacts for children’s heart health as they become adults, and not simply an E. coli risk when they eat the food as children. Approaching industrial foods that lead to non-communicable diseases as a contaminant could radically alter the urban food safety conversation. Other non-communicable diseases, such as chronic kidney disease and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, have been linked to the chemicals used in industrial food production (Benbrook, 2019).

4. CASE STUDIES OF THE URBAN FOOD SAFETY/ FOOD SECURITY NEXUS 4.1 Avian Flu and the Industrialization of Asia’s Food Systems Avian flu is a strain of influenza that reflects the underlying connections between food safety and the industrialization of urban food systems. Research shows that 60 per cent of all known human infectious diseases are diseases that transmit between humans and other animals, known as zoonotic diseases (Waltner-Toews, 2017). Avian flu is a zoonotic disease caused by pathogens capable of transferring between animals and humans. As people move into cities, the potential for an avian flu pandemic increases. For millennia, flu viruses have lived non-disruptively in the guts of birds. It seems pigs and humans are newer to the flu, with researchers suggesting it is perhaps only in the past 500 years that humans and pigs have been susceptible (Farndon, 2005; Wu et al., 2015). It is the domestication and enclosure of animals and people in intensified conditions over the past few hundred years that has created the opportunity for zoonotic diseases to jump species. The problem is worsened in the Global South as regulations and infrastructure may be inadequate to address the issues intensive livestock practices raise, such as waste handling and water quality issues (GRAIN, 2006; IPES-Food, 2017, p. 26). First reported in China in 1997, it took only a few years for the first alarming avian flu outbreak to sweep across Asia in the early 2000s. Several countries – beginning with Bangladesh, and then Indonesia – experienced heavy H1N1 outbreaks among poultry populations. Reports of illnesses in humans surfaced throughout 2003 and 2004 (WHO, 2013). The outbreak was driven by a combination of habitat loss – driving migrating birds into closer proximity to human settlements and the domesticated birds that lived there – and the industrialization of Asia’s poultry sector over the past few decades, creating

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conditions for speedy transmission. Poultry populations are tied to urbanization. In 30 years coinciding with urban migration, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese chicken production increased from roughly 300,000 tons of meat in 1971 to 2,440,000 tons in 2001; and China’s production of chicken tripled to 9 million tons per year in the 1990s as an increasingly urban population needed to buy meat (GRAIN, 2006). This growth hinged on the rapid industrialization of Asia’s poultry sectors, removing birds from the countryside and raising birds in confined animal-feeding operations near cities. Typically populated with genetically uniform animals, confined animal-feeding operations concentrate waste, creating suitable environments for pathogens to spread, adapt and rapidly reproduce. Housing conditions and feed practices exacerbate pathogen risks (GRAIN, 2006; Saenz et al., 2006). Yet it was the wet markets – decentralized, often rudimentary centres of trade for small, independent producers – that were singled out as sources of outbreaks. The avian flu outbreak resulted in mass culling, and China went from being self-sufficient in poultry products in 2005, to being a net importer in 2006 (GRAIN, 2006). Opportunistically, US chicken giant Tyson, supply chain giant Cargill, and Marfig of Brazil are among the major global powers acquiring Chinese farms and running vertically integrated operations built on the confined animal-feeding operations model, which has crushed competition and enabled these companies to gain the majority of global markets. For regulators unable to cope with food illness outbreaks, the promise of greater traceability that these corporations bring implies fewer food safety issues (Pi et al., 2014), although the evidence shows the industrial food system does not live up to this promise. For example, the prevalence and the perceived threat of food allergies and intolerances are on the rise, and are connected to molecular changes associated with industrial food processing (IPES-Food, 2017, pp. 36–7). Surveillance, containment, vaccines and drug treatments are the four methods for addressing influenza outbreaks effectively. If prevention is to work, it must begin within 30 days of the first infection, otherwise an outbreak is more challenging to contain (Farndon, 2005; Gostin and Berkman, 2007). Yet, across the globe, outbreaks are quieted or hidden by executives of large livestock companies out of fear that consumer demand for their products may drop (Farndon, 2005; Pi et al., 2014). Thailand and Cambodia, afraid of losing market share, mismanaged their outbreaks early on: one processor alone ramped up slaughter from 90,000 chickens per day to 130,000 chickens per day to absorb the flu epidemic that was allowed to rage for months while millions of chickens – sick when slaughtered – had been shipped overseas to export markets (Ear, 2011; Farndon, 2005, p. 88). Informal and formal markets were disrupted as trade in backyard chickens and provisioning were affected alongside the commercial trade. Despite the fact that cooking meat prevents avian flu transmission between birds and humans, the perception of risk led to the culling and disposal

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of millions of otherwise edible birds, causing economic hardship for producers and increasing food insecurity. In the 2003−2004 outbreaks, Vietnam lost 17.5 per cent of its entire poultry population, reducing GDP to between 0.3 per cent and 1.8 per cent, and causing food security issues for the already at-risk population (McLeod et al., 2005). In sum, rapid urbanization contributed to these outbreaks as livestock and human settlements simultaneously increased in population and proximity. Urban food security is further compromised by compartmentalizing food production, taking poultry in particular out of small scale, household level and wet market management systems, where they provide pest control, fertilization and the occasional eggs and meat for peri-urban and urban communities. Consolidation of power has prioritized export poultry sectors in some countries of the Global South at the expense of ecological and community health (Zinsstag, 2012), and leaves urban eaters vulnerable to market shocks. 4.2 GMO Contamination of Traditional Corn in Mexico With increasing urbanization comes efforts to produce food with greater efficiency to meet demand. GE proponents suggest the technology allows for greater yield on less land – an attractive prospect for urban centres in the Global South seeking sustaining food systems. The case of maize transgene contamination came to the world’s attention in 2001 (ETC Group, 2002; Snow, 2009). Mesoamerica is considered the centre of origin for crop genetic diversity for maize and, as such, farmers in the region have a unique relationship with and responsibility for the crop. The globally significant maize trade has its origins in the landraces and bred cultivars arising from what is now Mexico and Central America, including important wild phenotypes with various relationships with domesticated cultivars. When GMO maize was introduced in the global marketplace, farmers, researchers, and government involved in maintaining the genetic integrity of Mexico’s maize heritage expressed concerns about the potential for transgenic drift to undermine the genetic integrity of the in situ seed bank of Mesoamerican farmers, and thus undermine food security (Rowell, 2004). Such a disruption of genetic integrity can be understood as a food safety issue when taking a complexity view (Kay et al., 1999). Local seed guardians shared concerns with researchers about food safety issues arising from the lack of data on the impacts of genetically engineered maize on plant, ecosystem, and human health; and the incursion on culturally distinct ways of valuing food safety and security (Quist and Chapela, 2001; Rowell, 2004). Despite a moratorium that prevented growing genetically engineered maize in Mexico, Quist and Chapela (2001) showed that transgenes originating in Novartis’ engineered maize developed in the United States had somehow made their way into Mexican maize. Whether through intentional planting, as

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some critics suggest, or through accidental cross-contamination as a result of Novartis’ seeds being imported to Mexico, genetic pollution in the centre of origin for maize – a biologically sensitive and biodiverse geographical context – raises issues of food security (Rowell, 2004). If genetic diversity is compromised, the ability of a plant family to adapt to changing climate (and the pests and diseases that a changing climate introduces) is compromised, affecting food security. Researchers were optimistic in the use of substantial equivalence – the belief that plants or animals produced through GE are enough like their non-engineered parents to be treated the same – to protect food supplies. While not a safety assessment, substantial equivalence could be used to identify similarities and differences between the existing and novel foods that would be subject to further toxicological investigation (Kuiper et al., 2001). Because no international standards have been set for follow-up toxicological inquiries, and the research provided to regulators for GE approvals is inaccessible to researchers, confidence in the substantial equivalence approach to keep the food system safe is fairly low among researchers critical of GE in agriculture (Collins and Lappé, 2015). US regulators take a politically convenient approach to GMO safety, built upon the conceptual bifurcation of nature and society. What proponents call a “science-based” strategy for regulation relies on the unwarranted assumptions that the effects of GE can be observed, confined and controlled effectively outside the lab; corporations can safely self-monitor the effects – both during production and in the marketplace – of their genetically engineered products; and the risks and benefits of transgenic crops can be assessed independently of the specific ecological and social contexts in which they are cultivated (Collins and Lappé, 2015; Krimsky, 2015; McAfee, 2008). Promoters of biotechnology, alongside government agencies, assume a level of rigour in verification and safety testing that critical sources have called into question (Altieri and Rosset, 1999; Krimsky and Gillam, 2018; Leu, 2014). A fuller discussion on risks and concerns of GE applied to food systems can be found in Krimsky (2014) and Antoniou et al. (2012). The issue of genetic contamination of Mexican maize varieties highlights the role governments ought to play in overseeing the responsible introduction of novel foods, providing reasonable assurances that they are safe for human consumption, and that novel agricultural inputs avoid negative ecological and social costs. Industry has been successful in creating self-regulation, and having biotechnology treated in law as substantially equivalent to food produced through sexual selection or hybridization. This reflects the ongoing consolidation of corporate power in the global food system, while providing precious little evidence on the long-term impacts of GE. In practice, the presence of GMOs is regarded by many as a direct threat to food security, impacting biodiversity, political autonomy, and cultural identity (McAfee, 2008).

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4.3 Melamine in Our Food China’s melamine milk scandal in 2008 was a food safety scandal caused by non-food chemical additives in food to boost the level of protein content in milk, baby formula and other food products. Because of the melamine added to baby formula, 300,000 children fell ill and six children died. While much of the media attention focused on the baby formula contamination, all milk products were affected, and the issue continued for two years following the original discovery of tainted products, despite restructuring and recalls. By March 2009, the government had disbanded Sanlu, the state-owned dairy first exposed as producing the tainted baby formula, forcing the company into bankruptcy. This move dealt a further blow to parents seeking compensation, as Sanlu’s assets were handed over to another corporation – a move seen by parents as an effort to exonerate government officials and undermine efforts of families to seek compensation for healthcare costs (Yang, 2014). Weibo (a widely used social media platform, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) internet comments registered high netizen anger with national dairy firms, yet the most ire was reserved for government. [Chinese] citizens are critical of fundamental problems with regulatory oversight of businesses, government accountability and the political system generally, as demonstrated through comments focused more on the implications of the scandal on social order and governance, than on the actual health issues the scandal raised (Yuan et al., 2015). The consequences of the scandal were far-reaching. It led the Chinese government to restructure the dairy sector, issue the Food Safety Law, and completely reconfigure its food safety governance system (Holdaway and Husein, 2014). The scandal also resulted in a strong push from the Chinese state to scale-up and consolidate the sector, with the belief that industrialization would solve the food safety threat (Sharma and Zhang, 2014). Food safety concerns also drive Chinese consumers to further favour high-tech, heavily processed and packaged, branded products over localized, traditional dairy networks. Yet the scandal is closely related to the industrialization of the food system. Through the proliferation of supermarkets, rapid urbanization has resulted in the favouring of branded processed milk products over the home-delivery networks that dominated China in the 1980s and 1990s. Supermarkets quickly became China’s largest retailing format in 2012, representing 73 per cent of total sales for modern retailers and 46 per cent of total grocery retail (AAFC, 2014). Branded products are marketed through supermarkets and convenience store chains that benefit from consumers’ belief that supermarkets carry brands based on product quality and value. The consequences of this belief include a loss of faith in local systems (Fuller et al., 2006) and the exacerbation of food systems’ industrialization as more people abandon traditional foods and markets. However, the melamine milk scandal had a large-scale impact because of

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the industrialization of the dairy sector. It was not only a consequence of the national distribution network of these monopoly enterprises but also a consequence of the standardized protein content requirement in milk. The scandal can also be linked to rapid urbanization in many other ways. Rapid urbanization requires meeting the expectation of cheap food, which urban centres rely upon for their existence, creating economic incentives to cut corners in food production (Collins and Lappé, 2015). This illustrates one of many ways in which “health impacts in food systems cannot be seen in isolation from socio-economic drivers” (IPES-Food, 2017, p. 70). Increased urbanization is a driver in the “westernization” or industrialization of diets in the Global South. Rising incomes contribute to rising consumption of dairy products, which traditionally is not a part of Chinese diets (Fuller et al., 2006). The consolidation of global food systems contributes to rising costs for small-scale producers’ compliance with industrial food safety standards, impacting business viability (IPES-Food, 2016). Cheap food comes with hidden costs. The demand within industrialized food systems for cheap food means that corners will be cut where quality cannot be delivered, to meet pricing and turn a profit for producers.

5. MARKET LIBERALIZATION, STRUCTURAL CHANGES AND THE FOOD SAFETY/FOOD SECURITY NEXUS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH The case studies demonstrate that market liberalization in the Global South has critical implications for food safety and food security. Liberalized markets have resulted in aggregation, supermarketization and consolidation – all of which are structural changes that impact food safety. With market liberalization comes increased industry self-regulation (Clapp, 2016; IPES-Food, 2016), which, in practice, is a redistribution of food safety responsibilities between the public and private sectors that has resulted in food safety issues (IPES-Food, 2017). This liability-centred approach puts the orderly conduct of the food systems’ business – not maximizing public health – as food safety’s primary goal (Martin, 2014). Aggregation speaks to pooling of supply by global food giants (Elder and Dauvergne, 2015), making tracing the source of an outbreak difficult. Supermarketization represents a process of rapid transition from independent, decentralized, street-based food procurement, to the mass retail environments that dominate the Global North (Reardon et al., 2003). Despite the efficiency logic, research suggests food-borne illnesses are more likely to spread into numerous products across large geographic areas in the consolidated and integrated food-processing industry (IPES-Food, 2017; Waltner-Toews et al., 2008).

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Consolidation within the food industry has the dual prospect of addressing some food safety concerns while introducing new ones. On the one hand, consolidation can introduce consistent systems and traceability regimes that help raise food safety standards in the Global South to meet the requirements of importing countries. On the other hand, consolidation in distribution and aggregation of supply chains increase the risk that contamination events will be vast rather than localized, as shown in the melamine milk scandal. With the expansion of the global food chain to include suppliers in countries whose food safety regimes and inspection processes are outside the control of multinational food companies, demand has been generated for international standards to be established by governance bodies such as the WHO and FAO (Holdaway and Husein, 2014). Industry-led certification systems have been established to facilitate trade according to these global standards. The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) certification system, and various International Safety Organization (ISO) designations, for example, increase traceability and improve record keeping. These safety standards require investment, best met in consolidated food chains, as the high costs of meeting international food safety standards are extremely difficult for independent smallholders to meet. This industry exercise in traceability contrasts with alternative food networks and the informal markets that have long formed food systems in the Global South, characterized by direct relationships between food producers and consumers. With poor traceability, a current feature of the commodityfocused global food system, discovering the cause of a given outbreak can be time-consuming and economically devastating to businesses along the supply chain. When food safety issues do arise in deeply consolidated food systems, the impact of a food safety issue on population health and on food security is exacerbated over geography, time, and scope (Klein and Xiu, 2010). Consolidation within the food industry also changes the urban food environment. The growth of supermarkets reflects a corresponding rise in consumption of ultraprocessed foods, livestock and dairy products, sugary foods, soy products, fruits and alcohol. At the same time, consumption of grains, tubers, vegetables, and pulses or grain legumes has fallen (Holdaway and Husein, 2014). These dietary changes have contributed to a rise in non-communicable diseases.

6. ADDRESSING FOOD SAFETY CHALLENGES People from diverse backgrounds are taking various initiatives to address food safety challenges. Consumers take everyday actions to cope with increased food safety risks: selecting produce or packaged foods with care, washing and preparing food in ways that reduce risks, and seeking shorter value chains, are

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active strategies people engage (Roesel and Grace, 2015). Civil-society organizations and the FAO have been championing a gender lens on food safety and security in the Global South as clear gendered dimensions of social structures and food safety are at play. Researchers attribute this to the fact that women are more reliant on informal food networks than men for their livelihoods (Roesel and Grace, 2015). Considering the gender dimensions of food safety and security contributes to research project design that reflects age, gender, socioeconomic status and various cultural contexts. At global trade tables, transnational corporations use their lobbying power to effect food safety regulations that favour their globalized model of production, often enforcing rules across the entire sector regardless of risk or scale. Outcome-based regulation considers the processor’s context, with the goal of improved food safety outcomes rather than prescriptive regulation that currently dominates industrial food systems. This one-size-fits-all approach ensures that small-scale traditional butchers and dairy processors cannot compete, due to the costs of implementing regulations designed for high-volume processors (Martin, 2014), impacting food security not only for food producers, but also for citizens who rely on informal food networks for sustenance. It may take small producers three years to recover from losing an entire flock, as was the case for small commercial operators in Vietnam following the 2003 avian flu outbreak. For many, that means not only food insecurity, but also insolvency (McLeod et al., 2005). Food security was ultimately compromised in this approach to food safety as backyard poultry and wet markets for live birds were banned as a response to the avian flu crisis in the early 2000s (Yuan et al., 2015). Communities and industry alike respond to food safety issues by agitating for new policies to combat urban food safety challenges, including better enforcement of existing food safety laws and regulations, and the creation of new ones. Formal approaches to food safety include adoption of local, regional or international food safety standards. Institutional capacity to respond in the Global South is uneven at best and non-existent in far too many regions. Despite a 4:1 benefit-cost ratio for preventing and controlling zoonotic diseases, rather than treating humans after infection, poor households are responsible for the preventative care of livestock and the treatment when family members become ill. A study examining pastoral communities’ health expenditures in Kenya, where outbreaks of endemic zoonoses are frequent, revealed that under-investment in preventative care creates a feedback loop of poverty, driven by disease and impacting food security, nutrition, and health (Grace et al., 2017). While institutions affect the ways a society perceives food safety – as evidenced in the increasingly important role international industry standards from HACCP to ISO designations play in food safety governance and policy – food safety scandals also shape those institutions. The 2008 melamine scandal in

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China, for example, triggered a series of institutional changes at policy level, such as the enactment of the new Food Safety Law in 2009 and the establishment of the National Food Safety Commission in 2010 (Jia and Jukes, 2013). These institutional changes affected how business was done, and the businesses themselves, with the dairy industry undergoing a massive restructuring in response to the crisis, effectively doubling down on food system industrialization and the questionable assumption that such an effort will lead to greater food safety (Zinsstag, 2012). Scaling-up or intensifying industrialization are common responses to urban food safety and security threats, despite evidence that such industrialization may be putting food security and food safety at risk. Governments have a role to play in addressing the urban food safety/food security nexus in the Global South. For example, national governments create export policies that favour agribusiness without assessing the unintended effects of these policies on non-communicable diseases (Altieri and Rosset, 1999). Researchers suggest incorporating sustainability principles into national dietary guidelines as one of many composite approaches required to achieve food safety and food security goals (Nishida, 2016). Enhancement of North−South cooperation through research agencies and aid agencies may be a precondition to the type of deep cooperation required. Further, researchers recognize that technological fixes alone will not address food safety breakdowns that lead to food security issues. One view is that further engagement with civil society and the development of international treaties are required to address the crippling issues of resource depletion, climate breakdown and poor governance. The effects of these three issues on health can best be mitigated by governments at the national level working collaboratively with each other, with civil society, and with health professionals at the international level using a “One Health” approach (Zinsstag, 2012). Integrating appropriate forms of food production with human settlements becomes an increasingly necessary step in addressing the food safety/food security nexus by reversing some aspects of centralization. Agroecological rather than industrial approaches to food systems in urban and peri-urban settings may provide an avenue to address this challenge (IPES-Food, 2016). Agroecology addresses some of the conditions that contribute to pandemics related to food safety, and encourages investment and renewed commitment to workable, sustaining food economies. This management approach reduces food safety risks from chemical residues in food. In cities of the Global South, alternative food networks also provide new approaches to rebuild the trust between consumers and producers deteriorated by food safety scandals (Klein, 2013; Si, 2017). These civil-society responses to food safety also forge larger alliances with other sustainable development initiatives, such as the New Rural Reconstruction Movement in China (Si and Scott, 2016). With more than half of the Sustainable Development Goals

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(SDGs) – which will drive the development agenda through to 2030 – relating directly or indirectly to food systems (Picchioni et al., 2017), building coalitions among stakeholders and government champions of the SDGs could provide some much-needed political will to address these complex and often conflicting needs of a growing urban population in the Global South.

7. CONCLUSION Food safety is an inherent component of urban food security. Having access to safe food is one of the prerequisites for maintaining food security at regional, household and individual levels. Yet structural changes – globalization, urbanization, supermarketization and consolidation – are reshaping food supply chains, creating novel conditions for the emergence and evolution of food safety problems associated with industrialization, food processing, and distancing, previously seen predominantly in the Global North. These global and national structural changes make food safety problems in urban centres of the Global South increasingly complex, including but not limited to the lack of regulatory and other capacity to address food safety problems; and the lack of power experienced by marginalized communities. Further, these structural changes impact transmission of traditional knowledge that informs food safety practices, from food preparation to resource management (Roesel and Grace, 2015; Shiva, 2016). As a result, addressing food safety challenges involves multiple actors, such as consumers’ everyday coping strategies, the enforcement of policies and the efforts of both formal and informal initiatives. Key learnings from this chapter: safety is currently disconnected from food security goals and • Food requires “joined-up” policy. producers are pushed out of the system as they are unable to imple• Small ment new food safety regulations that favour industrial systems and econ-

• • •

omies of scale. This results in consolidation of power and increased food security vulnerability in the face of inevitable market shocks. Case studies show that food security and food safety research must consider social and cultural dimensions (and not simply technical ones) to identify problems and solutions. Future food security may depend on broad genetic diversity – held in situ in local landraces, wild relative populations and commercial varieties – remaining distinct from acts of lab-based biotechnology. Rapid urbanization leads to consolidation in the food sector and larger producers gaining more market share, exacerbating the scope and scale of food safety issues when an outbreak or issue arises.

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public engagement and sacrifice, governments and industry may • Without not respond to crises. “cheap food” at all costs – a food security concern driven by • Delivering market economies and the globalized and integrated food system helmed by a handful of multinational companies (Clapp, 2016) – when disconnected from food safety leads to poor decision-making that prioritizes economics over people. Food safety is a critical dimension of urban food security analysis and needs to be part of the research agenda. Expanding research within food security to address food safety becomes increasingly important when we consider the food security implications of food scandals that break trust in the food system generally, and in food governance institutions in particular. Reflecting on these case studies challenges readers to think beyond technical notions of urban food safety that focus on business risk reduction, and consider ways in which urban food security may be elusive without addressing emerging food safety issues connected to food systems industrialization.

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Industrialization, food safety and urban food security in the Global South  325 Eckerstorfer, M., M. Engelhard, A. Heissenberger, S. Simon and H. Teichmann (2019), ‘Plants developed by new genetic modification techniques: comparison of existing regulatory frameworks in the EU and non-EU countries’, Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 7(26), 1–16. Elder, S. and P. Dauvergne (2015), ‘Farming for Walmart: the politics of corporate control and responsibility in the global South’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(5), 1029–46. ETC Group (2002), ‘Genetic pollution in Mexico’s centre of maize diversity’, Food First Backgrounder, 8(2). FAO (2008), ‘An introduction to the basic concepts of food security’, Food Security Information for Action – Practical Guides, EC-FAO Food Security Programme. FAO (2015), ‘Food-based dietary guidelines – Brazil, 2014’, Rome, Italy: FAO. Farndon, J. (2005), Bird Flu (All Access series), New York, NY, US: Disinformation. Fuller, F., J. Huang, H. Ma and S. Rozelle (2006), ‘Got milk? The rapid rise of China’s dairy sector and its future prospects’, Food Policy, 31(1), 201–15. GIFS (2019), ‘Global Institute for Food Security mission statement’, Saskatoon, Sask, Canada: University of Saskatchewan. Gostin, L. and B. Berkman (2007), ‘Preparing for pandemic influenza: legal and ethical challenges’, in Institute of Medicine (US) Forum on Microbial Threats, Ethical and Legal Considerations in Mitigating Pandemic Disease: Workshop Summary, Washington, DC, US: National Academies Press. Grace, D., J. Lindahl, F. Wanyoike, B. Bett, T. Randolph and K. Rich (2017), ‘Poor livestock keepers: ecosystem–poverty2health interactions’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B − Biological Sciences, 372(1725), 1–10. GRAIN (2006), ‘Fowl play: the poultry industry’s central role in the bird flu crisis’, GRAIN Briefing, February. Hanning, I., C. O’Bryan, P. Crandall and S. Ricke (2012), ‘Food safety and food security’, Nature Education Knowledge, 3(10), 1–9. Heinemann, J.A., S.Z. Agapito-Tenfen and J.A. Carman (2013), ‘A comparative evaluation of the regulation of GM crops or products containing dsRNA and suggested improvements to risk assessments’, Environment International, 55, 43–55. Holdaway, J. and L. Husain (2014), ‘Food safety in China: a mapping of problems, governance and research forum on health, environment and development’, Working Group on Food Safety, February. Hu, F. (2011), ‘Globalization of diabetes’, Diabetes Care, 34(6), 1249–57. IPES-Food (2016), ‘From uniformity to diversity: a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems’, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. IPES-Food (2017), ‘Unravelling the food–health nexus: addressing practices, political economy, and power relations to build healthier food systems’, The Global Alliance for the Future of Food and IPES-Food. Jia, C. and D. Jukes (2013), ‘The national food safety control system of China − a systematic review’, Food Control, 32(1), 236–45. Kendall, H., S. Kuznesof, M. Dean, M. Chan, B. Clark, R. Home, H. Stolz, Q. Zhong, C. Lui, P. Brereton and L. Frewer (2019), ‘Chinese consumers’ attitudes, perceptions and behavioural responses towards food fraud’, Food Control, 95(1), 339–51. Klein, J.A. (2013), ‘Everyday approaches to food safety in Kunming’, The China Quarterly, 214(214), 376–93. Klein, K. and C. Xiu (2010), ‘Melamine in milk products in China: examining the factors that led to deliberate use of the contaminant’, Food Policy, 35(5), 463–70. Kay, J., H. Regier, M. Boyle and G. Francis (1999), ‘An ecosystem approach for sustainability: addressing the challenge of complexity’, Futures, 31(7), 721–42. Krimsky, S. (2014), ‘Low-dose toxicology: narratives from the science–transcience interface’, in S. Boudia and N. Jas (eds), Powerless Science?: Science and Politics in a Toxic World, Berghahn Books, pp. 234–53. Krimsky, S. (2015), ‘An illusory consensus behind GMO health assessment’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 40(6), 883–914.

326  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Krimsky, S. and C. Gillam (2018), ‘Roundup litigation discovery documents: implications for public health and journal ethics’, Journal of Public Health Policy, 39(3), 318–26. Kuiper, H., G. Kleter, H. Noteborn and E. Kok (2001), ‘Assessment of the food safety issues related to genetically modified foods’, Plant Journal, 27(6), 503–28. Lee-Gammage, S., E. Atherton, J. Head and S. Stewart (2018), ‘What is the connection between infectious diseases in humans and livestock?’, Foodsource: Chapters, Food Climate Research Network, University of Oxford. Leu, A. (2014), The Myths of Safe Pesticides, Greeley, CO, US: Acres US. Martin, W. (2014), ‘Food gone foul? Food safety and security tensions’, PhD Dissertation, University of Victoria. Mateo-Sagasta, J., S. Zadeh and H. Turral (2017), ‘Water pollution from agriculture: a global review’, Rome, Italy: FAO and International Water Management Institute. McAfee, K. (2008), ‘Beyond techno-science: transgenic maize in the fight over Mexico’s future’, Geoforum, 39(1), 148–60. McLeod, A., N. Morgan, A. Prakash and J. Hinrichs (2005), ‘Economic and social impacts of avian influenza’, Rome, Italy: FAO and ECTAD. Nishida, C. (2016), ‘Preliminary results of the 2nd global nutrition policy review: a global perspective’, Working Paper at the Meeting the Challenge of a New Era for Achieving Healthy Diets and Nutrition: Outcomes of the 2nd Global Nutrition Policy Review, December. Pi, C., Z. Rou and S. Horowitz (2014), ‘Fair or fowl? Industrialization of poultry production in China’, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Picchioni, F., E. Aurino, L. Aleksandrowicz, M. Bruce, S. Chesterman, P. Dominguez-Salas, Z. Gersten, S. Kalamatianou, C. Turner and J. Yates (2017), ‘Roads to interdisciplinarity – working at the nexus among food systems, nutrition and health’, Food Security, 9(1), 181–9. Pinstrup-Andersen, P. (2009), ‘Food security: definition and measurement’, Food Security, 1(1), 5–7. Quist, D. and Chapela, I.H. (2001), ‘Transgenic DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico’, Nature, 414, 541–3. Reardon, T., P. Timmer, C. Barrett and J. Berdegué (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 85, 1140–46. Roesel, K. and D. Grace (eds) (2015), Food Safety and Informal Markets: Animal Products in SubSaharan Africa, London, UK: Routledge. Rowell, A. (ed.) (2004), Don’t Worry, It’s Safe to Eat (2nd Edition), Earthscan Ltd. Saenz, R., H. Hethcote and G. Gray (2006), ‘Confined animal feeding operations as amplifiers of influenza’, Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, 6(4), 338–46. Sharma, S. and R. Zhang (2014), ‘China’s dairy dilemma: the evolution and future trends of China’s dairy industry’, Global Meat Complex: The China Series, 28 February. Shiva, V. (2016), Who Really Feeds the World? The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Zed Books, London. Si, Z. (2015), ‘Alternative food networks and rural development initiatives in China: characterization, contestations and interactions’, Doctoral thesis, University of Waterloo. Si, Z. (2017), ‘Rebuilding consumer trust in food: community supported agriculture in China’, in J. Duncan and M. Bailey (eds), Sustainable Food Futures: Multidisciplinary Solutions, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 34–45. Si, Z. and S. Scott (2016), ‘The convergence of alternative food networks within “rural development” initiatives: a case of the new rural reconstruction movement in China’, Local Environment, 21(9), 1082–99. Snow, A. (2009), ‘Unwanted transgenes re-discovered in Oaxacan maize’, Molecular Ecology, 18, 569–71. Spink, J. and D. Moyer (2011), ‘Defining the public health threat of food fraud’, Journal of Food Science, 76(1), 157–63. United Nation Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (2013), ‘UNCTAD trade and environment review 2013: wake up before it is too late: make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate’, Geneva, Switzerland: UNCTAD. Waltner-Toews, D. (2017), ‘Zoonoses, One Health and complexity: wicked problems and constructive conflict’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 372(1725).

Industrialization, food safety and urban food security in the Global South  327 Waltner-Toews, D., J. Kay and N. Lister (eds) (2008), The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability, New York, NY, US: Columbia University Press. WHO (2006), ‘Food safety risk analysis: a guide for national food safety authorities’, WHO and FAO, Geneva, Switzerland and Rome, Italy. WHO (2013), ‘Avian influenza: avian influenza in the South-East Asia region in 2013’, Surveillance and Outbreak Alert. Wu, D., S. Zou, T. Bai, et al. (2015), ‘Poultry farms as a source of avian influenza A (H7N9) virus reassortment and human infection’, Scientific Reports, 5, 7630. Yang, G. (2014), ‘Contesting food safety in the Chinese media: between hegemony and counterhegemony’, The China Quarterly, 214(1), 337–55. Yuan, J., E. Lau, K. Li, Y. Leung, Z. Yang, C. Xie, Y. Liu, X. Ma, J. Liu, X. Li, K. Chen, L. Luo, B. Di, B. Cowling, X. Tang, G. Leung, M. Wang and M. Peiris (2015), ‘Effect of live poultry market closure on avian influenza A(H7N9) virus activity in Guangzhou, China, 2014’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 21(10), 1784–93. Zinsstag, J. (2012), ‘Convergence of Ecohealth and One Health’, EcoHealth, 9(4), 371–3.

16. Food waste and the growth of food banks in the Global South Daniel N. Warshawsky

1. INTRODUCTION As highlighted in previous studies on food waste, more than one-third of the world’s food supply is lost in the global food system (Gustavsson et al., 2011, Lipinski et al., 2013). While significant amounts of food are wasted during agricultural production, post-harvest handling and storage, processing and packaging, distribution, and consumption, the places where food is wasted varies significantly by region. In the Global North, most food is wasted in the retail and consumption stages; in the Global South, most is wasted during the postharvest and processing stages. The type of food lost also varies considerably by country and region (Gustavsson et al., 2011). Given the negative impacts on economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, and food security, there has been increasing research focus on food waste (Bloom, 2011; Cloke, 2013; Gunders, 2012; Evans et al., 2013; Pikner and Jauhiainen, 2014). Urban food waste is often conceptualized as the result of individual choices (Evans, 2011), the capitalist culture of waste (Hawkins, 2006; Mazzolini and Foote, 2012; O’Brien, 2008; Scanlan, 2005), or inadequate waste management (Melosi, 2005; Onibokun and Kumuyi, 1999; Tammemagi, 2009). However, there are many ways to conceptualize food waste throughout the food system. Although food waste is commonly used to denote food lost in retail and consumption, food losses and spoilage are often utilized to identify food wasted in production (Parfitt et al., 2010). Alternatively, food waste may indicate complex social relations (Gille, 2012), the presence of animal feed (Stuart, 2009), or the difference between food consumed per capita and food needed per capita to survive (Smil, 2004). In this chapter, food waste is conceptualized broadly as any edible food that is lost during any phase of the food system (Gustavsson et al., 2011). Even though most food is not grown in cities, large volumes of food are transported to urban formal and informal markets across the Global South. For this reason, it is inadequate to focus only on food waste during or after consumption, given that most food waste is created before retailers sell food to consumers. To reduce food waste in the world’s cities, community food organizations (CFOs) – including formalized non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 328

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informal community-based organizations (CBOs), and dynamic social movements – have emerged as key institutions to reduce urban food waste (Warshawsky, 2016b). As key civil society organizations, CFOs have operated feeding schemes and soup kitchens (Caraher and Cavicchi, 2014; Lambie-­ Mumford and Jarvis, 2012; Riches and Silvasti; 2014). They have also facilitated the growth of broader social movements based on food justice and food equity (Goodman et al., 2011; Gottlieb and Joshi, 2010; Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015; Sonnino, 2016; Wekerle, 2004). While CFOs have become increasingly numerous, it is not clear that they can meet their objectives to improve social service delivery or transform society. This is because of their overly localized focus, elite origins, lack of independence from broader neoliberal forces, and limited potential in Global South contexts (Born and Purcell, 2006; Busa and Garder, 2014; Feagan, 2007; Guthman, 2008, 2012; Shannon, 2014; Slocum, 2007; Warshawsky, 2016a, 2016b). CFOs therefore need to be more critically examined in order to assess their position within contemporary capitalism accurately, especially in the Global South (Wilson, 2012). To this end, this chapter critically analyzes the roles that CFOs play in reducing food waste through a case study of urban food banks in the Global South. From their origins in the US in the 1960s, food banks now redistribute unused food to communities in more than 30 countries as a way to reduce food insecurity and food waste (Global FoodBanking Network, 2017b). Food banks may improve the efficiency of food redistribution systems, but it remains unclear whether they reduce food insecurity or food waste over the long term. In addition, many food banks suffer institutional crises related to lack of funding, interference by the state or private sector, and inappropriate placement in many parts of the Global South. This chapter suggests that the impact of urban food banking may be limited in the Global South. This chapter begins by analyzing the globalization of food banking and its growth in the Global South. Then, through a case study of FoodForward SA (FFSA), it critically analyzes the roles that urban food banks play in cities of the Global South. While FFSA does not reflect the experiences of all food banks or CFOs, its prominent role helps to situate and clarify the broader role of CFOs in food waste reduction in these cities.

2. GLOBALIZATION OF FOOD BANKING The concept of food banking emerged in the US city of Phoenix when retired businessman John van Hengel set up a warehouse to collect, sort, and redistribute unused or excess food from donors. By redistributing surplus, donated, or unused food from government food programmes, farms and fisheries,

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fresh-produce markets, supermarkets, restaurants, corner stores, food wholesalers, and distribution centres to people in communities, food banks and their network of local agencies became the largest food redistribution system in the United States (Figure 16.1) (Feeding America, 2017). The US food banking system now has 200 member food banks and 60,000 local beneficiary member agencies, including feeding schemes, soup kitchens, and community gardens; care centres for the young, aged, disabled, sick, or homeless; and religious institutions and other cultural organizations (Feeding America, 2017). As food banking expanded in the US, international interest grew in the Feeding America model of food redistribution. As a result, the Global FoodBanking Network (GFN) was founded in 2006 as a spinoff organization from Feeding America in Chicago, and existing food banks in Canada, Argentina, and Mexico. The GFN is a non-profit organization funded by wealthy individuals and global food corporations such as Cargill, General Mills, and Kellogg (Global FoodBanking Network, 2006). Since the creation of the GFN, food banking systems have developed in more than 30 countries on six continents (Figure 16.2) (Global FoodBanking Network, 2017b). The GFN provides training and

Source: Created by author with data from Feeding America.

Figure 16.1 The Food Banking Model

Food waste and the growth of food banks in the Global South  331

Source: Created by author with data from the Global FoodBanking Network.

Figure 16.2 The Global FoodBanking Network and affiliated food bank locations

support to its food bank partners worldwide, while each country’s food bank is primarily resourced through local funding streams. Although regional food banks develop their own system to fit their local context, the GFN’s US-based Feeding America system is promoted as a best practice model regardless of the location. Many corporations, states, and NGOs promote food banks as locally embedded and non-government funded, enhancing efficiency and reducing food insecurity and food waste through civil society institutions. As food banking has grown internationally, research has started to critically examine these claims, and the structure and impact of these important food bank models. In particular, researchers have paid attention to the source of food bank funding, their role in urban governance regimes, and their capacity to reduce food insecurity in cities (Husbands, 1999; Lambie-Mumford and Jarvis, 2012; Riches, 2002). First, although food bank promoters suggest that food banks increase food security, reduce food waste, and empower communities, there are no studies that connect the development of food bank systems to reduced food waste

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or lower levels of food insecurity. While food banks redistribute increasing amounts of food, it is unclear whether they work in cooperation with, or in place of, previously existing food programmes operated by the state or other NGOs. Moreover, given the complexity of the social context in which different food banks operate, it is difficult to isolate the impact of a single food bank in the larger urban food system, where a range of other political, economic, and social processes operate simultaneously. Second, food banks have been criticized for depoliticizing food insecurity and social inequality (Henderson, 2004; Riches and Silvasti, 2014). They do this by focusing attention on the amount of food redistributed and not the underlying causes of food insecurity or food waste. Food banks typically focus on maximizing the amount of food they collect and redistribute, without regard for the real impact this food is having on food insecurity. Food donors and volunteers are often part of this process, as charity provides people with a false sense that their “good work” will solve the problem. In part, this is due to the fact that donors and food recipients are often quite disconnected from each other. In turn, donors and volunteers can feel good about the role that food banks play, without having to think about if and how they impact on food-insecure people. Third, some researchers have suggested that food banks play a critical role in reproducing neoliberal urban governance structures (Warshawsky, 2010). Food banks play an increasing role in the conceptualization of food waste and food insecurity, to proposed solutions to food insecurity, and to the management of the food system. Others point to a compromised institutional mission (Young et al., 2012), or corporate welfare, as food banks provide a mechanism to repurpose food waste (Ionescu-Somers, 2004; Warshawsky, 2016c). In this way, food banks can be understood as a corporate market-correction mechanism, not an institution to reduce food insecurity or food waste, given that this is an indirect secondary result of the food bank process. As food banks have globalized, the stated mission of these institutions has evolved to meet the needs of the green economy. Although food banks initially emerged to replace key aspects of the social welfare state in many contexts, they are now more commonly cast as a central player in environmental stewardship to reduce food waste (Global FoodBanking Network, 2017a). As food banks transform to ensure that they are valuable, legitimate, and fundable in the public realm, some researchers have become concerned that these mission shifts suggest that food banks are more focused on institutional self-­perpetuation than the reduction of food insecurity and food waste (Warshawsky, 2016a). Although most of the critical attention paid to urban food banks has been focused on the Global North, recent studies in South Africa (Warshawsky, 2011, 2016c), Brazil (Rocha, 2014), and other emerging regions (Riches and Silvasti, 2014), have identified the development and outcomes of food banks in the Global South. However, a significant research gap still exists on food banks

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in the Global South. The following section examines FFSA as a case study to probe the issues raised by the development of food banking systems in the Global South.

3. CASE STUDY OF FOODFORWARD SA South Africa’s food waste has been estimated at over 9 million tons per year (Gustavsson et al., 2011; Oelofse and Nahman, 2013). This includes agricultural production (26 per cent or 2.4 million tons per year), post-harvest handling and storage (26 per cent or 2.3 million tons per year), distribution (17 per cent or 1.5 million tons per year), processing and packaging (27 per cent or 2.4 million tons per year), and consumption (4 per cent or 0.4 million tons per year). South Africa’s food waste is thus significantly higher during the production and immediate post-production phases of the food system. This places the country in line with lower-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia (Gustavsson et al., 2011). Oelofse and Nahman (2013) estimate that the most commonly wasted foods are fruits and vegetables (47 per cent or 4,244,000 tons per year), cereals (28 per cent or 2,504,000 tons per year), roots and tubers (10 per cent or 892,000 tons per year), milk (8 per cent or 775,000 tons per year), meat (5 per cent or 427,000 tons per year), oilseeds and pulses (1 per cent or 126,000 tons per year), and fish and seafood (1 per cent or 74,000 tons per year). While these statistics give a general picture of a country with tremendous food wastage, it is critical to determine the institutions that produce, regulate, and reuse food waste in the urban environment. Building on other studies that critically analyze the governance of urban food waste (Davies, 2008; Moore, 2011), and the particular challenges of waste management in the Global South (Huchzermeyer, 2011; Myers, 2005; Njeru, 2006; Onibokun and Kumuyi, 1999), the following section critically examines the roles that CFOs play in reducing food waste through the South African case study. Given the country’s robust infrastructure, corporate sector, and plethora of CFOs, the GFN determined that South Africa was a smart place to develop food banks (Global FoodBanking Network, 2006). Also, with more than 13 million food-insecure people (Aliber, 2009) and approximately 30 per cent of all food wasted in South Africa, the GFN determined that the potential for food banking was significant. In collaboration with various South African governmental departments and key CFOs, the GFN opened FFSA in 2009, after two years of development. Starting in Cape Town, food banks opened in Durban, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Rustenburg, Pietermaritzburg, and Polokwane (Figure 16.3). FoodBank Limpopo, based in Polokwane, is a virtual food bank whereby beneficiary organizations in Limpopo province are connected to the

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most proximate participating retail store to collect perishable and non-perishable food items (FoodForward SA, 2017). Each food bank collects, stores, repackages, and distributes excess, mislabelled, or unsellable food to FFSA’s network of 561 soup kitchens, feeding schemes, schools, old age homes, and HIV clinics (FoodForward SA, 2017). In addition, FFSA supports virtual food banking in many of its locations across the country. To supplement food collected through this food rescue programme, FFSA has a food procurement programme that purchases food at a discount. In total, the current FFSA system feeds 250,000 people per year, including 14,500,000 meals served and tons of food distributed per year. FFSA was initially developed with significant funding from the South African government, food corporations, and the GFN. However, the operating budget has fluctuated between USD1 million and USD3.5 million as funding support has wavered and operations have become increasingly expensive (FoodForward SA, 2017). This has led to reduced or uneven food delivery, new management, staff retrenchments, and extreme uncertainty as FFSA has struggled to remain open. In 2009, FFSA had hopes of expanding to more than 20 cities in South Africa, but this was never achieved due to funding shortfalls (Warshawsky, 2016a). Although FFSA is a non-profit organization, the state and corporate food businesses have had significant impact on the institution’s mission and development. As one of the core initial funders, the South African government supported FFSA because it fit into its broader policy framework to promote non-governmental market-driven initiatives (Department of Public Works South Africa, 2009; Warshawsky, 2011). As part of a more systematic movement towards the privatization, devolution, and decentralization of delivery of basic services – such as sanitation, power, and refuse collection – South Africa has institutionalized a neoliberal approach to social service delivery (Bond, 2002; Peet, 2002; Swilling and Hutt, 1999). This has fundamentally shifted the responsibility of waste management and similar services to local and nongovernmental institutions (McDonald, 2002; Miraftab, 2004; Mogale, 2003; Stavrou, 2000). As part of its funding agreement with FFSA, the government has made efforts to micromanage the way food banks operate, and how they relate to CFOs in their own network (Warshawsky, 2011). Food corporations not only fund key aspects of FFSA, but also provide the actual food donations critical to its operations. In this way, private food retailers and manufacturers – such as Tiger Brands, Nestlé, and Pick n Pay – have a significant role to play in the success or failure of FFSA. However, for FFSA to operate successfully, it depends on food waste in the corporate food system, which includes the overproduction, mislabelling, or incorrect packaging of food. In these ways, some have suggested that FFSA is fundamentally beneficial to corporations as it provides a place for food waste while improving

335

Figure 16.3 FoodForward SA’s locations

Source: Created by author with data from FoodForward SA.

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corporate image (Warshawsky, 2016c). Such contradictions are central to the food banking model. As the final node on the food banking model, CFOs provide food and other key services to households. In contrast to other NGOs, these CFOs are often self-funded and extremely dependent on the support provided by FFSA. Although FFSA provides CFOs with food and occasional financial support, tensions exist in this fragile network. FFSA operates in a top-down hierarchical style by providing food, advice, and legitimacy to its partner CFOs (Warshawsky, 2011). This is potentially problematic as CFOs have important knowledge about the types of food people eat and the nature of food insecurity in their communities. They are arguably more connected to the causes of hunger and possible solutions that might work in their communities. For FFSA to operate effectively and equitably, it is critical that the knowledge and experience of beneficiary CFOs is fully integrated into the food banking model.

4. CONCLUSION This chapter has examined the role of CFOs in urban food systems using a South African case study. Advocates of food banking argue that food banks have the potential to streamline food-donation processes, increase the amount of food delivered, and reduce waste in cities of the Global South (Global FoodBanking Network, 2017a). Although there is little research evidence to back up these claims, evidence from South Africa suggests that the impact of urban food banks may be limited in many contexts across the Global South. South Africa was chosen as one of the GFN’s first projects in the Global South due to its robust infrastructure. While a strong state and private sector provided FFSA with a strong start, these institutions also ensured that FFSA’s successes and failures would depend disproportionately on these outside organizations (Warshawsky, 2016a). FFSA has struggled to maintain its operations as the South African state and private sector have retracted much of their funding. While the state attempted to micromanage FFSA’s operations to fit within its broader neoliberal policy agenda, private food corporations utilized the FFSA as a waste regulator to streamline their operations and leverage brand potential. FFSA’s management of its CFO network has also been problematic, as it has asserted a top-down management style that has increased dependency for many CBOs, and not fully integrated the knowledge and experience that they could bring to food banking (Warshawsky, 2011). Given that FFSA has shielded the state from political exposure and responsibility for food insecurity, some have suggested that food banks depoliticize the issue of hunger and food insecurity (Henderson, 2004; Poppendieck, 1998; Riches and Silvasti, 2014). As high food insecurity rates persist in South Africa

Food waste and the growth of food banks in the Global South  337

and much of the Global South, it is critical to determine whether food banking systems like FFSA can successfully reduce food waste and food insecurity in cities. With many countries in the Global South having less-developed core infrastructure, governmental institutions, and corporate food sectors than South Africa, it remains unclear how food banks can operate effectively in the context of a range of social issues such as economic underdevelopment, political corruption, extreme poverty, high demand for social services, rapid in-migration, and public health crises (Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Rakodi, 1997). As the number and size of food banks increase globally, it is critical to research how food banks fit into existing food systems, and their role in reducing food insecurity and food waste. Moreover, given that food banks are only one type of CFO in the Global South, it is important to examine how formalized food bank structures fit within the complex network of informal foodways that are critical to the livelihoods of billions of people across the Global South (Simone, 2004, 2014). Lastly, because food banks are intimately connected with the charitable enterprise associated with corporate food waste, it is vital that scholars examine how food banks either challenge or reproduce the status quo of structural inequality associated with the political economy of poverty and welfare (Clapp and Fuchs, 2009; Riches and Silvasti, 2014).

REFERENCES Aliber, M. (2009), ‘Exploring statistics: South Africa’s national household surveys as sources of information about food security and subsistence agriculture’, Unpublished report, Centre for Poverty Employment and Growth, Pretoria, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council, 31 March. Bloom, J. (ed.) (2011), American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (And What We Can Do About It), Cambridge, MA, US: Da Capo Lifelong. Bond, P. (ed.) (2002), Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development, and Social Protest, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press. Born, B. and M. Purcell (2006), ‘Avoiding the local trap: scale and food systems in planning research’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 26(2), 195–207. Busa, J. and R. Garder (2014), ‘Champions of the movement or fair-weather heroes? Individualization and the (a)politics of local food’, Antipode, 47(2), 323–41. Caraher, M. and A. Cavicchi (2014), ‘Old crises on new plates or old plates for a new crises? Food banks and food insecurity’, British Food Journal, 116(9), 1382–91. Clapp, J. and D. Fuchs (2009), ‘Agrifood corporations, global governance, and sustainability: a framework for analysis’, in J. Clapp and D. Fuchs (eds), Corporate Power in Global Agrifood Governance, Cambridge, MA, US: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, pp. 1–25. Cloke, J. (2013), ‘Empires of waste and the food security meme’, Geography Compass, 7(9), 622–36. Davies, A. (ed.) (2008), The Geographies of Garbage Governance: Interventions, Interactions, and Outcomes, Burlington, VT, US: Ashgate. Department of Public Works South Africa (2009), ‘Statement by Minister of Public Works, Geoff Doidge, MP on the occasion of Social Protection and Community Development Cluster media briefing’, 9 November.

338  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Evans, D. (2011), ‘Blaming the consumer – once again: the social and material contexts of everyday food waste practices in some English households’, Critical Public Health, 21(4), 429–40. Evans, D., H. Campbell and A. Murcott (2013), ‘A brief history of food waste and the social sciences’, in D. Evans, H. Campbell and A. Murcott (eds), Waste Matters: New Perspectives on Food and Society, Malden, MA, US: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 5–26. Feagan, R. (2007), ‘The place of food: mapping out the “local” in local food systems’, Progress in Human Geography, 31(1), 23–42. Feeding America (2017), About Us, accessed 10 June 2017 at www.feedingamerica.org/about-us/. FoodForward SA (2017), 2017 Annual Report, accessed 18 November 2017 at www.foodforwardsa. org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/11/44746%20FoodForward%202017%20Annual%20Report%20 digital%20FA2%20GAMIRO.pdf. Gille, Z. (2012), ‘From risk to waste: global food waste regimes’, Sociological Review, 60(2), 27–46. Global FoodBanking Network (2006), Newsletter: Winter 2006, accessed 12 December 2006 at www.foodbanking.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/GFN_Winter06_English-1.pdf. Global FoodBanking Network (2017a), 2017 Annual Report, accessed 13 August 2017 at www. foodbanking.org/2017annualreport/. Global FoodBanking Network (2017b), Where We Work, accessed 24 September 2017 at www. foodbanking.org/what-we-do/our-global-reach/. Goodman, D., E. Dupuis and M. Goodman (eds) (2011), Alternative Food Networks: Knowledge, Practice, and Politics, London, UK: Routledge. Gottlieb, R. and A. Joshi (eds) (2010), Food Justice, Cambridge, MA, US: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Gunders, D. (ed.) (2012), Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill, New York, NY, US: Natural Resources Defense Council. Gustavsson, J., C. Cederberg, U. Sonesson, R. van Otterdijk and A. Meybeck (2011), Global Food Losses and Food Waste, Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, accessed 10 November 2011 at www.fao.org/3/mb060e%20%20/mb060e00.pdf. Guthman, J. (2008), ‘Thinking inside the neoliberal box: the micro-politics of agro-food philanthropy’, Geoforum, 39(3), 1241–53. Guthman, J. (2012), ‘Doing justice to bodies? Reflections on food justice, race and biology’, Antipode, 46(5), 1153–71. Hawkins, G. (ed.) (2006), The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, Lantham, MD, US: Rowman and Littlefield. Henderson, G. (2004), ‘“Free” food, the local production of worth, and the circuit of decommodification: a value theory of the surplus’, Environment and Planning D, 22(4), 485–512. Huchzermeyer, M. (ed.) (2011), Cities with ‘Slums’: From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa, Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press. Husbands, W. (1999), ‘Food banks as antihunger organizations’, in M. Koc, R. MacRae, L. Mougeot and J. Welsh (eds), For Hunger-Proof Cities, Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, pp. 103–9. Ionescu-Somers, A. (2004), ‘The food and beverage industry’, in U. Steger (ed.), The Business of Sustainability, New York, NY, US: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 178–98. Lambie-Mumford, H. and D. Jarvis (2012), ‘The role of faith-based organizations in the Big Society: opportunities and challenges’, Policy Studies, 33(3), 249–62. Lipinksi, B., C. Hanson, J. Lomax, L. Kitinoja, R. Waite and T. Searchinger (2013), ‘Reducing food loss and waste’, World Resources Institute, accessed 10 October 2013 at www.pdf.wri. org/reducing_food_loss_and_waste.pdf. Mazzolini, E. and S. Foote (eds) (2012), Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice, Cambridge, MA, US: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. McDonald, D. (2002), ‘What is the environmental justice’, in D. McDonald (ed.), Environmental Justice in South Africa, Athens, Ohio, US: Ohio University Press, pp. 1–15. Melosi, M. (2005), Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, Pittsburgh, PA, US: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Food waste and the growth of food banks in the Global South  339 Miraftab, F. (2004), ‘Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services: the case of waste collection services in Cape Town, South Africa’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28(4), 874–92. Mogale, T. (2003), ‘Developmental local government and decentralised service delivery in the democratic South Africa’, in G. Mhone and O. Edigheji (eds), Governance in the New South Africa: The Challenges of Globalisation, Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press, pp. 215–43. Moore, S. (2011), ‘Global garbage: waste, trash trading, and local garbage politics’ in R. Peet, P. Robbins and M. Watts (eds), Global Political Ecology, New York, NY, US: Routledge, pp. 133–44. Moragues-Faus, A. and K. Morgan (2015), ‘Reframing the foodscape: the emergent world of urban food policy’, Environment and Planning A, 47(7), 1558–73. Myers, G. (2005), Disposable Cities, Burlington, VT, US: Ashgate. Njeru, J. (2006), ‘The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya’, Geoforum, 37(6), 1046–58. O’Brien, M. (2008), A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society, New York, NY, US: Routledge. Oelofse, S. and A. Nahman (2013), ‘Estimating the magnitude of food waste generated in South Africa’, Waste Management and Research, 31(1), 80–86. Onibokun, A. and A. Kumuyi (1999), ‘Governance of waste management in Africa’, in A. Onibokun (ed.), Managing the Monster: Urban Waste and Governance in Africa, Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, pp. 1–10. Parfitt, J., M. Barthel and S. Macnaughton (2010), ‘Food waste within food supply chains: quantification and potential for change to 2050’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1554), 3065–81. Parnell, S. and J. Robinson (2012), ‘(Re)theorizing cities from the Global South: looking beyond neoliberalism’, Urban Geography, 33(4), 593–617. Peet, R. (2002), ‘Ideology, discourse, and the geography of hegemony: from socialist to neoliberal development in postapartheid South Africa’, Antipode, 34(1), 54–84. Pikner, T. and J. Jauhiainen (2014), ‘Dis/appearing waste and afterwards’, Geoforum 54(1), 39–48. Poppendieck, J. (1998), Sweet Charity, New York, NY, US: Viking. Rakodi, C. (ed.) (1997), The Urban Challenge in Africa, New York, NY, US: United Nations. Riches, G. (2002), ‘Food banks and food security: welfare reform, human rights, and social policy. Lessons from Canada?’, Social Policy and Administration, 36(6), 648–63. Riches, G. and Silvasti, T. (2014), ‘Hunger in the rich world: food aid and right to food perspectives’, in G. Riches and T. Silvasti (eds), First World Hunger Revisited (2nd Edition), New York, NY, US: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–14. Rocha, C. (2014), ‘A right to food approach: public food banks in Brazil’, in G. Riches and T. Silvasti (eds), First World Hunger Revisited (2nd Edition), New York, NY, US: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29–41. Scanlan, J. (2005), On Garbage, London, UK: Reaktion. Shannon, J. (2014), ‘Food deserts: governing obesity in the neoliberal city’, Progress in Human Geography, 38(2), 248–66. Simone, A. (2004), For the City Yet to Come, Durham, NC, US: Duke University Press. Simone, A. (2014), Jakarta: Drawing the City Near, Minneapolis, MN, US: University of Minnesota Press. Slocum, R. (2007), ‘Whiteness, space, and alternative food practice’, Geoforum, 38(3), 520–33. Smil, V. (2004), Enriching the Earth, Cambridge, MA, US: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Sonnino, R. (2016), ‘The new geography of food security: exploring the potential of urban food strategies’, Geographical Journal, 182(2), 190–200. Stavrou, S. (2000), ‘Infrastructural services’, in J. May (ed.), Poverty and Inequality in South Africa: Meeting the Challenge, New York, NY, US: Zed Books. Stuart, T. (2009), Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, New York, NY, US: W.W. Norton.

340  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Swilling, M. and D. Hutt (1999), ‘Johannesburg, South Africa’, in A. Onibokun, (ed.), Managing the Monster: Urban Waste and Governance in Africa, Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, pp. 173–226. Tammemagi, H. (1999), The Waste Crisis: Landfills, Incinerators, and the Search for a Sustainable Future, New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. Warshawsky, D. (2010), ‘New power relations served here: the growth of food banking in Chicago’, Geoforum, 41(5), 763–75. Warshawsky, D. (2011), ‘FoodBank Johannesburg, state, and civil society organizations in postapartheid Johannesburg’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37(1), 809–29. Warshawsky, D. (2016a), ‘Civil society and public–private partnerships: case study of the AgriFoodBank in South Africa’ Social and Cultural Geography, 17(3), 423–43. Warshawsky, D. (2016b), ‘Civil society and the governance of urban food systems in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Geography Compass, 10(7), 293–306. Warshawsky, D. (2016c), ‘Food waste, sustainability, and the corporate sector: case study of a US food company’, Geographical Journal, 182(4), 384–94. Wekerle, G. (2004), ‘Food justice movements: policy, planning, and networks’, Journal of Planning: Education and Research, 23(4), 378–86. Wilson, A. (2012), ‘Beyond alternative: exploring the potential for autonomous food spaces’, Antipode, 45(3), 719–37. Young, D., L. Salamon and M. Grinsfelder (2012), ‘Commercialization, social ventures and forprofit competition’, in L. Salamon (ed.), The State of Nonprofit America (2nd Edition), Washington, DC, US: Brookings Institution Press, pp. 521–48.

17. The planned “city region” in the New Urban Agenda: An appropriate framing for urban food security? Jane Battersby and Vanessa Watson

1. INTRODUCTION The concept of the city region has occupied regional economists and planners for some decades, but is now gaining new prominence in two potentially aligned sources: first, in the New Urban Agenda (NUA) (2016), which views the city-region idea as important for achieving inclusive and sustainable cities, and “balanced” urban and regional territorial development; and second, in certain urban food security and food-policy positions, which argue that the city-region food-systems (CRFS) approach is key to addressing the issue of urban food insecurity. Yet, over the years, the city-region construct has been challenged from analytical and normative perspectives in the fields of planning and regional economy, as well as in the field of urban food security. In addition, both of these lines of critical thinking have drawn attention to the important influence of context and “place”, and have questioned the validity of applying single-model analytical constructs and solutions in all parts of the world. The purpose of this chapter is to question the concept of the city region in these two related policy arenas of urban food security and territorial urban planning. We argue that, in current food-security thinking, there is a strong emphasis on “localism” and its spatial manifestation through the concept of the city region and urban–rural linkages. These concepts are also present in the NUA and its related planning guidelines in formulating the approach to urban and territorial planning, as well as urban food-security policy. However, there is tension between these recent positions and the concept of the entire food system (as found in the work of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE)). Drawing on the various perspectives from which the city-region concept has been approached helps to question its adoption into the NUA and current urban food-security policy. The research in this chapter is based on desktop literature and policy-document reviews, as well as attendance by the authors at several international meetings on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the NUA, and food security.

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The next section of the chapter introduces the concept of urban food security: its growing importance as an urban development issue; the shifting analytical and normative positions associated with addressing it; and how recent policy positions have been influenced by a growing theoretical and practical localism, and hence a concern with the nature of urban–rural linkages and issues of sustainability and economic equity. The spatialized city-region concept incorporates these various concerns and makes them available to be operationalized in the field of urban and development planning. The third section examines how the concept of the city region has found its way into the NUA and its related planning guidelines, offering a policy alignment between urban food policy and urban planning linked to an important and global set of development commitments: the SDGs. The fourth section moves to an analysis and critique of the city-region model, drawing on its long history of application and debate in the fields of regional economic development, and urban and regional planning, as well as the far more recent critiques of the city-region idea in the food-policy field. The final section assesses the value of the city-region concept to urban food security and asks if it is an appropriate approach for achieving the urban food-security intentions of the NUA.

2. URBAN FOOD SECURITY AND THE RISE OF “THE LOCAL” There is growing awareness of the extent of food insecurity and poor nutrition in urban areas, particularly in lower-income countries, and how it is interrelated with a wide range of other development issues. The Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) survey of 146 countries in 2014–2015 found that 50 per cent of urban populations in the least-developed countries were food-insecure, compared with 43 per cent in rural areas. This reached 70–95 per cent of the population in urban informal settlements around the world (Tefft et al., 2017, p. 36). Food expenditure is a significant component of most low-income household budgets, usually in competition with other basic needs and priorities, thus contributing directly to urban poverty. The food system is a major source of urban employment and livelihoods, especially in the areas of food retail and processing, and it supports a significant proportion of the informal economy. The inability to access sufficient safe and nutritious food gives rise to malnutrition in its various forms and this is responsible for more ill-health (through stunting, wasting, and obesity) than any other cause (Global Nutrition Report, 2018). Poor diets over a life span limit individuals’ ability to work productively and urban economies suffer as a result. Food security and nutrition are thus preconditions for achieving a range of goals set out in the SDGs and the NUA.

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Efforts to address food insecurity have been through a number of shifts over the last century. Lang and Barling (2012) explain how the issues of food and hunger were taken up at the global level in the 1930s and became a clear policy position as part of post-World War II international reconstruction. The policy focus was on raising agricultural production to increase food supply. This “productionist” approach, they argue, was challenged some decades later by positions which argued that addressing food security required more complex and multifaceted approaches. However, the 2007–2008 food price spikes led to the reassertion and dominance of policies that rely on primary production. Lang and Barling (2012) suggest that, while this older productionist approach to food security has again become the dominant paradigm, newer policy formulations are combining it with a sustainability approach, essentially implying a modernizing and softening of the focus on food production. The productionist approach is still at the core of policies promoted by a range of global food and development agencies, including the FAO and the World Bank, although there is now greater recognition of the important role of the whole food “system”. This is defined by the HLPE as a system that “gathers all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, infrastructures, institutions, etc.) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution, preparation and consumption of food, and the outputs of these activities, including socioeconomic and environmental outcomes” (HLPE, 2014, p. 12). This definition makes the connection between household food security, the food system, and the wider set of systems in which food operates, and provides entry points to bring food into an urban development agenda and vice versa. It also directs intervention aimed at improved food security and nutrition beyond its usual focus at the individual and household scales to wider regional and global actions (Battersby and Watson, 2019). Two more recent approaches to addressing food security emphasize the issue of food supply, but both also prioritize this at the local scale, with production and linkage to proximate urban areas. The “foodshed” approach attempts to counter increasingly global and corporatized food systems with small-scale and local food supplied through much shorter supply chains (Kloppenburg et al., 1996). The idea of the “foodshed” was first articulated by Hedden (1929), and was used to describe the actual sources and flows of foods to cities. He described the foodshed as being bounded more by economic than by physical barriers. When the foodshed concept was revived in the 1990s, it was normative rather than analytical, and environmental rather than economic in rationale. The justification for the current position lies in the argument that, if people are distanced from their sources of food, they cannot recognize the ecological and social destructiveness of food production and supply systems, and therefore cannot act responsibly and effectively for change. Central aspects of the thesis by Kloppenburg et al. (1996) is that food production must be spatially proximate to

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towns and limited by the capacities of the natural environment. Offering a related normative perspective on food security is the “food-­sovereignty” approach, described by Alonso-Fradejas et al. (2015) as an alternative food system and a global social movement launched in 1993 by an international agrarian movement called La Via Campesina. A definition of food sovereignty is clearest in the movement’s Nyéléni Declaration of 2007, which states: Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015, p. 432

The movement calls for food-system localization, partly to counter the “distancing” (Clapp, 2014) of food supply created by the industrial food system. However, the complexities of defining “local” have been recognized by some authors, who point to both, and sometimes competing, geographical (territorial), and social and supply-chain characteristics of local production (Robbins, 2015). These approaches have been elaborated in the development of the CRFS approach, which adds a strong local and territorial dimension to previous food production and sustainability positions. This concept was spelt out in 2013 by the FAO: A city-region food system is a concept that refers to a complex network of actors, processes and relationships related to food production, processing, marketing and consumption that exist in a given geographical region and includes a more or less concentrated urban centre and its surrounding peri-urban and rural hinterland – a regional landscape across which flows of people, goods and ecosystem services are managed. Tefft et al., 2017, p. 45

Jennings et al. (2015) provide a useful synthesis of the current state of thinking on CRFS. They identify the main concerns of this concept as the growing “disjunction” between urban and rural areas, given that rural areas can provide food, water, energy, raw materials, and other ecosystem services to urban areas, but are being reorganized in inequitable and unsustainable ways to meet demands for cheap foods by urban consumers. The city region is therefore presented not only as an analytical concept to try to explain the relationship between urban areas and their surrounding regions, but also as a normative

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concept: a CRFS approach aims to improve the linkages between urban areas and their rural hinterland, and between consumers and nearby food producers, to create social, economic, and environmental benefits. As a global food strategy, this approach was taken forward in the significant Milan Urban Food Policy Pact of 2015 (MUFPP, 2015), which was signed by 180 city mayors, calling on all cities to develop sustainable food systems. Its sixth principle reads: Acknowledging that urban and peri-urban agriculture offers opportunities to protect and integrate biodiversity into city-region landscapes and food systems, thereby contributing to synergies across food and nutrition security, ecosystem services and human well-being.

Jennings et al. (2015) argue that the CRFS approach does not support unquestioned localism (of food supplies), and that sourcing food globally will remain a critical pillar of any urban food-security strategy. However, a key paper by Blay-Palmer et al. (2018) suggests increasing support for localism. They describe the CRFS approach as support for “actors, processes and relationships” in a “concentrated urban centre and its surrounding peri-urban and rural hinterland” where “improved rural–urban connectivity” is critical to achieving sustainable food systems. Characteristics include minimizing or eliminating external inputs to a region’s food system. CRFSs are aligned to a “territorialdevelopment” approach that recognizes the role of geography (or space) in connecting urban and rural areas, and local governance institutions that are strongly participatory and representative (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018). While they recognize that CRFSs occur within “larger food networks that link city regions to national and global food systems” (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018, p. 16), they also argue for the production of “local food”, which helps to reduce dependence on imports and market-price volatility. In sum, there have been significant developments in both analytical and normative framings of urban food security and nutrition since the earlier positions which assumed that solutions lay mainly in increasing food supply (although this position remains a central element of many current policies). Current foodpolicy ideas appear to draw together three slightly different policy positions. First, there is evidence of increasing urban food and nutrition insecurity (Tefft et al., 2017), which demands specifically urban food-security policy and interventive responses that better connect food systems and their food-security outcomes. Second, policy needs to recognize the role the food system plays as a source of employment and livelihood. Third, policy needs to recognize the importance of promoting the sustainability and justice of a food system, with the foodshed and food-sovereignty approaches putting particular emphasis on this. In this third approach there is a clear emphasis on localism and its spatial manifestation through the concept of the city region and urban–rural linkages.

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The city-region concept offers a spatial and planning/policy-related expression of these three connected themes, and hence features prominently in recent policy shifts. The next section turns to the NUA and its guidelines to show the close alignment between food policy and urban and territorial development strategies.

3. THE RETURN OF THE CITY REGION IN THE NUA AND PLANNING GUIDELINES The concept of the city region has also risen to prominence across a range of policy arenas concerned with development and sustainability. In the case of the SDGs, the introduction of an urban goal (SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities) raised the centrality of the urban process in securing sustainable futures across other SDGs focusing on sectoral issues such as food, climate, health, economy, and poverty. Recognition of the “urban” also builds on influential policy positions (World Bank, 2009), which foreground urban economic agglomeration as an imperative for development and sees cities as “engines of economic growth”. The introduction of the urban goal in the SDGs has given the new global development agenda a distinctive and city-centric concept of development, which is also place-based, scalar, and arguably local (Barnett and Parnell, 2016). A second important shift, evident in SDG 11 and the NUA (with implications for implementing other goals), is renewed emphasis on planning, but reconfigured to be a form of planning more inclusive than before and encompassing a wider range of issues beyond land use (Barnett and Parnell, 2018). The NUA states that “the implementation of the New Urban Agenda contributes to the implementation and localization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in an integrated manner, and to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and targets, including Goal 11, of making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” (NUA, 2016). The SDGs and the NUA were produced in separate processes, and the NUA was responding to a number of global policy frameworks in addition to SDG 11. The idea of planning which finds its way into the NUA is also distinctive. It is multi-scalar and assumes state-led action at national, regional, city-regional, and local levels, but with an emphasis on subnational government actors; it has a strong spatial emphasis (although also incorporating and integrating social, economic, and environmental values to address the full range of global “challenges”); and it presents cities and/or “the urban”, not just as a site of developmental problems that must be planned better, but as “hubs”, “drivers”, or “nodes” that can be used proactively to address much wider development issues (Barnett and Parnell, 2018).

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The targets of SDG 11 call for sustainable cities and communities through, inter alia, improving urban planning and management in a way that is both participatory and inclusive. The NUA (2016) takes these aims further. Under the section “Our principles and commitments”, paragraph 15C sets out the role for planning: “(iii) Reinvigorating long-term and integrated urban and territorial planning and design in order to optimize the spatial dimension of the urban form and deliver the positive outcomes of urbanization”. There is reference throughout the NUA document to the need for action at the “global, regional, national, subnational and local levels”, and paragraph 96 refers to the city region: “We will encourage the implementation of sustainable urban and territorial planning, including city-region and metropolitan plans, to encourage synergies and interactions among urban areas of all sizes and their peri-urban and rural surroundings.” There is an important shift here from an earlier approach in regional economic development that applied the term “city region” to the globe’s larger and economically well-connected urban agglomerations (Scott, 2019), to, in the NUA, both large and small urban areas (everywhere) and their surrounding hinterlands. The concept of the city region thus becomes even more abstracted (any city or town forms the hub of a city region) and the strong urban economic logic of earlier theorizing is downplayed in favour of a more territorial logic. The NUA is supported by planning guideline documents (UN-Habitat, 2015; UNHSP, 2018), which give a more detailed view of how city regions are envisaged in the new policy agenda. An important definition in the UNHSP document describes city regions as: The area within which the connections between one or more cities and the surrounding rural land are intense and functionally (economically, socially, politically and geographically) connected. These areas are typically 80–100 km across and occupy up to 10,000 km². UNHSP, 2018, p. iv

This is a concept of city regions as bounded geographical areas containing towns and their rural hinterlands, with higher levels of economic and social intra-linkage, and some degree of autonomy. An emphasis on the local/regional scale of intervention also comes through in the NUA and the guideline documents: We commit ourselves to supporting local provision of goods and basic services and leveraging the proximity of resources, recognizing that heavy reliance on distant sources of energy, water, food and materials can pose sustainability

348  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South challenges, including vulnerability to service supply disruptions, and that local provision can facilitate inhabitants’ access to resources. NUA, 2016, para. 70

The importance of the local scale is also evident in the UNHSP (2018) planning guidelines. This document argues that planning practice is increasingly focused on governance qualities such as transparency, inclusiveness, and participation, which are most easily achieved at the local level. While planning intervention can occur at all scales, urban and territorial planning should be undertaken at the lowest appropriate level (UNHSP, 2018, p. xi). Compatible with the NUA and planning guidelines’ view of a city region and a local focus to promote sustainable cities and human settlements, there is also an emphasis on strengthening urban–rural linkages. UN-Habitat (2017) promotes the development of synergies and linkages between cities, towns, and their hinterlands. One spatial planning strategy put forward is to promote “city-region, land use and regional and territorial planning that takes into account urban, peri-urban and rural areas” (UN-Habitat, 2017, p. 56). This policy document does not negate the role of national and regional plans, but notes that these should promote decentralization and the participation and inclusion of communities, civil society, NGOs, women’s interests, and the private sector. Urban food security has an important (and welcome) presence in the NUA and related planning guideline documents. Links between urban and territorial planning and urban food-security policy, which have been only marginally connected in the past (Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 2000), are recognized in the NUA: paragraph 51 states that urban spatial frameworks, urban planning and design can strengthen food-systems planning. In the NUA, food is most frequently linked to issues of environmental sustainability, resilience, agriculture, urban–rural linkages, small-scale farmers, and urban green space (to grow food). This indicates an ongoing focus of food-security approaches on growing food, in keeping with the productionist emphasis in both older and more recent international food policies, although other aspects of the food system are also recognized. Specifically, NUA (2016, para. 123) states: We will promote the integration of food security and the nutritional needs of urban residents, particularly the urban poor, in urban and territorial planning, in order to end hunger and malnutrition. We will promote coordination of sustainable food security and agriculture policies across urban, peri-urban and rural areas to facilitate the production, storage, transport and marketing of food to consumers in adequate and affordable ways in order to reduce food losses and prevent and reuse food waste …

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The UNHSP (2018) planning guidelines document echoes the link between planning and food security and particularly the local production of food: city sprawl consumes agricultural land and creates food insecurity (UNHSP, 2018, p. xii); open space must be protected to promote food security (UNHSP, 2018, p. xii); planners should boost local food networks (UNHSP, 2018, p. 71); and food can be a focus of territorial initiatives to strengthen urban–rural relations (UNHSP, 2018, p. 72). The NUA-related guideline document on urban–rural linkages makes the connection between food security and the city-region concept: Settlements and their surrounding rural and peri-urban areas need to acknowledge their territorial interdependence for guaranteeing a sustainable food supply for all. In this context, the relevance of city-region food systems and regional approaches needs to be recognized. Regional food systems are able to create food self-sufficiency, are more environmentally friendly and foster regional employment. UN-Habitat, 2017, p. 44

The promotion of linkages between towns and their hinterlands is seen as necessary to achieve urban food security. UN-Habitat identifies, as an entry point for sustainable urban food systems, “the flows of goods and services that promote sustainable local and regional food supply chains; especially regarding the linkages between urban agglomerations and the relevance of peri-urban areas and the hinterland in producing and supplying food for urban areas” (UNHabitat, 2017, p. 42). This section has argued that central aspects of current urban food-security policy – promotion of the city-region concept and, relatedly, the prioritizing of localism and urban–rural linkages – are evident in the NUA and its linked planning guidelines. This is evident in relation to urban and territorial planning, and in relation to urban food security, and there is a strong alignment and compatibility between these two positions. However, if the city-region concept (along with localism and urban–rural linkage) is to play such a central role in the aim of the NUA to encourage urban settlements to be hubs, drivers, or nodes to address wider development issues (Barnett and Parnell, 2018), it is necessary to unpack these concepts and take into account the extensive debate that has taken place around them – primarily in the field of regional economic development and planning, and more recently in the field of urban food security. This is the focus of the next section.

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4. CRITIQUES OF THE CITY-REGION CONCEPT IN REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, URBAN PLANNING AND URBAN FOOD-SECURITY POLICY 4.1 Regional Economic Development and Planning There is close alignment between recent conceptualizations of the city-region model in the NUA and related planning guidelines, and the much earlier concept of the city region in the writings of planning “founders” Patrick Geddes (1915) and Lewis Mumford (1925). The contributions of Geddes (1854–1932) were shaped by his training as a biologist and in sociology, with his ideas on regionalism being particularly relevant for city regions. His emphasis on the need to understand the unique nature of people and place in context, through his model known as the Valley Section, has led some to suggest that he is a forerunner of present-day environmental activism and the intellectual link connecting Darwin and the current “green” movement (Rubin, 2009). For Geddes, the opportunities and constraints of the natural environment (place) were the basis for determining the nature of work and society, thus synthesizing and integrating people and environment, as well as urban settlements and their surrounding regions. Geddes’s work had an important impact on urban scholar Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) and the Regional Planning Association of America, wherein the economic links between a city and its region became more explicit. Mumford argued for a national plan with “regions delimited on the basis of natural geographic entities”, “a maximum of foodstuffs, textiles and housing materials grown and manufactured in the home region”, and a “minimum of interregional exchanges based only on such products as the home region cannot economically produce” (Hall, 1988, p. 151). The Fabian socialist inspiration of Geddes and Mumford has had lesser influence in subsequent years (Hall, 1988), and the emphasis on taking context into account diminished as the city-region was developed into a more abstract conceptual model. Taking a functional regionalist approach to city regions, Parr (2005, p. 556) attributes the origin of the term to Robert Dickinson (1947), but offers a preliminary definition as an entity “comprising two distinct but interrelated elements: the city (sometimes a regional or national metropolis) possessing some specified set of functions or economic activities; and a surrounding territory, which is exclusive to the city in question”. City-region plans developed by national governments shaped the emergence of regional planning in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, aligning closely with organized, state-centred, Keynesian economics of the post-World War II years. An assumed “functional reality” of integrated economic, political, and social relations (Healey, 2009), within and across the town and its hinterland, and able to be defined by spatial and administrative

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boundaries, became a foundational spatial-planning concept through much of post-war planning. Parr (2005) argues that, in the UK, there was growing interest from the policy community in taking both the city and its region into account. This arose from the realization that city administrative boundaries did not capture the full range of housing and labour-market linkages, due to the growing emphasis on the role of local and regional government in planning, and the influence of New Regionalism, which drew attention to the importance of the regional scale for intervention and regulation. In Europe, following the “tradition of contained towns and cities where the city core commands the surrounding territory”, Healey (2015, p. 266) argues that, decades later, planning is still influenced by this vision of cities and their regions. However, there is now substantial literature in the fields of regional economic development and planning that examines the idea of the city region as an analytical and normative concept. Key issues of debate in this literature are the extent to which it is valid to geographically define a city region as an entity that has high levels of economic, social, and institutional intra-linkage, and some degree of autonomy, and whether any city and its hinterland is likely to have wider local and even global economic and other linkages, which make attempts at boundary definition problematic. This is sometimes referred to as the network-versus-territory debate (see Jessop et al., 2008; Painter, 2010). A new stream of literature emerged in the 1990s and into the 2000s, which focused on the economic linkages of cities and their regions in an increasingly global economic system. Strongly influenced by the work of authors such as Scott and Storper (Scott, 2001; Scott and Storper, 2003; Storper, 1997), this line of thought proposed that globalization was challenging the power of nation states, and that city regions able to capitalize on the agglomeration of leading international economic sectors were more likely to function as the motors of the new global economy. In this new post-national age, the region could no longer be considered as a territorially fixed and bounded unit amenable to top-down state planning and management. Recognition of city regions’ multiscalar economic networks, and their ability to achieve international economic competitiveness, required policy to consider relationally networked space rather than territorial and administrative geographies. Allen and Cochrane (2007, pp. 1162–3) recognized that the relational view of the region sat uneasily with the idea of “regions as territorially bounded political constructions”, but argued that now even governance works “through a looser, more negotiable, set of political arrangements that take their shape from the networks of relations that stretch across and beyond given regional boundaries”. Hence, the urban regional network was pitted against urban hierarchy and bounded territories in what Harrison and Growe (2014) call the territorial/relational divide. It did not take long, however, for a critique of this economy-centred and network-oriented position to emerge; one author confidently declaring that

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“territory is back” (Painter, 2010, p. 1090). However, this repositioning of the city-region debate avoids a return to Geddes and the post-war interpretation of concepts of hierarchy, territory, and state planning. Writers acknowledge the importance of multi-scalar economic linkages that to varying degrees tie city regions to other parts of the world. But they argue that the state has not disappeared and neither has the importance of space, place, or territory, and the institutions that manage them. What has emerged from the literature is a more nuanced interpretation of the concept of city regions, which recognizes that territory and network can be complementary, or overlapping, or competing, in different configurations of state/space (Harrison and Growe, 2014). Jessop et al. (2008, p. 391) pointed to the “one-dimensionalism” that had characterized previous socio-spatial theorizing about regions: “methodological territorialism”, which subsumes all socio-spatial relations under “territoriality”, as in state-centric and territorialist understandings of cities, states, and the world economy; “place-centrism”, which treats places as self-contained ensembles of social–ecological interactions; “scale-centrism”, which sees scale as the basis around which other socio-spatial relations are organized; and “network centrism”, with its one-sided focus on networks, flows, and mobilities. In its place, Jessop et al. (2008, p. 392) offer a “territory–place–scale–network” understanding of socio-spatial relations, which takes into account “historically specific geographies of social relations … and explores contextual and historical variation in the structural coupling, strategic coordination, and forms of inter-connection among the different dimensions of the latter”. The additional consideration by Jessop et al. (2008) of the importance of context (“historically specific geographies”) has been echoed in other writings. Cochrane and Ward (2012) suggest that particular developments across European space in the post-Fordism–Keynesian era have been highly influential in shaping recent abstract concepts of the city region, and it is important to recognize how the roles of place and time influence conceptual shifts. Similarly, Healey (2009) notes that the concept of the city region emerged in Europe in response to locally specific institutional reconfigurations, but may play out very differently elsewhere. It is not “a well-developed package which can be inserted into a government system to fix and reconfigure sub-national government” (Healey 2009, p. 839). Roy (2009) has argued that much of the theoretical work on city regions is located in the urban experience of Euro-America, and that new ideas and concepts need to emerge from the very different metropolises of the Global South. In the field of development studies, research in regions of the Global South is now concluding that local development depends largely on the extent of networked space and positionality: “Local development opportunities are very much determined by trans local linkages – what is happening in other places, sometimes directly, as a result of flows of capital, goods, people and information” (Zoomers, 2018, p. 4807).

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A return to territory and network concepts draws attention to methodological issues around city-region concepts. Solis et al. (2017) build on the “scalemismatch” problem, especially in ecology, to explore the connection between the spatial dimensions of both data and decision making. Their position recognizes the problem of the spatial scale of data generation that influences policy decisions being incongruent with the scale and spatial unit of decision-making jurisdictions. They add two further potential incongruences: that policy decisions may be affected by behaviour discourses and outcomes in different spatial areas or scales; and that the spatial scale and area for which decision makers are held accountable may be different again from data, decisions, or impact. Solis et al. (2017) draw attention to the vital issue of considering the “materiality” of spatiality and its relation to data generation, policy formulation, decision making, and accountability by decision makers for their actions. Applications of the spatial and localized model of the city-region idea would need to take all these factors into account. Despite disagreements in the academic literature over the interpretation of the city-region concept, it has continued to be mobilized in certain parts of the world and claimed as a policy tool that can promote urban economic growth, address issues of urban spatial equity and welfare, and manage land development. In Europe, Salet et al. (2015, p. 251) note that city-region spatial policies persist. While urban patterns are becoming increasingly polycentric, and urban linkages are increasingly complex and stretched beyond the bounds of the city and region, institutional structures still operate on the assumption of a dominant urban core and dependent periphery, which skews policy and infrastructure accordingly. Healey (2009, p. 832) commented that “attempts to tie critical economic, social, political and environmental relationships to a concept of a relationally integrated ‘urban place’ have become increasingly difficult”. Reports from a number of European countries (Salet et al., 2015) point to the lack of alignment between the nature of urban networks and the jurisdictional boundaries of government, raising the “scale-mismatch” problem identified by Solis et al. (2017). Salet et al. (2015) suggest that the governance of city regions will have to depend far more on innovative sectoral and strategic collaborations across and beyond territorial boundaries. This in itself depends on the existence of strong, well-resourced local governments willing to collaborate, as well as well-developed civil society and advocacy groups – characteristics that do not hold in many areas of the world and are especially lacking in parts of the Global South. In the US, where the intended role of city-region governance has been to manage land development and promote the economic competitiveness of leading regions, Kantor and Nelles (2015) point to new political and governance conflicts that have emerged. City-region governance is particularly difficult as it usually has to rely on network collaborations of lower-level government and

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advocacy coalitions. However, as large city regions become more “multi-polar urban phenomena” (as is the case in Europe), developmental tensions occur around competition for the provision of regional infrastructure to newer and older nodes, social equity tensions occur due to increasing inequalities within a city region, and environmental and land-use tensions occur over competing claims to space. The NUA takes a strongly state-led approach to urban and regional planning, which assumes that territories and markets can be controlled and directed through national and local policies and laws (Watson, 2016). European and US experiences with the city-region idea suggest that this is no longer the case, even where states are relatively strong and well resourced. 4.2 Urban Food-Policy Debates In response to the recent incorporation of the city-region concept into food policy, critiques echoing the arguments put forward by regional economists and planners have been taken up more broadly in the “network-versus-territory” debates. In a key article, Born and Purcell (2006) take a stand against food-systems research that claims local (urban) food systems are preferable to systems at a larger scale – regional, national, or global. They term this the “local trap”. They point to the tendency of food activists and researchers to assume that the local scale is inherently desirable, offering better ecological sustainability, social justice, democracy, and nutritious and quality food. Drawing on “scale theorizing” in political and economic geography, Born and Purcell (2006, p. 196) argue that there is nothing inherent about any scale and that “the outcomes produced by a food system are contextual: they depend on the actors and agendas that are empowered by the particular social relations in a given food system”. Drawing on “network theory” in economic geography, they suggest that local places need to forge a context-specific combination of vertical and horizontal networks in promoting food security, where vertical food networks extend beyond the local and horizontal networks link to non-agricultural interests in or near a local area. Jennings et al. (2015) respond to the growing dominance of the local approach to urban food security (as evidenced in the NUA, new food-policy movements, and the CRFS position) by drawing on case studies to test the assumptions underlying the city-region approach in food policy. Their work tests 15 types of food security, economic, and environment-related benefits claimed by the city-region position. While acknowledging that hard evidence from cases is limited, they show that a number of common assumptions are not currently supportable, and that outcomes are highly reliant on context. For example, and prominent in NUA-linked documents, is the argument that urban food security will be improved by linkage between urban centres and producers in their rural hinterlands. Jennings et al. (2015, p. 40), in testing the assumptions

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of “increased livelihood resilience for small-scale rural producers; reduced food prices for urban consumers; and increased resilience of urban food supply and prices against shocks such as natural disasters, climatic factors, financial speculation, or changing oil prices”, found little evidence of benefit, reflecting partly a lack of research, but also the downsides of localized supply chains. They found that these can be subject to considerable volatility, and have increased potential for market inefficiencies, monopolies, and corruption. On the contrary, integration with global value chains can provide small-scale farmers with a buffer against local volatilities. Further, localized food chains may reduce food prices for consumers to some extent, but this often relates to specific types of food (such as fresh fruit and vegetables) and not to the major part of food consumption by food-insecure households provided through globalized food chains (Jennings et al., 2015, p. 41). Recent empirical work in three case-study secondary cities in Africa (Kisumu in Kenya, Kitwe in Zambia, and Epworth in Zimbabwe) supports the above critiques of the CRFS concept, particularly in relation to assumptions of the priority of localism and the outcomes of urban–rural linkages (Battersby and Watson, 2019). In all three cities, the poor households that were interviewed obtained their food from a wide range of sources – from borrowing from neighbours, to informal food sellers, and the larger formal supermarkets. There was little reliance on urban agriculture or self-grown supplies. The dynamics between formal and informal traders were strongly influenced by urban planning and governance factors, and city-specific decisions about where to locate supermarkets and how to deal with informal markets and trader areas. This shows the important role that can be played at the municipal/local-government level in addressing food security – a factor that tends to be obscured by the current focus on the city-region scale. These complexities and linkages have important implications for a city’s food-supply system. In the African case-study cities, supermarket chains were tied to global food-supply systems, but in some cases would also source food from local suppliers. Informal traders could also rely on global food suppliers. For example, in Epworth (Zimbabwe), rice sold by informal traders came from South Africa, Mozambique, China, Vietnam, and Singapore. Zimbabwe imports 95 per cent of its rice, which comes into the country through wholesalers, the government, and small cross-border traders (Tawodzera et al., 2019). There would be little possibility of meeting the demands of Epworth or Harare (Zimbabwe) with rice from its city region. Eggs sold at wholesale markets in Kisumu, Kenya, came from neighbouring Uganda, where agricultural policies allow cheaper production and connecting transport routes favour cheaper access to Kisumu than poor-quality, local, city-region connections. Both examples also show how urban food supplies are influenced by factors at each stage of the value chain, including local governance and planning decisions.

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A reverse value-chain analysis was conducted in the three case-study cities on five basic foods consumed by poor households (Sibanda and Von Blottnitz, 2019). The foods were identified through in-depth interviews and were context-specific. This is the opposite approach to most food-system value-chain analyses, which start with sources of food production and follow them through to points of sale: the farm-to-fork approach (Kaplinsky and Morris, 2000). As might be expected, the outcomes were highly variable. In Kisumu, very little of staple foods came from the region surrounding the city. For example, ugali (maize or sorghum meal), a staple food of most residents, comes from the Rift Valley area of Kenya and from Uganda. Kisumu is located on the shores of Lake Victoria, yet the basic types of fish consumed come from much further away in Kenya and from Uganda. The demand for fish is also met by frozen products from China (Opiyo and Ogindo, 2019). In similar research in northern Ghana, Mangnus and van Westen (2018) assessed a maize value-chain project that aimed to connect local farmers to input and output markets, and to sources of knowledge and technology. The research found that, despite some benefits to food supply and income, the intervention also threatened longer-term urban food security. Farmers became more dependent on maize and less flexible in crop variation. Despite more local maize production there was still insufficient to meet local demand, and imported maize from southern Ghana raised all maize prices. This negatively affected food security and food purchasing. In sum, African case-study research supports the questioning by Jennings et al. (2015) of a number of assumptions underlying the CRFS approach, including the benefits of urban–rural linkages, and the dangers of the “local trap” raised by Born and Purcell (2006). It also supports their call for the recognition of contextual specificity and the need to understand and support the entire food system, which is likely to be more resilient where it draws on a combination of local, wider regional, and international food networks.

5. DOES THE CITY-REGION CONCEPT BELONG IN THE NUA? The purpose of this chapter has been to question the way in which the cityregion concept has come to play a dominant role in the NUA, and how this has shaped the way in which the goal of achieving better urban food security is incorporated into these documents. To do this we have drawn on two literatures: older and more recent debates in regional economic development and planning on the validity of the city region, and the more recent food-policy literature in which the city-region concept has achieved dominance. A questioning of the

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assumptions informing the city-region position in urban food policy has begun to emerge, but it remains on the margins of debate. Taking forward this need for rethinking the city-region concept in urban food-security policy can benefit from drawing on the extensive discussions of the idea in regional economics and planning. These fields have been able to draw on and evaluate the historical track record of the city-region concept in planning theory and practice (in Europe particularly), which is useful given the strong re-emergence of the older Geddesian- and Keynesian-inspired ideas in the NUA and related planning guidelines. These fields can also draw on regional economic analyses to highlight in planning how the growing role of global economic networks in urban development has usurped assumptions of the primacy of territory and state in considering urban and regional development. However, contributions over the last decade or so have achieved an important rebalancing of the network-versus-territory debate, pointing to the ongoing role of the state and governance, and the danger of a “network-centric” approach entirely replacing a “territory-centric” approach. The work by Jessop et al. (2008) has been seminal here, as has the contribution of Born and Purcell (2006). These authors have stressed that a recognition of the role of territory does not represent a return to the post-war interpretation of concepts of hierarchy, territory, and state planning, and that we need to recognize the role of territory (place) and network in shaping urban development. This implies a departure from the planning concept in NUA-related documents of a nested hierarchy of spatial plans from national- to local-government levels. This is an idea that draws on older and European ideas of spatial planning, and pulls in a rather different direction to the concept of cities as hubs, drivers, or nodes of wider development processes. Recent critiques have also stressed the influence of context and history in determining how territory and network play out in different parts of the world. Comments by Roy (2009) that the city region is located in the urban experience of Euro-America, and by Healey (2009) that the concept of city region emerged in Europe in response to particular institutional reconfigurations, remind us of this, and of the danger of assuming in the NUA and planning guidelines that a simplified construct of the city region can be applied in all parts of the world, regardless of local differences. Urban food systems across the world have been changing. Jennings et al. (2015) explain a shift from what they call Food System 1.0, characterized by many actors in the food chain, local and regional production, greater prevalence of small producers, subsistence production and informal actors, and a smaller variety of unprocessed food dominated by a few staples. Food System 2.0 is becoming increasingly dominant: supplies are increasingly national and international; there are fewer actors in the food chain; the urban food-retail sector is more likely to be formalized; there is less reliance on urban and peri-urban

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production; and greater consumption of processed foods. They recognize that Food System 1.0 is still evident in parts of the developing world, and that 1.0 and 2.0 frequently coexist to varying degrees, but that a transition is under way, as evidenced by the expansion of supermarket chains in many cities and towns. However, they argue that the extent of this variation in global or local food-supply networks is influenced by contextual factors: size of urban centre, history, culture, politics, region, and the nature of local linkages. The wealth of publications by more recent regional economists supports this position for many sectors of the urban economy. The implication that it would be possible to impose a city-region economic and institutional model on urban development everywhere, as suggested in certain NUA-linked planning guidelines, is unrealistic. Who, or what kind of institutions, could implement such a dramatic change in the global food economy is a further obvious question. This is not to suggest that global economic networks have “hollowed out” the state, as was implied by earlier regional economists who argued for network over territory. Governments at national and local levels clearly play a major role in food supply through import charges and controls, agricultural pricing and policy, investment in regional infrastructure, health laws, informal-sector controls, and planning and land-use controls. The concept of a “territory–place–scale–network” understanding of urban socio-spatial relations by Jessop et al. (2008, p. 392) has significant value. But attempts in Europe to enrol the state in city-region governance have shown the difficulty and complexity of this strategy, and its reliance on strong, well-resourced and collaborative governance, and welldeveloped civil society (Salet et al., 2015). How possible is the state institutional model envisaged by CRFS proponents when the qualities of governance in many parts of the world do not meet the preconditions suggested by Salet et al. (2015)? None of this implies that economic and political strategies are not required to address the very critical and worsening problem of urban food security and nutrition. It is also fully accepted that such strategies need to simultaneously address related issues of multidimensional poverty, unemployment, environmental sustainability, and resilience. However, conceptualizing these strategies as a CRFS model is misleading and falls into the “local trap” identified by Born and Purcell (2006). The same could be argued for the way the city-region concept has been incorporated as a planning strategy in the NUA and related planning guidelines. While it is not the purpose of this chapter to set out an alternative approach to addressing urban food security and nutrition, we argue that the starting point lies in understanding the entire food system and how aspects of it are interrelated with, and impact on, urban food security; that is, how the food system intersects with urban households and with scales and networks of governance

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and economy. Starting with a food-systems approach implies a shift away from the dominant productionist-only approach to addressing food security. It further implies recognizing the importance of the entire urban food system and how this needs to include local and global, formal and informal, sources of food supply; and acknowledging (a) the multidimensional nature of urban poverty and the role of food and nutrition in this; (b) the important role of context in any urban food-security strategy – particularly the problematic approach of applying Global North solutions in Global South regions; (c) the vital role of informal or small-scale food suppliers for poor households and how local governance can promote and support this sector of the economy, especially through urban planning mechanisms and the reshaping of urban form; and (d) integrating urban food security into local, regional, and national urban policy, and recognizing its multisectoral and multi-scalar nature (Bellagio Communique, 2017).

6. CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that the emergence of the city-region model in the NUA – as both an analytical and a normative framework – is problematic, and will weaken and obscure the good intentions of the NUA to achieve inclusive and sustainable cities, and improved urban food security and nutrition. While some of the principles that underpin the city-region idea (such as sustainability, social justice, and the consideration of cities in relation to their wider hinterlands) are clearly supportable, they have taken on a strongly localized and highly constrained spatial, or territorial, form in the NUA and related guideline documents. The principles have also been adopted into a model that claims universality, despite evidence that the city-region idea emerged in particular (European) parts of the world, and relies, at minimum, on the presence of strong and well-resourced local governance to function. Hence, the theoretical and policy-related insights from many decades of debate on the idea of the city region in planning have been ignored, and the food-policy field has been led into the “local trap”. By disregarding arguments to recognize the relevance to food security in urban areas of the whole food system (particularly the multi-scalar and networked nature of urban food economies), and arguments on the importance of contextual differences, the form of the city region in the NUA disregards current city-region debates and counters the intention to frame cities as hubs, drivers, or nodes that can proactively address wider development issues.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This chapter was previously published in Town Planning Review 90(5) (2019), reproduced with permission of Liverpool University Press.

REFERENCES Allen, J. and A. (2007), ‘Beyond the territorial fix: regional assemblages, politics and power’, Regional Studies, 41(9), 1161–75. Alonso-Fradejas, A., S. Borras, T. Holmes, E. Holt-Giménezc and M. Robbins (2015), ‘Food sovereignty: convergence and contradictions, conditions and challenges’, Third World Quarterly, 36(3), 431–48. Barnett, C. and S. Parnell (2016), ‘Ideas, implementation and indicators: epistemologies of the post2015 urban agenda’, Environment and Urbanization, 28(1), 87–98. Barnett, C. and S. Parnell (2018), ‘Spatial rationalities and the challenges for planners in the New Urban Agenda for Sustainable Development’, in G. Bhan, S. Srinivas and V. Watson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, pp. 25–36. Battersby, J. and V. Watson (2018), ‘Addressing food security in African cities’, Nature (Sustainability), 1(1), 153–55. Battersby, J. and V. Watson (eds) (2019), Urban Food Systems: Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London and New York, Routledge. Bellagio Communique (2017), ‘Harnessing urban food systems for sustainable development and human well-being’, accessed 30 June 2019, at www.africancentreforcities.net/wp-content/ uploads/2017/04/Bellagio-Communique-Harnessing-urban-food-systems-for-sustainabledevelopment-and-human-well-being.pdf. Blay-Palmer, A., G. Santini, M. Dubbeling, H. Renting, M. Taguchi and T. Giordano (2018), ‘Validating the city region food system approach: enacting inclusive, transformational city region food systems’, Sustainability, 10(5), 1–23. Born, B. and M. Purcell (2006), ‘Avoiding the local trap: scale and food systems in planning research’, Journal of Planning Education Research, 26(2), 195–207. Clapp, J. (2014), ‘Financialization, distance and global food politics’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(5), 797–814. Cochrane, A. and K. Ward (2012), ‘Researching the geographies of policy mobility: confronting the methodological challenges’, Environment and Planning A, 44(1), 5–12. Dickinson, R. (1947), City, Region and Regionalism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Geddes, P. (1915), Cities in Evolution, London, Williams and Norgate. Global Nutrition Report (2018), ‘Development Initiatives Poverty Research Ltd’, accessed 11 December 2018 at https:// globalnutritionreport.org/reports/global-nutrition-report-2018/. Hall, P. (1988), Cities of Tomorrow, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell. Harrison, J. and A. Growe (2014), ‘When regions collide: In what sense a new “regional problem”?’, Environment and Planning A, 46(10), 2332–52. Healey, P. (2009), ‘City regions and place development’, Regional Studies, 43(6), 831–43. Healey, P. (2015), ‘Spatial imaginaries, urban dynamics and political community’, Planning Theory and Practice: Interface, 16(2), 266–68. Hedden, W. (1929), How Great Cities Are Fed, New York, NY, US: D.C. Heath and Company. HLPE (High Level Panel of Experts) (2014), ‘Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems’ (Report by the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security), Rome, Italy, HLPE. Jennings, S., J. Cottee, T. Curtis and S. Miller (2015), ‘Food in an urbanised world: the role of city region food systems in resilience and sustainable development’, Food and Agricultural

The planned “city region” in the New Urban Agenda  361 Organization of the United Nations, accessed 29 June 2019 at www.alnap.org/help-library/ food-in-an-urbanised-world-the-role-of-city-region-food-systems-in-resilience-and. Jessop, B., N. Brenner and M. Jones (2008), ‘Theorizing sociospatial relations’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26(3), 389–401. Kantor, P. and J. Nelles (2015), ‘Global city region governance and multicentred development: a North American perspective’, Environment and Planning C, 33(3), 475–95. Kaplinsky, R. and M. Morris (2000), ‘A handbook for value chain research’, University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies, accessed 5 August 2019 at www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_ upload/fisheries/docs/Value_Chain_Handbool.pdf. Kloppenburg, J., J. Hendrickson and G. Stevenson (1996), ‘Coming into the foodshed’, Agriculture and Human Values, 13(3), 23–32. Lang, T. and B. Barling (2012), ‘Food security and food sustainability: reformulating the debate’, Geographical Journal, 178(4), 313–26. Mangnus, E. and A. van Westen (2018), ‘Roaming through the maze of maize in northern Ghana: a systems approach to explore the long-term effects of a food security intervention’, Sustainability, 10(10), 1–19. MUFPP (2015), ‘Milan urban food policy pact’, accessed 29 June 2019 at www.­ milanurbanfoodpolicypact.org/. Mumford, L. (1925), ‘The Fourth Migration’, The Survey, 54(1), 130–33. NUA (2016), New Urban Agenda, Quito: United Nations Habitat III Secretariat. Opiyo, P. and H. Ogindo (2019), ‘The characteristics of the urban food system in Kisumu, Kenya’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems: Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 182–94. Painter, J. (2010), ‘Rethinking territory’, Antipode, 42(5), 1090–118. Parr, J. (2005), ‘Perspectives on the city-region’, Regional Studies, 39(5), 555–66. Pothukuchi, K. and J. Kaufman (2000), ‘The food system: a stranger to the planning field’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 66(2), 113–24. Robbins, M. (2015), ‘Exploring the “localisation” dimension of food sovereignty’, Third World Quarterly, 36(3), 449–68. Roy, A. (2009), ‘The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory’, Regional Studies, 43(6), 819–30. Rubin, N. (2009), ‘The changing appreciation of Patrick Geddes: a case study in planning history’, Planning Perspectives, 24(3), 349–66. Salet, W., R. Vermeulen, F. Savini and S. Dembski (2015), ‘Planning for the new European metropolis: functions, politics, and symbols’, Planning Theory and Practice, Interface, 16(2), 251–75. Scott, A. (2001), ‘Globalization and the rise of city-regions’, European Planning Studies, 9(7), 813–26. Scott, A. (2019), ‘City-regions reconsidered’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51(3), 1–27. Scott, A. and M. Storper (2003), ‘Regions, globalization, development’, Regional Studies, 37(6–7), 579–93. Sibanda, L. and H. von Blottnitz (2019), ‘Food value chains in Kisumu, Kitwe, and Epworth’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems: Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 169–81. Solis, P., J. Vanos and R. Forbis Jr. (2017), ‘The decision-making/accountability spatial incongruence problem for research linking environmental science and policy’, Geographical Review, 107(4), 680–704. Storper, M. (1997), The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy, New York, NY, US: Guilford. Tawodzera, G., E. Chigumira, I. Mbengo and S. Kusangaya (2019), ‘The characteristics of the urban food system in Epworth, Zimbabwe’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems: Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 208–20. Tefft, J., M. Jonasova, R. Adjao and A. Morgan (2017), ‘Food systems for an urbanizing world’, World Bank and Food and Agricultural Organization, accessed 29 June 2019 at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/454961511210702794/pdf/Food-Systems-for-an-UrbanizingWorld.pdf.

362  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South UN-Habitat (2015), ‘International guidelines on urban and territorial planning’, Nairobi, Kenya, accessed 5 August 2019 at https:// unhabitat.org/books/ international-guidelines-on-urban-and-territorial-planning/. UN-Habitat (2017), ‘Implementing the New Urban Agenda by Strengthening Urban– Rural Linkages’, Nairobi, Kenya, accessed 5 August 2019 at www.uncrd.or.jp/content/ documents/7015Urban%20Rural%20Linkages%20for%20implementing%20the%20New%20 Urban%20Agenda_08112017_spreads.pdf. UNHSP (United Nations Human Settlements Programme) (2018), ‘Leading Change: delivering the New Urban Agenda through urban and territorial planning’, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Watson, V. (2016), ‘Locating planning in the New Urban Agenda of the Urban Sustainable Development Goals’, Planning Theory, 15(4), 435–48. World Bank (2009), ‘World Development Report 2009: reshaping economic geography’, Washington, DC, World Bank. Zoomers, A. (2018), ‘Development at the crossroads of capital flows and migration: leaving no one behind?’, Sustainability, 10(12), 4807.

18. Perspectives on urban food-system governance in the Global South Gareth Haysom

1. INTRODUCTION As a concept and practice, urban food-system governance encompasses multiple framings of both the food system and governance (Smit, 2016). In some instances, it entails proactive steps to obtain a particular outcome from the urban food system: the exclusion of fast food outlets or urban agriculture policy, for example. In others, the aim of governance processes is to restructure or reclaim the food system through local food systems, alternative food retail (such as farmers’ markets), and preferential procurement. In yet other cases, urban food-system governance is about city-level governance actors taking back control of the urban food system and implementing pro-poor policies that see food as a public good to enhance food system outcomes. Other types of urban governance approaches (Andrée et al., 2019) include urban food-policy programmes (Hatfield, 2012), urban food strategies (Moragues et al., 2013), food-policy entrepreneurship (MacRae and Donahue, 2013), and food-policy councils (Brouillette, 2012). The question of how cities can engage in and act on their food system needs to consider wider ecological systems, the agricultural production system, food value chains, and non-governmental actors working through the city. As the preamble to a recent book on the role of civil society and social movements in urban governance states: “as global food systems face multiple threats and challenges there is an opportunity for [urban] social movements and civil society to play a more active role in building social justice and ecological sustainability” (Andrée et al., 2019, p. i). Cities are increasingly viewed as entry points to challenge wider food-system-related issues and concerns. There has been a marked increase in urban food-governance studies in recent years, including a focus on urban–rural linkages (Vorley and Lançon, 2016), the city-region food system (CRFS) (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018), the supermarketization process (Reardon et al., 2003), the nutrition transition (Drewnowski and Popkin, 1997; Popkin and Slining, 2013), and the absence of urban food issues within the Sustainable Development Goals (Battersby, 2017; Fukuda-Parr and Orr, 2014). Most urban food-system governance interventions have emerged in the Global North. MacRae and Donahue (2013), for example, describe the pace 363

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and spread of these structures across Canada, and provide useful insights into the different types of urban food-governance arrangements. Central to many of these structures – not only in Canada, but also in the US (Harper et al., 2009) and Europe (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010) – has been a form of governance with different scales of cooperation between government and non-governmental groups. The governance approach applied in most urban food-system governance structures in the North is broadly described as pluralistic (Koc and Bas, 2012). While the weighting between total state control and complete civil-society control may vary (MacRae and Donahue, 2013), pluralistic urban food governance seeks to engage across the state and non-state spectrum. This pluralistic, state/ society governance model has served these nascent urban food governance structures well. It has enabled engagement with the private sector, brought food system and other governance actors and different skills together, and enabled new ways of acting in a governance and policy space. Others have stressed the merits and challenges associated with these types of structures (Harper et al., 2009). They have been seen as essential vehicles to democratise the food system (Winne, 2009), and as a vehicle to liberate urban consumers from increasingly globalized food systems (McMichael, 2005). There is a danger that “Northern” views and arguments about urban food governance are uncritically inserted, or worse, imposed (and adopted) in cities and regions in the Global South. The CRFS approach is a case in point. One of the most prominent representations of the connections between food and cities is embedded in the New Urban Agenda (NUA) of Habitat III (UNHabitat, 2017). Within the NUA, food is seen as part of the city, but the framing is largely embedded in a problematic CRFS discourse (Battersby and Watson, 2019b). As a form of territorial planning, CRFS thinking emerged in the 1990s (Rondinelli, 1990), and is liable to the same criticisms and shortfalls associated with territorial planning (Battersby and Watson, in this volume, 2019b; Painter, 2010; Scott and Storper, 2003). The problems with the CRFS approach have been largely disregarded in current global governance arrangements such as the NUA. CRFS has recently been advocated as a relevant governance approach in a number of Southern cities. Pilot sites applying components of the CRFS approach include Lusaka and Kitwe in Zambia, Dakar in Senegal, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Medellin in Colombia, and Quito in Ecuador (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018; FAO et al., 2018). However, these case studies have simply sought to understand components of the food system in these cities, with a predominant focus on mapping the CRFS and sustainable food-production considerations. The actual governance of food-system processes across the city regions, and the intersections between governance and wider city operations and functions, are less considered. While CRFS is just one element of a wider urban food

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governance approach, it is being championed as an important urban food governance position. Given the vastly different context and scales of development between Northern cities and those in the South, questions need to be asked about the transferability of such pluralistic urban food-system concepts and urban food-governance processes. Are these modes of urban food governance what is actually needed at this time in Southern cities? This chapter questions urban food-governance needs in African cities, and reflects on the governance actions required to respond to wider Southern foodsystem changes, challenges, and observable negative outcomes. This chapter begins with a short review of pluralistic food-system governance (Koc and Bas, 2012), and then discusses how these models are assumed to have relevance to African cities (and Southern cities more broadly). A short reflection on why pluralistic urban food-governance processes may not gain traction in the South is presented, which leads to the question of where African and Southern cities can and perhaps should engage the food system. Evidence from urban foodsystem surveys carried out across Southern Africa is used to pose specific urban food-governance questions. A different approach to African (and Southern) urban food-system governance is proposed. Infrastructure deficits and factors external to the food system provide insights into the challenges faced by urban residents in their attempts to access affordable, safe, and nutritious food. The chapter argues that food in the African city is a public good. If food is indeed a public good, what role should a state (and city government) in the current stages of development play in enabling access to this good? The chapter concludes by arguing that the normalization of food poverty, the absence of agency, the limited political weight of urban areas, coupled with severe resource constraints, mean that citizens are unlikely to mobilize to contest food poverty and insecurity, and that this absence of civic action means that the state is unlikely to see urban food issues as political, requiring a proactive city- or state-level response.

2. FOOD-SYSTEM GOVERNANCE PROCESSES In cities in the Global North, pluralistic governance is often associated with the emergence of processes such as food policy councils (FPCs). In part, these are a reaction to the absence of food-focused governance initiatives driven by city governments (Emanuel, 2013). FPCs seek greater levels of inclusivity and ways to counter inequalities within the food system (Harper et al., 2009). As Andrée et al. (2019, p. 1) suggest, “the past two decades have seen an uprising of movements that challenge industrial food systems by experimenting with a variety of alternative ways of producing, harvesting, foraging, processing, distributing, consuming, and, ultimately, governing food. These movements seek

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to reinforce, build on, and scale-up innovative, place-based initiatives.” Despite the pluralistic nature of such interventions, there is a distinct politics involved. FPCs gather local collaborative knowledge and experience from multiple stakeholders in order to assert change on the structures and functioning of the urban food system (Schiff and Levkoe, 2014). More generally, FPCs adopt collaborative governance approaches, meaning that they often work alongside or in partnership with other actors such as governments and/or the private sector as “co-producers of governance outcomes” (Andrée et al., 2019, p. 3). The types, scale, and focus of local food-system governance processes differ considerably (Haysom, 2015; MacRae and Donahue, 2013). In a review of over 170 local food-governance groups in the US, Haysom (2015) identified 12 core areas of focus, while the dominance of a particular focus varied across governance scales. Actions at the urban scale dominated these governance structures. Some local food-governance structures are established in order to influence government policy, while others seek to influence food-system actors and processes such as industry policies and practices. In a comparison between various food-governance structures in Canada and the United States, Haysom (2015) noted that collaboration with the state is a dominant trend in Canada, while more oppositional and contested governance approaches were evident in the United States. Some have suggested that localized food-governance processes are transferable to Southern contexts (Haysom, 2015). However, recent evidence from African urban food-system studies suggest that this is a flawed assumption. Four main factors constrain the emergence of these governance processes in African cities. First, the objective of many Northern FPCs (and other local food-­governance structures) is to facilitate change in the urban food system. This is a far cry from the needs of poor urban residents in African cities. For the urban poor, the urban food “question” is more about how to access food in an often unaffordable food system (Crush and Frayne, 2010; Frayne et al., 2010). Second, Northern food-system governance is linked to the agency and voice of various stakeholders. The ability to actively engage in democratic governance processes is often absent in African cities. Colonial histories, post-­ independence self-sufficiency programmes, structural adjustment, and neoliberal economic policies have resulted in the normalization of food poverty. Eating is more about access to key staples than the nutritional benefits of food and diversifying local diets. The normalization of food poverty (and poor diets) perhaps explains the absence of protests and civic actions, including “food riots”, in many cities, despite high levels of food insecurity (Battersby and Watson, 2019a; Crush, 2016; Frayne et al., 2010). Third, food-system issues are generally not the direct mandate of local governments, but the domain of national governments. The result is that cities have no fiscal resources to engage these issues, even if there is a desire to

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do so. When cities do engage in urban food questions, the mandate is often narrowly construed as support for urban agriculture programmes (Crush and Riley, 2019, p. 52) or welfare support – the traditional twin-track approach of increasing production and, when access is constrained, social protection (Crush and Frayne, 2010, p. 9). The absence of a direct food mandate, coupled with the lack of civic challenge directed at local government inaction, further limits food-system responses from government. Finally, international development agencies and NGOs remain focused on production and are deeply embedded in a “produce more” approach to food security as opposed to enabling greater and more equitable food access, enhanced utilization, and price and supply stability (Lang and Barling, 2012), which reaffirms the national government scale of action. There is one example of a Southern city successfully adopting a food-system mandate: Belo Horizonte in Brazil (Gerster-Bentaya et al., 2011; Göpel, 2009; Rocha and Lessa, 2009). However, a central consideration in Belo Horizonte was an emphasis on localizing a national mandate pertaining to the realization of the right to food, and wider programmatic activities linked to the country’s Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) strategy (Rocha and Lessa, 2009). Food is therefore seen as a tool to enable development, and to ensure health and well-being. By viewing food as an essential public good, the city has a direct obligation to respond to the identified need. The actual programmes implemented in Belo Horizonte were diverse, but the primary focus was on improving food access (Rocha and Lessa, 2009). A central feature of the Belo Horizonte strategy was the systemic approach to food governance, connecting food programmes to wider urban activities and processes.

3. URBAN FOOD GOVERNANCE AND PLANNING Aligning themselves with the establishment of contextualised local food-­ governance structures, some planning researchers have started to consider the intersection between the urban food system and urban planning, and the role that planners play (or do not play) in the urban food system (Morgan, 2009; Morgan and Sonnino, 2010; Pothukuchi, 2000; Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 1999; Sonnino, 2009). Food-Sensitive Planning and Urban Design (FSPUD) offers further evidence of these emerging links (Donovan et al., 2011). The role of planning as an area of key importance in urban food-system governance has generally been absent from urban food discussions. However, planning plays a far greater role in the functions of an urban food system than is commonly assumed. As Pothukuchi (2000, quoted in Roberts, 2001, p. 3) argues, “inaction in the food planning environment does not have neutral

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consequences, but often generates negative outcomes”. In the Canadian context, this view is reinforced by Roberts (2001, p. 7) who notes: More than with any other of our biological needs, the choices we make about food affect the shape, style, pulse, smell, look, feel, health, economy, street life and infrastructure of our city … One way or another, these choices account for about 20% of all retail sales, 20% of all service jobs, 10% of industrial jobs, 20% of all car trips, 20% of chronic diseases, 25% of fossil fuel energy and air pollution, 40% of all garbage, 80% of sewage … the list goes on. Given the overarching importance of food in urban life, planners need to put food closer to the top of their planning menu.

These perspectives highlight the intersection of food access and the planning and operation of the city. The high levels of food insecurity in many African cities (Battersby and Watson, 2019a; Frayne et al., 2010) are a direct result of disconnect between planning and food-system functioning. The links between food-system functioning (largely seen as a market responsibility in African and other Southern cities), and city- or state-led planning, are seldom considered by urban governance actors and development agencies supporting African governments. For example, recent EU funding calls, targeting key development challenges, call for agriculture and rural-development interventions. However, the urban is absent from these calls, as is urban food security. Similarly, most international donor calls do not include urban food security as a key focus. The research that has been conducted in recent years on urban food security and urban food systems has used food as a lens to engage the broader funded topics of urban poverty or inclusive growth. Food is not viewed in the same way as other essential urban services, such as access to housing, water, and energy.

4. FOOD AS A PUBLIC GOOD Viewing food as a public good invokes notions of a duty of care and statecentred obligations that require action from key state actors, coupled with processes to be embedded in policy and governance. These processes and actions supposedly enable the progressive realization of the right to food. In this chapter a more theoretical approach is suggested, drawing on the concept of the foundational economy (Froud et al., 2018). The notion of the foundational economy helps deepen debate on the roles of the state in enabling access to essential public goods such as food. While the foundational economy perspective has Northern roots, it offers a useful entry point for discussion on urban food governance in Southern cities. The foundational economy has been described as the “mundane goods and services necessary to everyday life: pipe and cable utilities, transport networks,

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supermarket retail and food processing, community-based health, education and welfare” (Leaver and Williams, 2014, p. 220). Much of the existing work on the foundational economy focuses on points of production. However, in the urban context, Hall and Schafran (2017) suggest that the focus needs to shift to the point of consumption. This focus on consumption of so-called “mundane goods” (i.e. goods that are essential to life, but whose production is beyond the scope of the individual or household) is linked to the notion of public goods. As Hall and Schafran (2017, p. 7) argue, “if we prioritize consumption of these life-sustaining systems that most people cannot self-provision, it forces us to rethink some of the important tenets of alternative economic thinking”. They stress further that “a foundational urban systems approach does not develop an a priori idea of a particular politics or scale and apply it to all systems. It starts with the necessary system itself and develops a bespoke political economy and scalar strategy for each system in a geo-historically specific way” (Hall and Schafran, 2017, p. 7). Food, and the systems that deliver it, are an essential service, much like water, energy, health provision, and education. Infrastructure is a key determinant in the quality of access to these essential services. While they can all be privatized and subject to competition and market forces, the high levels of inequality and poverty in most African cities mean that most urban residents, and particularly the poor, will always only have partial access to the food system if the “market” is the intended vehicle to facilitate access. From a governance perspective, what systems – philosophies even – are required if everyone is to have a right to these services, and what does this mean for city governments? Pieterse et al. (2018) suggest that the infrastructure developed in African cities in the next 20 years will define Africa’s future for the next 100 years. This raises important questions about governance and access to public goods. Froud et al. (2018, p. i) describe “the reciprocal relationship of the individual and society and the importance of public works, including the sustaining of urban infrastructure”, and how cities have always been the sites of experimentation for different forms of governance. Are African and other Southern cities potential sites of new forms of governance? Right now, certainly not. However, the extremely high levels of food insecurity raise serious governance questions about the efficacy of current economic models based on a “presupposition in favour of competition and markets through structural reform which aims to make labour markets more flexible and introduces large scale privatization and outsourcing. In all of this, foundational services and the infrastructures that enables them to be provided are subordinate” (Froud et al., 2018, p. 2). Given the high levels of food insecurity in African cities, what can the central or local state do to reduce the unequal outcomes of a market that is not enabling access to essential “mundane goods”? A different view of governance is certainly required. While pluralistic governance approaches may have some

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relevance, they are inappropriate for African cities, specifically given the absence of agency and urgent need for systemic food-system interventions. City and state both need to embrace the wider governance remit of food as a public good. The centrality of mundane goods in urban management, particularly when access to such goods is increasingly unequal, confirms the need to focus on issues of consumption rather than production.

5. LINKING FOOD-SYSTEM OUTCOMES TO FOOD SECURITY This section draws on data from recent research carried out by the Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) in three African cities: Cape Town, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; and Maputo, Mozambique. In addition, findings from another recent African urban survey, the Consuming Urban Poverty (CUP) project (Battersby and Watson, 2019a), are used to reflect on the food-retail component of the urban food system. The HCP research uses the food insecurity metrics developed by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project (Coates, 2013; Coates et al., 2007; Swindale and Bilinsky, 2006), including the Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence Scale (HFIAP) and the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS). Multi-dimensional poverty (MDP) status is measured using the Lived Poverty Index (LPI) (Dulani et al., 2013; Mattes, 2008). 5.1 Household Food Insecurity Until recently, household food insecurity was seen as a predominantly rural phenomenon, with mild (or lower) levels of food insecurity being experienced in urban areas. Following the 2008 African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) research, this view began to shift. AFSUN investigated the state of food insecurity in poor areas of 11 African cities and found that 80 per cent of the households were food insecure (Frayne et al., 2010). The recent HCP survey focuses on the city as a whole. Just under half of Cape Town’s respondents were either severely or moderately food insecure (Crush et al., 2018). Some 60 per cent of Maputo respondents and 58 per cent of Nairobi respondents were also severely or moderately food insecure (Owuor, 2018; Raimundo et al., 2018). These high levels of food insecurity point to deep systemic challenges in the food-provisioning systems of these cities. The LPI provides insights into income poverty and other drivers of poverty that have a direct impact on food security. Figure 18.1 presents the results from the LPI analysis of the three HCP cities (Cape Town, Maputo, and Nairobi). Across the three cities, between 35 per cent and 48 per cent of households

Enough fuel to Electricity in your home? A cash income? cook your food?

Medicine or medical treatment?

Enough clean water for home Enough food to eat? use?

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Nairobi Maputo Cape Town Nairobi Maputo Cape Town Nairobi Maputo Cape Town Nairobi Maputo Cape Town Nairobi Maputo Cape Town Nairobi Maputo Cape Town 0% Never without

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Once or twice/several times without

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Many times/always without

Source: Data from Hungry Cities Partnership.

Figure 18.1  Lived Poverty Index results

reported constrained access to income. Over a third of respondents in Maputo and Nairobi reported constrained access to water, essential in providing safe and nutritious food. Perhaps the most serious aspect of MDP across all the cities was limited access to electricity, at an average of 47 per cent. Electricity is vital in food preparation and preservation since, without it, refrigeration is absent, which affects how households orientate their food purchasing behaviour. For example, processed foods and foods that have been reworked to ensure longer life (such as dried fish or vegetables) would be preferable, both of which increase food costs. Without access to refrigeration, the benefits of bulk discounts, food safety, and food variety are not accrued. In the wider food system,

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if traders and neighbourhood retailers do not have access to electricity, their stocking practices and supply cycles are impacted. Insufficient access to fuel to cook food (over and above electricity) affected over a third of households in Cape Town and Maputo. Nairobi fared slightly better with 22 per cent reporting constrained access. Constrained access to medicine or medical treatment averaged just under a quarter (23 per cent) of respondents in all three cities. High levels of food insecurity are often accompanied by very low levels of dietary diversity as households rely on a limited number of key staples. In all three HCP cities, for example, the average HDDS was below five food groups, where a score of six or less is seen a proxy indicator of under-nutrition. Calls for nutrition education, part of the more conventional nutrition-intervention responses (Oldewage-Theron et al., 2006), disregard the wider food system (Hunter Adams et al., 2019). These dietary challenges are about far more than bad food choices. 5.2 Connecting Food Access to Urban Infrastructure CUP research has shown how key governance actors see the link between urban food access and infrastructure in terms of supermarkets and malls (Battersby and Watson, 2019a; Teppo and Houssay-Holzschuch, 2013). This formal market focus dominates planning and policy positions. Food-system perspectives considering the needs of poor households are absent. The urban poor rely heavily on the informal food-retail environment and approved, as well as unapproved, municipal market spaces. This reality is ignored by most policy-makers (Battersby and Muwowo, 2019; Battersby and Watson, 2019a; Hayombe et al., 2019), leading to draconian responses, often seeking to erase these economic actors from the urban food system (Skinner and Haysom, 2016; Skinner and Rogan, 2019). The lack of access to robust and basic infrastructure means that food choices are determined by what the infrastructure can service. Given the rise in noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and current debates on their relationship to food-system challenges (Thow et al., 2018), there are real concerns about the state’s capacity, both in terms of facilities and resources, to respond to the increasing health-related challenges. The solution is not as simple as suggesting that improving infrastructure would improve food-security outcomes. However, it does play an essential role in food-security outcomes. Infrastructure limitations determine both the types of food sold and the strategies adopted by food retailers in their stocking practices (which includes all food retailers, from street vendors to market operators, to wholesalers, to supermarkets). In all of the HCP and CUP studies there is a clear trend in how and where food is accessed. In wealthier households, most food is accessed via supermarkets on

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a weekly or monthly basis (Battersby and Watson, 2019a; Crush et al., 2018; Opiyo et al., 2019; Raimudo et al., 2018; Tawodzera and Chigumira, 2019). Supermarkets are only accessed by the poor to purchase staples in bulk on a monthly basis (Crush et al., 2018). For the poor the informal food-retail sector was the primary source of their food. Food from the informal sector and small neighbourhood shops is purchased by most households at least five times per week (Crush et al., 2018). The informal food-retail sector is effectively being used as the “pantry” of the poor, and the street has become the kitchen. The formal food sector, and more specifically the manner in which the large, consolidated and vertically integrated food industry, referred to as “big food” by Monteiro and Cannon (2012), capitalizes on these infrastructure limitations through a product offering that is highly processed, but has a long shelf life. The role that the proliferation of these foods plays in changing diets in poorer areas of cities needs to be better understood. However, diets are changing rapidly, particularly in areas where access to infrastructure is limited. Figure 18.2 shows the ten key foodstuffs sold by vendors in the three CUP cities: Kisumu, Kenya; Epworth, Zimbabwe; and Kitwe, Zambia. The preference for sugared drinks, non-perishable snacks such as biscuits and crisps, and processed and refined foods is clearly evident. Foods that are considered healthier, specifically fruits and vegetables, are more expensive and their cost increases faster than for other foods. The main business cost, other than stock purchase, is transportation. High transport costs are directly linked to the need to frequently restock, largely as a result of poor infrastructure. Furthermore, spending on waste removal and security (despite paying authorities a licence fee or for a permit), highlights the limited services being provided by cities to retailers. The vendors build these additional costs into the price of food sold, which has a direct bearing on the food-security outcomes of poor urban residents.

6. CONCLUSION Urban food governance in Africa, and the Global South more generally, needs to reflect on what actions are required to respond to wider food-system changes, challenges, and negative outcomes. Northern-style pluralistic urban foodgovernance structures are inappropriate and would not result in the necessary change in urban food-system outcomes. In Africa, particular attention needs to be given to the relationship between cities and the food system. The key urban food-governance question in African cities is better understanding the role that appropriate infrastructures could play in delivering positive urban food-system outcomes.

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Snacks, chips and crisps Sweets Sugared drinks Vegetables Sugar Eggs Fruits Oils and fats Tea and coffee Bread 0 Kitwe (n=375)

20

40

60

Kisumu (n=551)

80

100

120

140

160

Epworth (n=276)

Source: Data from Consuming Urban Poverty Project.

Figure 18.2 Top food items stocked in CUP cities

The emergence of pluralistic governance structures in the North has been driven, in part, by the absence of city-driven food-focused governance initiatives (Emanuel, 2013). Locally or contextually focused urban food-governance structures, in which pluralistic governance predominates, seek to enact greater levels of inclusivity and ways to counter inequalities within the food system (Harper et al., 2009). The mode of operating in these pluralistic structures sees actors working from both outside and inside the system, some as critics (BlayPalmer et al., 2016) and others in more collaborative ways (MacRae and Donahue, 2013). However, the spaces for engagement and pluralistic food governance in Northern cities have emerged out of a specific set of processes and

Perspectives on urban food-system governance in the Global South  375

conditions. As Shurman and Munroe (2009, p. 158) suggest, “when environmental conditions are favourable, movements are better able to mobilize and more likely to achieve their goals than when those conditions are inhospitable”. In African cities, the conditions for the emergence of such governance structures are inhospitable. The ability of actors to emulate the Northern example is also highly constrained, given the politics at play and the everyday lived experiences of poverty and food insecurity, in many urban centres. This raises the question of what urban food governance could or should look like in African (and Southern) cities. Smit (2016, p. 84) stresses that “the governance of urban food systems in Africa is complex, with a range of governance actors with competing agendas”, and that “we need to better understand existing urban governance processes and the competing interests of urban governance actors in order to be able to collaboratively design interventions to improve urban food security in Africa” (Smit, 2016, p. 85). These sentiments reflect the complexity and challenges faced by African cities. African cities are at a particular development juncture as the continent is increasingly urban and expected to become predominantly urban in the next 15 years (UN-DESA, 2018). As Pieterse et al. (2018, p. 151) succinctly state: “Africa is undergoing an internal city-centric reworking that mirrors the urban transformations of the continent and the world. This scalar recalibration assumes greater urgency for Africa because the urban transition of the next few decades will be formative of future developmental opportunities on the continent.” Africa’s future rests in its cities and how these are designed, planned, and governed. Significant investment in African infrastructure is poised to commence. Using food as a lens to understand urban infrastructure provides a window into an alternative urban food-governance agenda. Here, the notion of food being a public good is instructive in posing new questions about urban governance and infrastructure. What would the governance regime resemble if food is considered a mundane good and the concept of the foundational economy is shifted from the point of production to consumption? Given the significant impact of food on most urban functions (ranging from greenhouse gas to wastes, from road infrastructure to wages), it is an essential area of attention that would require a very different social contract between state and society. African city managers and politicians have a mandate to recraft the governance regimes and operational activities of their cities. In most African cities, however, planning regimes are effectively hangovers of colonial planning and governance (Watson, 2014). Pothukuchi’s (2000) warning that food-system governance and planning is not benign, and can have negative outcomes, is all too evident in African and Southern cities. One clear example of this is the perpetuation of punitive approaches to informality (Skinner and Haysom 2016). Given the diversity of African cities, no universal urban food-governance approach would be effective. Instead, what is required is a contextually relevant

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response to the specificities of each city’s urban food-governance needs and challenges. Urban food-system governance in Africa should not be concerned with establishing urban ministries of food or establishing a further layer of contested and politically fraught governance through pluralistic approaches. What is required is for food to become central to all facets of city governance in Africa’s urban transition. As a mundane good consumed in cities, food access cannot be left to the vagaries of market forces and globalized food systems. These systems are increasingly dictating not only the look and feel of many African cities, but also the health outcomes of many urban residents. An alternative governance paradigm needs to adopt a more people-centred, pro-poor approach to city planning and infrastructure that sees food as a public good and enacts planning and governance processes to ensure access to this good. This paradigm is about food, but also moves far beyond it.

REFERENCES Andrée, P., J. Clark, C. Levkoe and K. Lowitt (eds) (2019), Civil Society and Social Movements in Food System Governance, London, UK: Routledge. Battersby, J. (2017), ‘MDGs to SDGs − new goals, same gaps: the continued absence of urban food security in the post-2015 global development agenda’, African Geographical Review, 36(1), 115–29. Battersby, J. and F. Muwowo (2019), ‘Planning and governance of food systems in Kitwe, Zambia: a case study of food retail space’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 128–41. Battersby, J. and V. Watson (eds) (2019a), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK: Routledge. Battersby, J. and V. Watson (2019b), ‘The planned “city-region” in the New Urban Agenda: an appropriate framing for urban food security?’, Town Planning Review, 90(5), 497–518. Blay-Palmer, A., I. Knezevic, P. Andrée, P. Ballamingie, K. Landman, P. Mount, C. Nelson, E. Nelson, L. Stahlbrand, M. Stroink and K. Skinner (2016), ‘Future food system research priorities: a sustainable food systems perspective from Ontario, Canada’, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 3(4), 227–34. Blay-Palmer, A., G. Santini, M. Dubbeling, H. Renting, M. Taguchi and T. Giordano (2018), ‘Validating the city region food system approach: enacting inclusive, transformational city region food systems’, Sustainability, 10(5), 1–23. Brouillette, S. (2012), ‘Food policy councils: models from North America’, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Coates, J. (2013), ‘Build it back better: deconstructing food security for improved measurement and action’, Global Food Security, 2(3), 188–94. Coates, J., A. Swindale and P. Bilinsky (2007), Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) for Measurement of Food Access: Indicator Guide, Washington, DC, US: FANTA. Crush, J. (2016), ‘Hungry cities of the Global South’, HCP Discussion Paper No. 1, Cape Town, South Africa and Waterloo, Canada. Crush, J. and B. Frayne (2010), The Invisible Crisis: Urban Food Security in Southern Africa, Urban Food Security Series No. 1, Cape Town, South Africa: African Food Security Network (AFSUN).

Perspectives on urban food-system governance in the Global South  377 Crush, J. and L. Riley (2019), ‘Rural bias and urban food security’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 42–55. Crush, J., M. Caesar and G. Haysom (2018), ‘The state of household food security in Cape Town, South Africa’, HCP Report No. 12, Cape Town, South Africa and Waterloo, Canada. Donovan, J., K. Larsen and J. McWhinnie (2011), ‘Food-sensitive planning and urban design: a conceptual framework for achieving a sustainable and healthy food system’, Melbourne, Australia, National Heart Foundation of Australia. Drewnowski, A. and B. Popkin (1997), ‘The nutrition transition: new trends in the global diet’, Nutrition Reviews, 55(1), 31–43. Dulani, B., R. Mattes and C. Logan (2013), ‘After a decade of growth in Africa, little change in poverty at the grassroots’, The Afrobarometer, 31 October. Emanuel, B. (2013), Personal communication, Toronto Food Policy Council Offices, Toronto, Canada, 10 May. FAO, RUAF and WLU (2018), ‘City region food system toolkit assessing and planning sustainable city region food systems’, Food for the Cities Programme, RUAF−City Food Tools Project, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy. Frayne, B., W. Pendleton, J. Crush, B. Acquah, J. Battersby-Lennard, E. Bras, A. Chiweza, T. Dlamini, R. Fincham, F. Kroll, C. Leduka, A. Mosha, C. Mulenga, P. Mvula, A. Pomuti, I. Raimundo, M. Rudolph, S. Ruysenaa, N. Simelane D. Tevera, M. Tsoka, G. Tawodzera and L. Zanamwe (2010), ‘The state of urban food insecurity in Southern Africa’, Urban Food Security Series No. 2, African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), Cape Town, South Africa. Froud, J., M. Moran, S. Johal, A. Salento and K. Williams (2018), Foundational Economy: The Infrastructure of Everyday Life, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Fukuda-Parr, S. and A. Orr (2014), ‘The MDG hunger target and the competing frameworks of food security’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 15(1), 147–60. Gerster-Bentaya, M., C. Rocha and A. Barth (2011), ‘The food security system of Belo Horizonte: a model for Cape Town?’, Results from a fact-finding mission, 8 June. Göpel, M. (2009), ‘Celebrating the Belo Horizonte food security programme’, Hamburg, Germany, World Future Council. Hall, S. and A. Schafran (2017), ‘From foundational economics and the grounded city to foundational urban systems’, Foundational Economy Working Paper No. 3, Leeds, UK, Faculty of the Environment, University of Leeds. Harper, A., A. Shattuck, E. Holt-Gimenez, A. Alkon and F. Lambrick (2009), Food Policy Councils: Lessons Learnt, Oakland, US: Food First. Hatfield, M. (2012), ‘City policy and programs: lessons harvested from an emerging field’, Portland, US: Oregon Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Hayombe, P., F. Owino and F. Awuor (2019), ‘Planning and governance of food systems in Kisumu City’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 116–27. Haysom, G. (2015), ‘Food and the city: urban scale food system governance’, Urban Forum, 26(3), 263–81. Hunter Adams, J., J. Battersby and T. Oni (2019), ‘Food insecurity in relation to obesity in periurban Cape Town, South Africa: implications for diet-related non-communicable disease’, Appetite, 137(1), 244–9. Koc, M. and J. Bas (2012), ‘Canada’s action plan for food security: the interactions between civil society and the state to advance food security in Canada’, in R. MacRae and E. Abergel (eds), Health and Sustainability in the Canadian Food System: Advocacy and Opportunity for Civil Society, Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, pp. 173–203. Lang, T. and D. Barling (2012), ‘Food security and food sustainability: reformulating the debate’, Geographical Journal, 178(4), 313–26. Leaver, A. and K. Williams (2014), ‘After the 30‐year experiment: the future of the foundational economy’, Juncture, 21(3), 215–21. MacRae, R. and K. Donahue (2013), ‘Municipal Food Policy Entrepreneurs’, Toronto, Canada, Toronto Food Policy Council.

378  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Mattes, R. (2008), ‘The material and political basis of lived poverty in Africa: insights from the Afrobarometer’, Working Paper No. 98, IDASA, Cape Town, South Africa. McMichael, P. (2005), ‘Global development and the corporate food regime’, in F. Buttel and P. McMichael (eds), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development, Oxford, UK: Elsevier Press. Monteiro, C. and G. Cannon (2012), ‘The impact of transnational “big food” companies on the South: a view from Brazil’, PLOS Medicine, 9(7), 1–5. Moragues, A., K. Morgan, H. Moschitz, I. Neimane, H. Nilsson, M. Pinto, H. Rohracher, R. Ruiz, M. Thuswald, T. Tisenkopfs and J. Halliday (2013), ‘Urban food strategies: the rough guide to sustainable food systems’, Foodlinks. Morgan, K. (2009), ‘Feeding the city: the challenge of urban food planning’, International Planning Studies, 14(4), 341–8. Morgan, K. and R. Sonnino (2010), ‘The urban foodscape: world cities and the new food equation’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3(1), 209–24. Oldewage-Therona, K., E. Dicks and C. Napier (2006), ‘Poverty, household food insecurity and nutrition: coping strategies in an informal settlement in the Vaal Triangle, South Africa’, Public Health, 120(1), 795–804. Opiyo, P. and H. Ogindo (2019), ‘The characteristics of the urban food system in Kisumu, Kenya’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 182–94. Owuor, S. (2018), ‘The state of household food security in Nairobi, Kenya’, HCP Report No. 11, Cape Town, South Africa and Waterloo, Canada, Hungry Cities Partnership. Painter, J. (2010), ‘Rethinking territory’, Antipode, 42(5), 1090–118. Pieterse, E., S. Parnell and G. Haysom (2018), ‘African dreams: locating urban infrastructure in the 2030 sustainable developmental agenda’, Area Development and Policy, 3(2), 149–69. Popkin, B. and M. Slining (2013), ‘New dynamics in global obesity facing low- and middle-income countries’, Obesity Reviews, 14(2), 11–20. Pothukuchi, K. (2000), ‘Community food mapping’, Address to Ontario Public Health Association Workshop, Toronto, 11 September. Pothukuchi, K. and J. Kaufman (1999), ‘Placing the food system on the urban agenda: the role of municipal institutions in food systems planning’, Agriculture and Human Values, 16(2), 213–24. Raimundo, I., C. McCordic and A. Chikanda (2018), ‘The state of household food security in Maputo, Mozambique’, HCP Report No. 10, Cape Town South Africa and Waterloo, Canada, Hungry Cities Partnership. Reardon, T., C. Timmer, C. Barrett and J. Berdegue (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 85(5), 1140–46. Roberts, W. (2001), ‘The way to a city’s heart is through its stomach: putting food security on the urban planning menu’, Crackerbarrel Philosophy Series, Toronto Food Policy Council, Toronto. Rocha, C. and I. Lessa (2009), ‘Urban governance for food security: the alternative food system in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’, International Planning Studies, 14(4), 389–400. Rondinelli, D. (1990), ‘Decentralization, territorial power and the state: a critical response’, Development and Change, 21(3), 491–500. Schiff, R. and C. Levkoe (2014), ‘From disparate action to collective mobilization: collective action frames and the Canadian food movement’, in L. Leonard and S. Kedzior (eds), Occupy the Earth: Global Environmental Movements, Bingley, UK: Emerald, pp. 225–53. Skinner, C. and G. Haysom (2016), ‘The informal sector’s role in food security: a missing link in policy debates?’, HCP Discussion Paper No. 6, Cape Town, South Africa and Waterloo, Canada, Hungry Cities Partnership. Skinner, C. and M. Rogan (2019), ‘South Africa’s informal sector creates jobs, but shouldn’t be romanticised’, The Conversation, 12 September. Scott, A. and M. Storper (2003), ‘Regions, globalization, development’, Regional Studies, 37(6–7), 579–93. Shurman, R. and W. Munroe (2009), ‘Targeting capital: a cultural economy approach to understanding the efficacy of two anti-genetic engineering movements’, American Journal of Sociology, 115(1), 155–202.

Perspectives on urban food-system governance in the Global South  379 Smit, W. (2016), ‘Urban governance and urban food systems in Africa: examining the linkages’, Cities, 58(1), 80–86. Sonnino, R. (2009), ‘Feeding the city: towards a new research and planning agenda’, International Planning Studies, 14(4), 425–35. Swindale, A. and P. Bilinsky (2006), ‘Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) for measurement of household food access: indicator guide’, Washington, DC, US, FANTA. Tawodzera, G. and E. Chigumira (2019), ‘Food poverty in Epworth, Zimbabwe’, in J. Battersby and V. Watson (eds), Urban Food Systems Governance and Poverty in African Cities, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 249–60. Teppo, A. and M. Houssay-Holzschuch (2013), ‘Gugulethu TM: revolution for neoliberalism in a South African Township’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 47(1), 51–74. Thow, A., S. Greenberg, M. Hara, S. Friel and D. Sanders (2018), ‘Improving policy coherence for food security and nutrition in South Africa: a qualitative policy analysis’, Food Security, 10(4), 1105–30. UN-DESA (2018), ‘World Urbanization Prospects’, New York, NY, US, UN-DESA. UN-Habitat (2017), ‘New Urban Agenda’, United Nations, 23 December. Vorley, B. and F. Lançon (2016), Urban Food Consumption, Urbanisation and Rural Transformation: The Trade Dimensions, London, UK: IIED. Watson, V. (2014), ‘African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares?’, Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 215–31. Winne, M. (2009), ‘Local and state food policies: what can we do?’, in A. Harper, A. Shattuck, E. Holt-Gimenez, A. Alkon and F. Lambrick (eds), Food Policy Councils: Lessons Learnt, Oakland, US: Food First, pp. 13–16.

19. Urban food systems and diets, nutrition, and health of the poor: Challenges, opportunities, and research gaps Marie T. Ruel, Jef L. Leroy, Olivier Ecker, Manuel Hernandez, Danielle Resnick and James Thurlow

1. INTRODUCTION Recent decades have seen exponential growth of urban populations around the world. More than half the world’s population live in cities and, by 2050, a projected 2.5 billion additional people will live in urban areas (UNDESA, 2018). Africa and Asia are expected to account for 90 per cent of this growth. Rapid urbanization, together with other global developments such as population growth, migration, globalization, climate change, and income growth, is creating unprecedented challenges for food systems in low- and middle-­income countries (LMICs) (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c). As cities expand, they struggle to ensure access to affordable and healthy diets, especially for the urban poor. Urban centres are increasingly home to problems of undernutrition (a problem long associated with rural areas), alongside rapid increases in overweight, obesity, and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) (Paciorek et al., 2013). Unhealthy diets are at the root of all forms of malnutrition. The diets of urban dwellers are rapidly shifting from traditional diets rich in coarse grains and pulses, to diets high in refined sugar, salt, saturated fats, animal-sourced foods, refined grains, and processed and ultra-processed foods (Imamura et al., 2015). These dietary changes, in turn, may increase the risks of micronutrient deficiencies and of overweight, obesity, and diet-related NCDs (Popkin et al., 2013). This “nutrition transition” is believed to be unfolding faster in urban areas than in rural areas due to higher incomes and greater food availability, the rapid expansion of modern food retail systems, and the abundance of convenient and cheap ultra-processed, energy-dense, and nutrient-poor foods (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c; Monteiro et al., 2018). The negative health effects of this nutrition transition are compounded by the limited physical activity of urban dwellers, who tend to have more sedentary jobs and use more motorized transportation than their rural counterparts (Hawkes et al., 2017). 380

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The diets of the urban poor are shaped by various individual and household factors, as well as the food environments that influence their food purchasing and consumption choices, and the broader urban, national, and global food systems they rely on. This chapter first lays out a conceptual framework for assessing the potential influences of these broad categories of drivers on the diets, nutrition, and health of urban dwellers. The framework is then used to review the current state of knowledge and evidence on the contribution of the different drivers to urban diets, and how these may affect the nutrition and health of the urban poor. The chapter concludes with a set of key research priorities for informing future action on transforming urban food systems towards healthier diets and better nutrition and health for the urban poor.

2. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Our conceptual framework is inspired by the framework developed by the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition and illustrates how food systems relate to consumers and their diets through the food environment (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2014). The framework depicts the food system using four broad categories of processes: agricultural production; food storage, transportation, and trade; food processing and transformation; and food retailing through formal markets (e.g. supermarkets) and informal trade (e.g. wet markets, informal vendors) (Figure 19.1). As an integral part of the food system, consumers shape these broad processes through their demand for foods and diets with specific characteristics, FOOD SYSTEM AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION FOOD STORAGE, TRANSPORTATION, AND TRADE FOOD PROCESSING AND TRANSFORMATION FOOD RETAILING

ENVIRONM EN OD T NSUMER FO CO

HEALTHY DIETS

Figure 19.1  Food systems, food environment, consumer choices, and diets

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including quality, diversity, and other attributes such as taste, affordability, and convenience. The food environment at the centre of the figure is the interface that mediates between household and individual food acquisition and consumption, and the wider food system (Turner et al., 2017). Swinburn et al. further define food environments as “the collective physical, economic, policy, and sociocultural surroundings, opportunities and conditions that influence people’s food and beverage choices and nutritional status” (2013a, p. 14). At the consumer and household levels, the main drivers of food choices include preferences (desirability), purchasing power (affordability given one’s income), health and nutrition knowledge and awareness, time (and related need for convenience), and physical accessibility (distance, transport). These are expected to differ across individuals of different ages and sex, and across households with different demographic (age and sex composition, household size) and socioeconomic characteristics, location of residence, and city size. The characteristics of the food environment that influence food choices include physical availability, quality and taste, and promotion/marketing of food; economic aspects (prices); policies such as rules and regulations on marketing and food labelling; and sociocultural norms and beliefs.

3. URBAN DIETS: KEY DRIVERS AND CONSEQUENCES FOR NUTRITION AND HEALTH OF THE URBAN POOR Diets in urban areas are rapidly modernizing as a result of rising incomes, greater availability of an abundant food supply, time constraints related to employment outside the home, and the variety of formal and informal retail and restaurant outlets available. A positive aspect of the nutrition transition in urban areas is the greater diversity of foods compared to rural areas, including a large selection of nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced foods. The urban food environment, however, also stimulates a shift towards unhealthy diets high in cheap sources of energy, added sugars, salt, saturated fat, refined grains, and ultra-processed foods (Lee et al., 2013; Monteiro et al., 2018). This nutrition transition is one of the main drivers of the “double-burden of malnutrition”, which is characterized by the coexistence of undernutrition (e.g. underweight, stunting, or micronutrient deficiencies) with overweight, obesity, and diet-related NCDs. Childhood stunting, a chronic form of undernutrition, has declined over the last decades in rural areas, whereas the urban numbers have remained stable. Currently, it is estimated that one in every three stunted children lives in a city (Paciorek et al., 2013). Deficiencies of essential micronutrients such as iron, zinc, iodine, and vitamin A are estimated to affect 2

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billion people globally, and women and young children disproportionately, but available data do not provide information by urban and rural location (Development Initiatives, 2018). It is likely, however, that the urban poor, who often lack access to healthy diets, are equally affected by micronutrient deficiencies as rural populations. Urban areas have also seen accelerated rates of increase in adult overweight and obesity in the past few decades (Black et al., 2013; Neuman et al., 2013), and related rises in diet-related NCD risks. Diet-related NCDs are now the leading cause of premature death globally, responsible for 41 million deaths (71 per cent of all deaths) in 2016 (WHO, 2018). Unhealthy diets in urban areas are therefore among the root causes of the double-burden of malnutrition and of excess mortality from diet-related NCDs (Popkin et al., 2020). Poor-quality diets are the result of a combination of individual- and household-level drivers, and of the dynamics of the food environment and food systems poor urban dwellers rely on. Evidence of the role of these broad categories of drivers in influencing urban diets in LMICs is summarized below. 3.1 Individual and Household Factors Shaping Diets and Nutrition in Urban Areas Urban diets are shaped by several individual and household characteristics associated with distinctive features of life and livelihoods in urban areas. Most urban dwellers, for example, have limited access to land for own food production and must therefore purchase most of their food. This, in turn, means that their food consumption relies heavily on income and the affordability of food. An 18-country study showed that around 40 per cent of a broadly representative sample of urban dwellers in low-income countries could not afford the recommended consumption of three servings of vegetables and two servings of fruits per day (Miller et al., 2016). Stable employment is important to ensure a regular flow of income for purchasing food. Yet, the livelihoods of the urban poor often depend on informal-sector employment, which is characterized by low wages, long working hours, and job insecurity (Charmes, 2012). Women are an important part of the workforce in urban areas, and a large share of poor women work in environments such as markets, streets, or factories, which are not suitable for bringing their young children with them (Ruel et al., 2017). Alternative childcare options may be limited in urban areas, given that extended family networks tend to be weaker than those in rural areas. Maternal work outside the home may therefore negatively affect children’s nutrition, health, and well-being (Leroy et al., 2012). In addition to the challenge of securing a stable source of income, the urban poor generally have less access to social safety nets than their rural counterparts. Evidence from 100 countries found that only 17 per cent of urban households in the poorest income quintile were covered by some type of safety net

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programme, compared with 23 per cent among the rural poor. The gap was much larger (around 24 percentage points) in middle-income countries (Gentilini, 2015). Informal safety nets, made up of trusted family members, neighbours, and friends, might also be weaker in urban areas (Ruel et al., 2017), leaving the urban poor more vulnerable to income and food-price shocks. Other individual and household drivers of food choices in urban areas include food preferences, time availability, and the related need for convenience, access to refrigeration, and cooking equipment, food and nutrition knowledge and health awareness, physical access to food, and social support (Hawkes, 2015). Changes in household structure associated with urbanization also affect food choices and diets. For example, recent migrants or urban slum dwellers may live in single-person households or with extended families in crowded rooms, and lack cooking space and facilities, refrigeration, and clean water and sanitation facilities (Dodman et al., 2013). These precarious living conditions, combined with time constraints, may lead urban dwellers toward the convenience of processed and ultra-processed, ready-to-eat snacks and foods, street foods, and prepared meals obtained at fast-food or informal restaurants. These options increase the risks of overconsumption of energy, added sugar, salt, and saturated fat, and lead to overweight, obesity, and increased risk of diet-related NCDs (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c; Monteiro et al., 2013). Other characteristics of city living also shape the nutritional status and health of poor urban dwellers. For example, although health care, clean water, proper sanitation, and waste removal services are generally more available in urban than in rural areas, large socioeconomic disparities mean that the urban poor and slum dwellers often have only limited access to these basic services (Checkley et al., 2016; Fink et al., 2014; Say and Raine, 2007). Urban dwellers also tend to be less physically active than their rural counterparts: jobs are more sedentary, domestic chores may require less physical activity, and transportation is often motorized (Hawkes et al., 2017). Limited physical activity, combined with the change in diets described above, put the urban population at increased risk of overweight, obesity, and diet-related NCDs. Limited access to, and use of, health services also means that these problems are more likely to remain undiagnosed and untreated among the poor (Bhojani et al., 2013), leading to higher health and mortality risks and expenses. The importance of these factors is well recognized, but little is known about their individual roles in determining the food consumption, dietary intake, nutrition, and health of poor urban dwellers (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c).

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3.2 The Urban Food Environment Urban diets are largely influenced by the local food environment: the interface between the food system and the consumer. The food environment determines the quality of dietary choices available to consumers, and is a key driver of both household food consumption and individual dietary intake (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017a; Mhurchu et al., 2013; Turner et al., 2017). The food environment includes individual and household factors (described above), and external (community) factors, which include food availability, prices, nutritional, and other quality aspects such as taste of available foods, diversity, properties of vendors and retail stores, and food marketing, promotion, and labelling (Mhurchu et al., 2013; Turner et al., 2017). The food environment in LMICs, most notably in the urban areas of these countries, is rapidly changing. Data and evidence on the characteristics of the food environment, how people interact with it, and the extent to which it drives household and individual food choices is building, but most of this information comes from high-income countries (Herforth and Ahmed, 2015; Mhurchu et al., 2013; Turner et al., 2017). Urban dwellers generally have access to a more diverse food supply than individuals in rural areas, but as incomes rise, the consumption of healthy foods (e.g. low-fat animal-sourced foods, dairy, fruits, and vegetables) and less healthy foods (e.g. ultra-processed foods) increases (Imamura et al., 2015). An important driver of these changes is the aggressive marketing of ultra-processed foods that accompanies the food retail sector’s rapid modernization. Companies selling snacks, fast foods, and sugary drinks invest heavily in making their products widely available and attractive, and in marketing them to influence consumer preferences. Because urban dwellers have better access to media and a wide range of retail stores, marketing may have a greater effect on their behaviour than would be the case for rural consumers (Hawkes et al., 2017). The role of supermarkets The food retail sector’s modernization, which is characterized by the accelerated spread of supermarkets in LMICs (Reardon et al., 2003), started in the early 1990s in South America, East Asia (excluding China), and South Africa, and now spans the entire world. By the mid-2000s, supermarkets in Southeast Asia and Central America, as well as in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, controlled 30–50 per cent of the food market. A supermarket revolution in Africa (beyond South Africa) is in its nascent stages (Reardon and Minten, 2011). Several studies have assessed the associations between changes in the food retail system due to the increased presence of supermarkets and changes in urban food consumption and dietary patterns in developed countries (Drewnowski et al., 2012). Supermarkets have adopted modern procurement systems, such

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as buying in bulk to lower costs and improve efficiency, and imposed private standards to raise quality (Reardon and Timmer, 2007). These factors, along with the diverse range of foods that supermarkets provide, can have important implications for the health and nutrition of the urban population, particularly the poor. Hawkes (2008) argues, for example, that supermarkets can make a more diverse diet accessible to more people, but can also reduce the ability of poor populations to purchase high‐quality, nutrient-rich foods, which are often more expensive than processed foods. Popkin (2014) notes that the processed and prepackaged foods often sold in supermarkets are rapidly reaching food-insecure and overweight populations, which can pose major challenges to their health. There is also a widespread perception globally that the rapid penetration of supermarkets, which is closely linked to greater consumption of processed foods, may contribute to overweight and obesity among consumers (Qaim, 2017). Research on the effects of supermarket shopping on diets and health in LMICs, however, is limited to a handful of case studies, and current evidence is mixed. Findings from Madagascar suggest that supermarkets sell higherquality foods than traditional markets, but charge higher prices, even after controlling for quality (Minten and Reardon, 2008). In Tunisia, consumers who use supermarkets as the first shopping place have been found to have slightly better diet quality relative to those who use other retail stores (Tessier et al., 2008). In Tunis, supermarket shopping was positively associated with dietary diversity and adequacy (Tessier et al., 2008). Supermarket purchases in Kenya and Guatemala, however, have been associated with higher purchases of ultraprocessed foods, with higher body mass index (BMI) among consumers, and (in Kenya) higher per capita energy availability and increased levels of fasting blood glucose (Asfaw, 2008; Demmler et al., 2017; Demmler et al., 2018; Kimenju et al., 2015; Rischke et al., 2015). The role of the informal food sector The arrival of supermarkets in LMICs has not replaced traditional markets. Many of the poor continue to buy from local shops or markets (Cohen and Garrett, 2010). In Vietnam, for instance, government interventions to actively discourage wet market retailing, and to promote the development of modern supermarkets, have failed to diminish the position of wet markets (which are less regulated and less hygienic than supermarkets) as the primary source of fresh produce (Wertheim-Heck, 2015). In Africa, the informal food retail sector is a major supplier of domestically produced agricultural goods. Notwithstanding the gradual supermarket expansion in the region, urban residents continue to depend heavily on informal markets and street vendors for daily purchases, and only periodically use supermarkets for bulk purchases of staples (Battersby and Crush, 2015). Most of the eggs, fish, meat, and milk sold to the poor in

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urban Africa are from informal markets (Roesel and Grace, 2014). A household survey of low-income neighbourhoods in 11 African cities found that 70 per cent of urban households regularly sourced food from the informal market or consumed street foods (Frayne et al., 2010). Key reasons for this include accessibility and the greater affordability of foods sold by vendors as they usually sell in smaller quantities and on credit (Roever, 2014). In addition to being a key food supplier to the urban poor, street vending, and informal trade are especially important sources of livelihoods and financial independence for women, who are the primary sellers of street foods and perishable goods such as fruits and vegetables (Battersby and Crush, 2015; Chen, 2007; Roever and Skinner, 2016). More broadly, in much of Africa the informal sector is the dominant source of employment. In urban Africa, 68 per cent and 79 per cent of the male and female labour force respectively are employed in the non-agricultural informal sector (ILO, 2018). While the expansion of supermarkets in LMICs and its consequences have been studied to some extent, other important aspects of the rapidly changing urban food environment, including the role of the informal sector and urban agriculture (which is not addressed in this chapter), have received little attention. So far, these and other aspects of the food environment, and their impacts on consumer behaviour, have been studied in isolation, which limits the external validity of the evidence currently available. Comprehensive studies that describe and evaluate the entirety of the food environment and assess its ability to provide consumers with foods that meet dietary recommendations, are missing. 3.3 Urban Food Systems, Peri-Urban Development, and Urban Diets Food systems are responsible for the production, storage, transportation, and trade of food, its processing and transformation, and its distribution to retail outlets and consumers. Food systems are intrinsically linked to food environments and can therefore play a critical role in shaping urban diets through their effects on the diversity, quantity, quality, and price of the food they supply. Food systems respond to the demand of urban consumers, but they can also play an important part in shaping their preferences, attitudes, and beliefs (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2016). Food systems vary by stage of development, level of urbanization, and, within a country, at different points along the urban–rural continuum (i.e. cities, towns, and peri-urban areas). Urban and peri-urban food systems are intimately linked, but there is little research on the actual dynamics of the linkages between urban and peri-urban food systems in helping to meet the demand for commodities produced outside of urban boundaries (Minten et al., 2017). Certain high-value (and highly perishable) foods, such as fruits and vegetables, eggs, and dairy, are essential to improve the diets of the urban poor and

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have great potential to transform adjacent peri-urban areas, where most of the LMICs’ rural populations live. Supplying these (often perishable) foods may create income and employment opportunities for poor households living close to cities and towns, especially for women who are often involved in small-scale processing and retail sales. Stronger linkages between urban and peri-urban areas could also help to supply cities with more accessible and affordable nutrient-rich foods. Yet little is known about the conditions needed for peri-urban areas to successfully supply urban markets (e.g. availability of food transport, storage, and market infrastructure) and the processes that would help to create income opportunities for smallholder farmers while also delivering healthier diets for the urban poor.

4. FOOD POLICIES AND INTERVENTIONS TO SUPPORT HEALTHIER URBAN DIETS, NUTRITION, AND HEALTH Economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the nutrition- and health-related problems faced by the urban poor. As LMIC economies grow and urbanization continues to intensify, adult overweight and obesity increase at a faster rate than the concurrent decreases in childhood stunting (Ruel and Alderman, 2013) and maternal underweight (Mamun and Finlay, 2015), deepening the double-burden of malnutrition crisis. Improving the quality of diets, nutrition, and health of the urban poor requires both demand and supply policy and programme actions that address their key drivers at the consumer, food environment, and food system levels (Hawkes et al., 2017). A critical challenge for such policies and programmes is the need to tailor them to the distinct features of urban living and the diversity of the urban population in terms of gender, family structure, income levels, cultural background, religion, and other socio­ demographic characteristics. In addition, for policies and programmes to be effective, they must consider the realities of urban life in their design, targeting, and implementation. These include the greater involvement of women in the labour force, especially in the informal sector, time constraints, family structure and social support, and precarious housing conditions, and cooking and sanitation facilities – all of which increase reliance on convenient, ready-to-eat foods, or eating outside the home. They also need to address the high exposure to food environments that offer and aggressively market a wide variety of convenient ultra-processed foods and fast-food outlets (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c). Examples of demand-side policy and programme options that target consumers and households include nutrition education (e.g. healthy eating campaigns and the promotion of fruit and vegetable consumption); social protection

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programmes that provide cash (combined with counselling on healthy diets), food transfers, vouchers, or subsidies for healthy foods that increase affordability of healthy diets (Alderman et al., 2018; Gentilini, 2015), and school feeding programmes that include health-promotion interventions to improve dietary patterns and physical activity (Verstraeten et al., 2012). Possible domains for policies and programmes to improve the food environment relate to food composition (minimizing less healthy nutrients or food components in processed foods); labelling (enabling consumers to make informed choices); promotion (reducing the promotion of less healthy foods or increasing promotion of healthy foods); provision (ensuring the healthfulness of foods provided in institutional settings such as schools); retail (supporting the availability and affordability of healthy foods); prices (using taxes to reduce consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages and subsidies to promote healthy eating); and trade and investment (favouring healthy food environments through trade and investment agreements) (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c; Swinburn et al., 2013b). Food-based dietary guidelines are a good tool for guiding the development of all these programme and policy options (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017b). Few LMICs, however, have institutionalized such guidelines (Gonzalez Fischer and Garnett, 2016). A growing number of LMICs are implementing national policies to counter the nutrition transition and especially to promote healthier diets (Hawkes et al., 2017). For example, Chile and Ecuador introduced warning labels to identify foods with high levels of fat, salt, and sugar; Mexico and some Caribbean and Pacific Island countries implemented taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages and other less healthy foods; Brazil focused on the school environment, regulating the foods that are available in and around schools; Mexico, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and China have restricted the marketing of less healthy foods to children; and Argentina and South Africa have promoted the reformulation of processed foods to reduce salt and trans-fatty acids levels. Policies and programmes aimed at the retail sector to encourage healthy food choices, however, have received little attention (Hawkes et al., 2017). In addition to national-level policies, municipal-level initiatives are now emerging. The 2015 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact called for action to promote healthy diets and was signed by 172 cities worldwide. Examples of city-level action under this pact include the introduction of popular restaurants that focus on increasing access of lowincome dwellers to healthier food (in Medellín, Colombia, and Belo Horizonte and Curitiba, Brazil), urban agriculture programmes (in Quito, Ecuador, and Nairobi, Kenya), and micro-gardens (in Dakar, Senegal) (Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, 2015). Notwithstanding the increase in policy and programme initiatives, evidence on their potential to improve diets remains largely limited to high-income countries (Bíró, 2015; Gittelsohn et al., 2012; Hyensi et al., 2017).

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One well-documented exception is the reduction in sugar-sweetened beverage purchases after Mexico introduced a tax on these drinks in 2014 (Colchero et al., 2016).

5. RESEARCH GAPS The design of urban policies and interventions to leverage urban food environments and food systems towards healthier diets, nutrition, and health, needs to be guided by evidence derived from rigorous and credible research (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c). Current available evidence and data are grossly outdated and incomplete. Detailed information on urban dietary patterns and their drivers, and on the nutrition and health challenges of the urban poor in LMICs, is surprisingly limited (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition 2015, 2017b, 2017c). The characteristics of the urban food environment, how people interact with it, and the extent to which it drives household and individual food choices, have only received research attention in high-income countries (Herforth and Ahmed, 2015; Mhurchu et al., 2013; Turner et al., 2017). National or global information on where people source their food – from the informal sector, modern retail supermarkets, or urban agriculture – and how procurement patterns may differ by gender, household structure, socioeconomic status, city size, location of residence, and types of foods (perishable versus non-perishable, healthy versus unhealthy) is completely lacking. There is also limited evidence on how the changing food demand in urban areas can be turned into an opportunity to revitalize peri-urban and rural areas, and stimulate economic transformation (Minten et al., 2017). Finally, notwithstanding the increase in policy initiatives designed to shape food choices toward healthier diets, evidence of their effectiveness remains scant and largely limited to high-income countries (Bíró, 2015; Gittelsohn et al., 2012; Hyensi et al., 2017). Box 19.1 summarizes some of the key priority areas of research that are needed to help generate the evidence base to support action on redirecting urban food systems and food environments toward healthier diets, nutrition, and health.

BOX 19.1 EXAMPLES OF RESEARCH GAPS ON URBAN DIETS, NUTRITION, AND HEALTH Diets: What? Where? Why?

•

What do urban dwellers eat (especially the poor)? What is the quality, safety, price of foods/meals they buy?

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• • • •

Where do they procure their food/meals (own production; informal vendors, markets, restaurants; formal supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, etc.)? Why do they make the choices they make? What are the drivers of healthy or unhealthy food choices (individual, household, food environment, and systems)? How influenced are they by marketing, pricing behaviours, and policy instruments (taxation, labelling, etc.)? What are the dynamics and the relative importance of the multi-level drivers of food choices and their impacts on the quality of diets, nutrition, and health of the urban poor? How do these aspects vary by gender, socioeconomic, demographic, or household structure characteristics, location of residence, city size, country, and region?

Methods, tools, and metrics

• • • •

How do we map and characterize the quality of the food environment? How do we measure dietary intake and physical activity accurately and efficiently (in large surveys) and characterize food purchasing and consumption patterns? How do we quantify and model individual, household, and food environment characteristics and their contribution to diets, health, and nutrition? How do we apply food-system approaches to assess impacts of the food environment and food-system policies and interventions on diet quality, nutrition, and health?

We lack tools, approaches, and metrics for measuring food environments, their contributions to healthy/unhealthy diets, nutrition, and health outcomes, and the impacts of policies and interventions to support healthy diets.

What works?

• • • •

How can food systems and food environments be leveraged to supply affordable healthy food choices and promote healthy diets? What types of interventions and policies work? What types of food-system and food environment policies work to reverse the tide on poor diets, obesity, and NCDs (e.g. value chain interventions, food labelling, taxes on unhealthy foods, school meals, restrictions on marketing to children)? How can governments support the informal food sector to support livelihoods and access to nutritious and safe foods/diets for the poor? What works to influence consumer behaviours related to food consumption and diets, and to supply affordable healthy food choices and promote healthy diets?

We lack carefully documented examples of success on both demand and supply side policies and interventions that can effectively reverse the tide on poor diets, malnutrition, and diet-related NCDs.

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6. CONCLUSION There is growing global recognition that the urban nutrition challenge requires urgent and decisive action as economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the diet, nutrition, and health problems faced by the urban poor (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c). Tackling these challenges will require transforming food systems into drivers of healthy food choices and engines of economic growth (Hawkes et al., 2017). For programmes, policies, and investments to be effective at shifting diets, they will need to be tailored to the diversity of urban populations. They will also need to take into account the realities of urban life, including the greater involvement of women in the labour force; limited time availability and the related need for convenience; the critical role of the informal sector in the livelihoods of vendors and the diets of the poor; and the exposure to food environments that offer and aggressively market an abundance of cheap and unhealthy, ultra-processed, ready-to-eat foods (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c). Policies should also explore the largely untapped potential of urban and periurban agriculture (which is not reviewed in this chapter) to supply affordable nutrient-rich and high-value products such as fruits and vegetables, eggs, and dairy (Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, 2017c). It is time to move from concepts and anecdotal evidence to generating the evidence base needed for action to strengthen the contribution of urban food systems and environments in supporting the urban poor to achieve healthier diets, improved nutrition, and health.

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Urban food systems and diets, nutrition, and health of the poor  395 Popkin, B., L. Adair and S. Ng (2013), ‘Now and then: the global nutrition transition: the pandemic of obesity in developing countries’, Nutrition Reviews, 70(1), 3–21. Popkin, B., C. Corvalan and L. Grummer-Strawn (2020), ‘Dynamics of the double burden of malnutrition and the changing nutrition reality’, Lancet, 395, 65–74. Qaim, M. (2017), ‘Globalisation of agrifood systems and sustainable nutrition’, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 76(1), 12–21. Reardon, T. and B. Minten (2011), ‘The quiet revolution in India’s food supply chains’, IFPRI Discussion Papers, September. Reardon, T. and C. Timmer (2007), ‘Transformation of markets for agricultural output in developing countries since 1950: how has thinking changed?’, in R. Evenson and P. Pingali (eds), Handbook of Agricultural Economics 3: Agricultural Development: Farmers, Farm Production and Farm Markets, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Press, pp. 2808–55. Reardon, T., C. Timmer, C. Barrett and J. Berdegué (2003), ‘The rise of supermarkets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 85(5), 1140–46. Rischke, R., S. Kimenju, S. Klasen and M. Qaim (2015), ‘Supermarkets and food consumption patterns: the case of small towns in Kenya’, Food Policy, 52(1), 9–21. Roesel, K. and D. Grace (2014), Food Safety and Informal Markets: Animal Products in Sub-­ Saharan Africa, London, UK: Routledge. Roever, S. (2014), ‘Informal Economy Monitoring Study Sector Report: Street Vendors’, Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing, Cambridge. Roever, S. and C. Skinner (2016), ‘Street vendors and cities’, Environment and Urbanization, 28(2), 359–74. Ruel, M. and H. Alderman (2013), ‘Nutrition-sensitive interventions and programmes: how can they help to accelerate progress in improving maternal and child nutrition?’, The Lancet, 382(9891), 536–51. Ruel, M., J. Garrett and S. Yosef (2017), ‘Food security and nutrition: growing cities, new challenges’, in Global Food Policy Report 2017, Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Say, L. and R. Raine (2007), ‘A systematic review of inequalities in the use of maternal health care in developing countries’, Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, 85(10), 812–19. Swinburn, B., G. Sacks, S. Vandevjvere, S. Kumanyika, T. Lobstein, B. Neal, S. Barquera, S. Friel, C. Hawkes, B. Kelly, M. L’abbe, A. Lee, J. Ma, J. Macmullan, S. Mohan, C. Monteiro, M. Rayner, D. Sanders, W. Snowdon and C. Walker (2013a), ‘INFORMAS (International Network for Food and Obesity/Non-Communicable Diseases Research, Monitoring and Action Support): overview and key principles’, Obesity Reviews, 14(1), 1–12. Swinburn, B., S. Vandevijvere, V. Kraak, G. Sacks, W. Snowdon, C. Hawkes, S. Barquera, S. Friel, B. Kelly, S. Kumanyika, M. L’abbe, A. Lee, T. Lobstein, J. Ma, J. Macmullan, S. Mohan, C. Monteiro, M. Rayner, D. Sanders and C. Walker (2013b), ‘Monitoring and benchmarking government policies and actions to improve the healthiness of food environments: a proposed Government Healthy Food Environment Policy Index’, Obesity Reviews, 14(1), 24–37. Tessier, S., P. Traissac, B. Maire, N. Bricas, S. Eymard-Duvernay, J. Ati and F. Delpeuch (2008), ‘Regular users of supermarkets in Greater Tunis have a slightly improved diet quality’, The Journal of Nutrition, 138(4), 768–74. Turner, C., S. Kadiyala, A. Aggarwal and H. Walls (2017), ‘Concepts and methods for food environment research in low- and middle-income countries’, Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy Food Environments Working Group (ANH-FEWG), London, UK. UNDESA (2018), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, UNDESA Population Division, New York. Verstraeten, R., D. Roberfroid, C. Lachat, J. Leroy, M. Holdsworth, L. Maes and P. Kolsteren (2012), ‘Effectiveness of preventive school-based obesity interventions in low- and middleincome countries: a systematic review’, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 96(2), 415–38. Wertheim-Heck, S. (2015), ‘We have to eat, right? Food safety concerns and shopping for daily vegetables in modernizing Vietnam’, Wageningen, Netherlands, Wageningen University. WHO (2018), ‘World Health Statistics 2018: monitoring health for the SDGs’, Geneva, Switzerland.

Index

Abrahams, C. 204 accessibility of food 7, 12, 52, 284, 368, 372–3 adaptation 72–3, 97, 120–21 adulteration of food 313 affordability of food 52 Afghanistan 268 Africa city-region approach 355–6 demographic changes 37, 63 dietary transformation 148 food insecurity 9, 27 food-system governance 365–6, 368–75 industrial agriculture 68 informal sector 223, 386–7 midstream value chains 146 migration 263, 266, 268, 272 overnutrition problem 10 population changes 2, 4, 23, 380 processed food consumption 41 remittance flows 283–6, 291, 294, 301 retail adaptability 121 rural development 5–6 rural–urban food systems 166, 170 services provision 180 slum life 26 supermarketization 116, 128–9, 132, 203–4 urban agriculture 236, 246–8, 251, 253, 256 urbanization levels 5 see also individual African regions and countries African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) 96, 370 AFSUN see African Food Security Urban Network agglomerations 46 aggregation 319 Agri-Parks, Indonesia 186 agribusinesses 52, 174 agricultural development 72–4

agricultural industrialization 62–78, 185–6 Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) 176 agricultural production 248–51 data limitations 237–8 demand growth 47 food-system governance 367 income share from 246 services intensity 180 see also food production agrifood investment 185–7 agrifood value chains 145–65 agro-fuel boom 70 agro-processing 185 agroecology 322 Albania 82, 84 Allen, J. 351 Alsono-Fradejas, A. 344 alternative food systems 190–91 Andersson Djurfeldt, A. 282, 296 Andrée, P. 365 antibiotic resistance 65–6 APMC see Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Argentina 330, 385, 389 Asia demand for food 47 demographic changes 37 industrial agriculture 68 industrialization of food 314–16 informal food sector 203 midstream value chains 145–7, 150– 54, 157–61, 178 migration 263, 268 overnutrition problem 10 population changes 2, 4, 23, 380 processed food consumption 40–41 remittance flows 283 rural–urban food systems 166, 169–70 stunting levels 89 urban agriculture 48, 238, 241, 244, 248–9, 253 397

398  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South urbanization levels 5 see also individual Asian regions and countries asylum seekers 268, 270 Australia 45, 117, 137 Austria 117 avian flu 314–16, 321 Bahadur, A. 105 Bangladesh midstream value chains 145, 149, 160–61 migration 272 remittance flows 283 urban agriculture 244, 250–51 Barbados 82 Barling, B. 343 Belgium 117 “Bennett’s Law” 148 Benton-Short, L. 262 Berdegué, J. 167 beverage industry 37, 39 bilateral migration corridors 264–5 biological simplification 64–5 biophysical overrides 64–6, 69–71 Blay-Palmer, A. 345 Bolivia 82–3 Born, B. 354, 356–8 Bosnia and Herzegovina 82 Botswana feminist research 218 gendered food consumption 226 remittance flows 286, 288, 291 supermarket chains 128, 136, 138 branding 161 Brazil DHS/MICS surveys 81 food safety 313–14 food-system governance 367 gender–urban-food interface 223 institutional markets 183–4 nutrition transition 169, 389 supermarket revolution 204 Bulgaria 249, 251 Burkina Faso 175, 226, 247–8, 251, 286 Burundi 268 business models, retailers 119 business-as-usual system 106 buyer power 114–15, 118, 135–7 buying groups 126

C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group 97 Caesar, M. 284 calorie consumption 42, 170 Cambodia 151, 315 Canada food banks 330 food-system governance 364, 366, 368 smart cities 94, 102–4, 106–7 urban experimentation 101–2 capital-intensive industries 39, 157–9 Caprotti, F. 105 Caribbean 86–7, 241, 263, 389 cash remittances 282, 286, 288–9, 295–7 cash transfers, informal sector 213 Cattaneo, O. 124 CBOs see community-based organizations Central America 115–16, 124, 172, 316, 385 see also individual Central American countries Central Asia 84–6, 89, 238 see also individual Central Asian countries centralized procurement 121, 136, 161, 170 centralized wholesale market 177 cereal remittances 292–3, 297 CFOs see community food organizations Chai, B. 4 Chakrabarty, A. 106 Chapela, I.H. 316 cheap food 62–78, 319 chemical food contaminants 310 children metabolic syndrome 80 slum life 26 stunting 79, 81–2, 84–91, 382 undernutrition 8, 10, 26 Chile 185, 385, 389 China avian flu 314–15 households study 221 hunger 63 melamine milk scandal 318–19, 321–2 midstream value chains 145, 149–55, 157–8, 160–61, 178 migration 272 nutrition transition 389 obesity levels 90

Index  399 rural–urban food systems 169–70, 172 short chain approaches 182 supermarket revolution 116 urbanization levels 5 cities catchment areas 148 centralized wholesale market 177 climate change–food security nexus 94–112 demographic changes 35–6 food systems 50–51, 174, 363 gender–urban-food interface 219–20, 224 hinterland linkages 348 migration to 261–81 nutrition in 226–8 planning 94–5, 98–109, 341–62, 389 population growth 167–8 services provision 180 size trends 4 supermarketization 204 typology 54–6 City Region Food System (CRFS) approach 14, 341–62, 364–5 city-regions localism 14, 341–9, 352, 354–5, 358–9 policy agenda 184–5 short chains 182 typology 55 civil society action 46, 322 climate change 29, 43–5, 69–73, 94–112, 184 Coates, J. 284 Cochrane, A. 351–2 cold storage industry 153, 159 Collier, P. 6 Colombia 26, 179, 209 coltan metal 106 commercialization, consumption 149 community-based organizations (CBOs) 329 community food organizations (CFOs) 328–9, 333–4, 336–7 competition informal food sector 206, 208, 211, 213 land uses 179 planning applications 107–8 rural non-farm economy 148 supermarkets 113–14, 117–18, 132–5

competition authorities 135, 137 competitive advantage, industrial agriculture 64, 66–7 concentration ratios (CRs) 117 conduct change 153–5, 157–61 Connell, J. 282 consolidation 155–7, 320 consumer preferences 39–40, 51, 381–2, 385 consumers food safety action 320–21 informal food sector 205 primary food production 177 purchasing behaviour 170, 173 smallholder links 183–4 supermarket revolution effects 113–14, 134 Consuming Urban Poverty (CUP) project 370, 372, 374 consumption aspiration-driven 40 commercialization 149 income poverty 28 lifestyle changes 39–40 mundane goods 369–70 nutrition/health 39–43, 226–8 salt intake 42 structural change 168–9 sugar intake 90 urban agriculture 248–51, 253 value-based 40 contaminants in food 309–14 contextual theme 13–14 contract farming 160–61 convenience foods 227 convenience stores 126 Copenhagen Accord 97 corn contamination 316–17 corporate-sector food banks 331, 334, 336 corruption 208 Corsi, D. 81 cost-reduction 119–20, 122 Costa Rica 183 Cowley, R. 105 cowpeas industry 175 credit access, informal sector 206 credit market 159 CRFS approach see City Region Food System approach

400  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South crop production 241–2, 244, 249, 316–17 CRs see concentration ratios Crush, J. 273, 275, 284 culture transfer 120–21 CUP project see Consuming Urban Poverty project customer–retailer–manufacturer relationship 119–20 customer support 213 dairy sector 318–19 Darwin, Charles 350 data, investment in 54 Davis, M. 68 Dawson, J. 119 DCs see distribution centres De Soto, H. 208 de-seasonalization 152–3, 181 decentralization 96 demand-side factors 46–51, 116, 205, 388–9 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 268, 272 demographic changes 35–7, 63 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) 81 development theory 228 Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) 80–81, 92 developmental planning 346 DHS see Demographic and Health Surveys diabetes 313–14 Dickinson, Robert 350 “diet globalization” see nutrition transition diet-related disease 42–3, 226, 309 dietary energy 8 dietary narrowing 68, 273–4, 372 diets changing 148–9, 168–70, 227, 313–14, 373, 380 conceptual framework 381–2 drivers/consequences 382–8 individual/household factors 383–4 policies/interventions 388–90 poverty 380–95 research gaps 390–91 Dinbabo, M. 273, 275 dis-intermediation 153–5, 174, 180

disease food security 309–10, 313–16, 321 nutrition-related 42–3, 226, 309 poverty and 380, 383 slum life 26, 29 “distance”, use of term 149 Distinguin, I. 208 distribution centres (DCs) 121, 154 Dobson, S. 208 DOHaD see Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Donahue, K. 363–4 Dorosh, P. 178 Dossa, L.H. 236 double-burden of malnutrition 382–3, 388 downstream food system 145–7, 150, 160 DRC see Democratic Republic of Congo Dubbeling, M. 184 Eastern Africa job growth 39 primary food production 178 processed food 169 retail markets 176–7 supermarket revolution 116, 128–9 urban agriculture 244, 253, 256 urbanization levels 5 see also individual Eastern African countries Eastern Asia irrigated cropland 48 stunting/obesity 84, 86, 90 supermarket revolution 115–16, 128, 385 urbanization levels 5, 147 see also individual Eastern Asian countries Eastern Europe 84–6, 89, 238, 248, 256 see also individual Eastern European countries ecologically rational agriculture 73–4 economic activity gendered consumption 227 informal sector 205–6, 208–9, 224 economic downturns 213–14 economic growth 24, 37–9, 188, 190, 388 economic linkages, city-regions 352 economies of scale 134, 158 Ecuador 209, 244, 251, 389

Index  401 education levels 89, 253 efficiency logic 64, 66 Egypt 27–8 electricity access 371–2 employment food production 180–81 geographic proximity 174 informal economy 27, 200–201, 211, 223–4, 387 manufacturing industries 38–9 migrants 267–8, 274 energy-dense foods 169 “entrepreneurial cities” 106–7 environmental burden, industrial agriculture 64–6 environmental hazards 29, 31 equity-related issues 105–6 Ethiopia households 28 informal food sector 205 refugee population 268 remittance flows 294 urban agriculture 241, 244, 248 Europe city-region approach 351–4, 357–8 FLW rates 45 Food Assembly initiative 184 industrial agriculture 64, 66 migration 272 supermarketization 117 see also individual European regions and countries Evans, J. 105 exclusive leases 117–18, 120, 134 experimental city planning 94, 98–105 export growth 145, 185 facilitating policies 54 FAFH see food away from home family farms 177 FANTA see Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance FAO see Food and Agriculture Organization Farina, E. 204 farm plots 178 farm products, spatial elongation 152 farm-to-fork approach 356 farmer fairs 183 farmer markets 183

farmer–retailer relationship 159–60 fast food 40 FDI see foreign direct investment Feeding America model 330–31 Feller, A. 145 female-headed households 221, 223, 253, 299, 301 feminist research 218–19 feminization of poverty 219 fertilizers 65–6, 71 FFSA see FoodForward SA FIES see Food Insecurity Experience Scale financial relationships 159–60 financial support, informal sector 212 Finland 117, 169 fish farming 153 Floro, M. 224 FLW see food loss and waste “follow sourcing” 154 food access 6–7, 12, 52, 284, 368, 372–3 food additives 310 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 95, 234–5 Food Assembly initiative 184 food availability 7, 12, 284, 308 food away from home (FAFH) 41 food banks 328–48 food choices, influences on 382–4 food–cities dichotomy 12 food composition improvements 389 food consumption see consumption food crisis 6–11 food environments definition 382 diets 381–2, 385–7 policies/programmes 389 research gaps 390–91 food inaccessibility, characterization 6 food industry growth 37, 39 food insecurity anthropometric measures 7–8 cross-cultural measures 9 food banks impact on 332, 336–7 levels/trends 1–2 low-income contexts 23–33 non-income dimensions 28–9 yearly fluctuations 10 Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) 42

402  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South food loss and waste (FLW) 44–5 Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) 9 food parks 186 food policy councils (FPCs) 365–6 food-policy debates 354–6 food production changes 177–9 first stage procurement 179–81 food safety/food security nexus 322 urbanization effects 167 see also agricultural production food redistribution systems 329–30 food remittances 282–306 food safety challenges 320–23 contaminants 309–14 food security nexus 307–9, 314–19 industrialization 307–27 new risks 313–14 regulations 158 slums 30–31 food security definitions 6–7, 95, 284, 307 dimensions 7 food safety nexus 307–9, 314–19 pillars of 307–8 food-smart cities 55 food sovereignty approach 344–5 food stability 7, 284 food supply organization 1 Food System 1.0/2.0 357–8 food systems changes in 34–61, 145–79 climate change and 29 definitions 166, 343 diversity of 181–5 drivers 35–7 food safety risks 313–16 formality 203–4 governance 15, 363–79 key interventions 56–7 local governments 31 localism 354–5 networks 17 overlapping channels 49–51 poverty and 380–95 rural–urban interface 166–97 second stage 181 tailored responses 54–6

food utilization 7, 284 food waste 44–5, 328–48 FoodForward SA (FFSA) 329, 333–7 foodshed concept 343–5 forced migration 268 foreign direct investment (FDI) 113, 116, 130, 150, 158 formal food system 203–4 formalization, informal sector 208, 211–12 fossil energy use 66, 69–71 foundational economy 368–9 FPCs see food policy councils fraudulent food 313 Frayne, B. 297 fresh food, supermarkets 123, 126 Froud, J. 369 functional regionalist approach 350 Galal, O. 90 garden cities 99–102 gastronomy 183 gateway cities 262, 266 GDP per capita see per capita GDP measure GE see genetic engineering Gebre-Egziabher, T. 6 Geddes, Patrick 350, 352, 357 gender discrimination 299, 301 food safety and 321 poverty link 219 slum life 29 urban-food interface 218–32 see also women genetic contaminants 310 genetic engineering (GE) 310, 316–17 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 310, 316–17 geographic proximity factors 174, 182 “geographical repositioning” 181 Georgia 249 GFN see Global FoodBanking Network Ghana city-region approach 356 household food security 223 remittance flows 283, 294, 296 street vendors 29, 209 urban agriculture 241, 250 GHI see Global Hunger Index

Index  403 Global Covenant of Mayors 97 Global FoodBanking Network (GFN) 330–31, 333–4, 336 Global Hunger Index (GHI) 8 global issues/globalization city-region approach 351 climate change–food security 95–7 food banks 329–33 supermarket expansion 115–24 urban experimentation 103 global–local scale/context 13 “global sourcing companies” 123 global value chain (GVC) framework 115, 124, 136, 138 GMOs see genetically modified organisms goods remittance flows 282, 286–8 Gordon-Larsen, P. 10 governance city-region 353–4 climate change 96 food systems 15, 363–79 food waste 332–3 informal food sector 209–11 multistakeholder mechanisms 54 urban experimentation 98, 104, 107–8 government revenue, informal sector 205 governments agrifood sector policy 150 direct purchasing 183–4 food safety/food security nexus 322 food system interventions 56, 366–7 formalization promotion 212 investment policy 189 green economy, food banks and 332 “green” movement 350 “green revolutions” 17 greenhouse-gas emissions 43–4 GRMI see Grocery Retail Market Inquiry grocery retail 116–17, 125–6, 128–30, 133 see also supermarketization/ supermarket revolution, supermarkets/supermarket chains Grocery Retail Market Inquiry (GRMI) 134–5 Growe, A. 351 Guatemala 82, 249–50, 386 Gulati, A. 203 Gulf region 266

GVC framework see global value chain framework Habitat III Conference 11–12, 347, 349 Hall, S. 369 Hamilton, A. 235, 241, 257 Harrison, J. 351 Hawkes, C. 386 Haysom, G. 366 HCP see Hungry Cities Partnership HDDS see Household Dietary Diversity Score Healey, P. 351, 352, 357 health 308, 313, 322 food consumption and 39–43, 226–8 LMIC trends 79–93 nutrition transition 169 policies/interventions 388–90 research gaps 390–91 rural–urban interface 191 urban poor 380–95 health regulations 158, 210 health services, access to 89 healthy immigrant hypothesis 261 heart disease 313–14 Hedden, W. 343 Herfindahl Index 256 hinterland areas 151, 182, 348–9, 350 Holdaway, J. 182 house brand products 137 Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) 370, 372 household food access 173–4 household food choices 382–4 household food expenditure 41 household food security food-system governance 370–72 gender–urban-food interface 218, 220–22 informal economy 199–200, 202 remittance flows 285, 289–90, 295, 297, 299 strategies 222–5 supermarketization 204 household income definition 237 remittance flows 294–5, 298–9 urban agriculture share 233–8, 241–8, 250–56 households, definitions 221

404  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South Hovorka, Alice 218–19, 226 Howard, Ebenezer 99–101 Humphrey, J. 122 hunger cheap food and 62–3 framing 12–13 urbanization of 26 Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) 200, 202–4, 221, 370–72 Hunter-Adams, J. 273 hygiene standards 210 hyper-experimentation 94–5, 105–9 hypermarkets 126, 128 ICLS see International Conference of Labour Statisticians ICTs see information and communication technologies IFAD see International Fund for Agricultural Development ILO see International Labour Organization imperfect competition theories 117 imported food 67, 123–4, 145 income diversification 256 gender–urban-food interface 224–5 increasing 148–9, 166–8, 299, 385, 388 informal food sector 205–6 manufacturing industries 38 poverty and 23–5, 383–4 stunting/obesity relation 82 technological change 80 urban agriculture 233–8, 248, 250–56 “income-induced diet diversification” 169 income poverty 27–8, 370–71 independent retail 125–6 India agrifood investment 185–6 child undernutrition 8 DHS/MICS surveys 81 dietary transformation 148–9 farmer markets 183 food safety risks 314 health status 80 income poverty 28 informal food sector 200 malnutrition 26

midstream value chains 145, 150–51, 155, 158–62, 174, 178 migration 272 overnutrition problem 10 remittance flows 283 retail changes 172 smart cities 94, 103–4, 106 sugar consumption 90 supermarket revolution 116 urban agriculture 237, 244 urban experimentation 101–2 urban population share 147 wholesale markets 175–6 Indonesia Agri-Parks 186 dietary transformation 149 midstream value chains 151, 153, 157, 160, 162 poultry sector 315 retail changes 172, 173 supermarket revolution 124 urban agriculture 235 urbanization levels 5, 147 industrial food/agriculture 62–78, 185–6 industrial organization 115, 135–6 industrialization 307–27 infectious diseases 309–10, 314 influenza 314–16 informal economy 198, 205–6, 208–9 household food security 223–4 migration 267–8, 275–6 statistical aspects 199–205 informal employment 27, 200–201, 223–4, 267–8, 274 informal food sector 14–15, 29–30, 49–51, 198–217 changes 172–3 city-region approach 355 counter-cyclical nature 206, 213–14 effective governance 209–11 infrastructure 373 macro-perspective 198 micro-perspective 198 migrants 276 opportunities/challenges 204–6 poverty and 383–4, 386–7 pro-cyclical nature 206 supermarketization 126 informal settlements 25, 37, 42, 297, 342 see also slums

Index  405 information and communication technologies (ICTs) 43 infrastructure food-system governance 365, 372–3 investment 149–50, 171–2, 174, 178, 213, 369 retail markets 176 innovation 43, 71–2 institutional markets 183–4 institutions city-region approach 358 food safety 321–2 informal food sector 210 midstream value chains 160–61 transformative 53 interconnections theme 16 intergovernmental organizations 109 intermediaries 153–5, 174 intermediate cities 148, 168, 185–8, 189–90 intermediate segments food systems 177, 186 value chains 170, 174 internal migration 282, 284, 286, 288–92, 296 International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) 237 International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) 95 International Labour Organization (ILO) 200, 211 international migration 261–81, 284–9 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 95–6 internationalization 113–16, 118–21, 125, 128–32 intra-regional migration 263–4 intra-regional trade 138 investment environment 189–90, 389 IPCC see International Panel on Climate Change Iraq 249 irrigated cropland 48, 235 irrigation override 71 Ivory Coast 247 Jaacks, L. 81–2, 90 Japan 5, 151 Jayne, T. 179 Jennings, S. 344–5, 354–7

Jessop, B. 352, 357–8 job creation 39, 43, 52, 190 Jolliffe, D. 253 Jordan 84 justice issues 105 Kaika, M. 106 Kantor, P. 353 Karamba, W. 283 Kawarazuka, N. 224 Kennedy, G. 203 Kenya city-region approach 356 food-system governance 370, 373 income poverty 27 informal food sector 203, 209 obesity rates 26 refugee population 268 remittance flows 286, 288–9, 294–5 supermarket revolution 116, 129, 137, 386 zoonotic diseases 321 Keynesian economics 350, 357 Kloppenburg, J. 343 Kumar, P. 149 Kuuire, V. 296 Kyoto protocol 96 Kyrgyzstan 84, 249, 251 La Via Campesina movement 344 labelling policies 389 labour absorption 67–8 labour force growth 37 labour-intensive agriculture 63, 73 labour-intensive industries 39 labour-intensive technologies 157–9 labour market, informal economy 199–200 LAC see Latin America and the Caribbean, migration Lacroix, T. 283 land climate change and 70 competition 179 scarcity 44 land reform policy 188 land sparing 73 Lang, T. 343 Laos 151 Latin America

406  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South

industrial agriculture 68 institutional markets 183–4 midstream value chains 146 migration 263 overnutrition problem 10 population changes 2 rural–urban food systems 166, 170, 172 short chain approaches 182 stunting/obesity 82–3, 86–7, 89 supermarket revolution 116, 128 urban agriculture 237–8, 241, 244, 248–9, 253, 257 urbanization rate 5 see also individual Latin American countries Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), migration 263 Le Courbusier, La Ville Radieuse 100–101 leases, supermarkets 117–18, 120, 134 legal standards, supermarkets 123, 136 Legwegoh, A. 226 Lesotho 209, 286, 288, 291 Letchworth garden city 99–101 Levin, C. 223 liability-centred approach 319 liberalization policies 150, 151, 158, 160 liberalized markets 319–20 Liu, J. 169–70 Lived Poverty Index (LPI) 370–71 livestock production 64–6, 241–2, 244 living laboratories 98–9 LMICs see low and middle-income countries local–global linkages 13, 95–7 local governments climate change–food security 97 food systems 31, 366–7 investment environment 189 see also municipalities localism, city-regions 14, 341–9, 352, 354–5, 358–9 localized development 45–6 location advantages 130 location-specific costs 120 logistics firms 155, 157 Louw, A. 203 low and middle-income countries (LMICs)

food systems 380, 383–6, 388–90 nutritional status 79–93 supermarketization 385–6 urban agriculture 233–60 low-income contexts food insecurity 23–33, 342 remittance flows 289, 291, 297 LPI see Lived Poverty Index MacRae, R. 363–4 Madagascar 386 Mahapatro, S. 283 Maharaj, V. 272 maize 292–6, 316–17, 356 Malawi gender–urban-food interface 220, 227 remittance flows 288, 291, 294, 296 street vendors 209 urban agriculture 244, 248, 250 Malaysia 151 Mali 226, 247–8 “mall culture” 135 mall space 134 malnutrition 26, 226, 342, 380, 382–3, 388 Mangnus, E. 356 manufacturing industries 38–9, 186 manufacturing internationalization 118–21 marginalized people 105–7 market institutions 160–61 market power, supermarkets 117–18, 134 market size, developing 157 marketing 149, 154–5, 248–9, 385 markets informal economy 200, 205, 209–11 liberalization 319–20 midstream value chains 171, 174 primary food production 177 role of 14–15 segmentation 128 small farming 67, 186–7 women 224 Masters, W. 89–90 MDP see multi-dimensional poverty status megacities 4–5, 36, 55, 148 melamine milk scandal 318–19, 321–2 Mellor, J. 149 men’s roles, domestic tasks 222

Index  407 mergers and acquisitions 156 Mesoamerica 316 metabolic syndrome 80–81 metropolitan areas 55, 184–5 Mexico agrifood investment 185 corn contamination 316–17 DHS/MICS surveys 81 food banks 330 informal food sector 200, 203, 209, 211 nutrition transition 389–90 supermarket revolution 115, 385 urban agriculture 237, 241, 249 microbiological food contamination 309–10 micronutrients 226, 382–3 MICS see Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys Middle East 86–7, 90, 263 middle-income contexts convenience foods 227 malnutrition 26 street vendors 30 urbanization drivers 24–5 see also low and middle-income countries midstream value chains 145–65, 171, 174–7, 178 migration 67, 261–81, 282–306 migration corridors 264–5, 267 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact 96, 345, 389 milk products 318–19, 321–2 millet remittances 293, 298–9 Minot, N. 173 Mistura fair 183 mitigation imperative, climate change 72 modern food channel 49–51, 125–6, 170–72, 175 modernization 62–3, 73, 221 Mongolia 244, 249 Moniruzzaman, M. 283 monocultures 62–4, 66, 73 Monteiro, C. 90 Morisset, M. 149 Mozambique food-system governance 370 households study 221 migration 272

remittance flows 286, 288, 291, 294 retail choice 173 urban agriculture 243, 246–7, 250–51 Muggah, R. 268 multi-dimensional poverty (MDP) status 370–71 multinational food companies 50, 129– 30, 204 Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) 81 Mumford, Lewis 350 mundane goods 368–70 municipalities, typology 55 see also local governments Munroe, W. 375 Myanmar 151, 156 Nahman, A. 333 Namibia informal food sector 203 migration 272 remittance flows 284, 288–9, 296–302 supermarketization 125, 138–9 NaRanong, V. 153 NCDs see non-communicable diseases Nelles, J. 353 neoliberal governance 107–8, 332, 334 Nepal 149, 244, 249–51 Netherlands 117 network-centric approach 352–3, 357 “network” efficiencies 119 network-versus-territory debate 351–2, 354, 357 networks, food systems 17 New Regionalism 351 New Urban Agenda (NUA) 11–12, 25, 341–62, 364 New Zealand 45 nexus approach 94–112 Ng, S. 169 NGOs see non-governmental organizations Nicaragua 225, 235 Niger 248, 250 Nigeria FAFH consumption 41 migration 272 remittance flows 283, 286, 294 street vendors 29 urban agriculture 241, 247

408  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South non-communicable diseases (NCDs) 42–3, 226, 309, 313–14, 372, 380, 383 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 328–9, 331, 336 North Africa 5, 48, 86–7, 128 see also individual North African countries North America 5, 45, 113, 115 see also Canada; United States Northern discourse 261–2, 264, 364–6, 373–5 Norway 169 NUA see New Urban Agenda nutrition in cities 226–8 consumption and 39–43 individual/household factors 383–4 LMICs status 79–93 NUA/SDG goals 342 policies/interventions 388–90 poverty links 380–95 research gaps 390–91 SES effects 80, 90 supermarket purchases 170 TRANSFORM framework 52 nutrition insecurity, dimensions 2, 11 nutrition security food security linkage 345 objectives 18 nutrition transition disease increases 42 gendered consumption 227 outcomes 16, 169 “paradox” of 10 poverty and 380, 382, 389–90 urban transition relation 23 obesity 10, 26, 42–3, 68, 79–93, 226 Oelofse, S. 333 oil scarcity 69 one-size-fits-all regulations 321 open data 54 “operational” efficiencies 119 operational transfer 121 organic monocultures 73 overnutrition 10–11 overweight see obesity Paciorek, C. 81, 88–9

packaged food 40–41, 125–7, 161 Pakistan 82, 249, 251 Panama 244, 249 parastatal processors 154, 156 Paris, urban experimentation 100 Paris Climate Agreement 97 Parker, Barry 99 Parr, J. 351 participatory approaches 96 partnerships 57, 108 per capita GDP measure stunting/obesity 80, 82, 84, 86, 88–90 urban agriculture 244–5, 247–8, 252–3 peri-urban agriculture 47–9, 179, 225 peri-urban areas demographic changes 37 development 387–8 perishable food 121, 124, 152, 155, 160, 387–8 Peru 82–3, 92, 183 pest resistance 65 pesticides 71 Petrou, K. 282 pharmaceutical overrides 71 Philippines 151, 153 physical food contaminants 310–13 pig processing plants 153 place-centrism 352 planning city-region approach 341–62 food-system governance 367–8 NUA approach 346 nutritional policies 389 urban experimentation 94–5, 98–109 pluralistic governance 364–6, 369–70, 373–5 policy and governance city-region approach 184–5 healthy diets 388–90 informal food sector 198–9, 214 urban experimentation 98, 104 political economy 130, 138 Popkin, B. 10, 90, 169, 386 population decline, rural areas 2–3 population growth 4, 166–8, 380 population movement, trends/drivers 35–7 population shares, urbanization 147 potato farming 159, 160 Pothukuchi, K. 367–8, 375

Index  409 poultry sector 314–16, 321 poverty agro-processing 185 climate change effects 45 economic growth and 37 food insecurity 27–8, 370–71 food system changes 366, 380–95 gender link 219 income dimensions 23–4 industrial food/agriculture 67–8 informal food sector 213, 372–3, 383– 4, 386–7 intermediate cities 168 local government role 31 migrants 266–7 non-income dimensions 23–4 nutrition/health 39, 380–95 remittance flows 290, 295, 299 retail choice 173 space and 23–5 urban agriculture 250–53 urbanization of 219–20 poverty reduction attempts 166–7 PQRS see price–quality–range-service precariousness 68–71, 224 Price, M. 262 price–quality–range-service (PQRS) 113, 126, 135 pricing improvements 389 primary food production 177–9 primary processing 170 private finance 54, 146, 150, 189–90 private-label products 137 private partnerships 108 private-sector consolidation 156 private standards 123, 136, 160–61 “process view” 119 processed food 40–41, 149 agribusinesses 174 branding 161 gendered consumption 227 market size 157 remittance flows 293–4 rural–urban interface 169–70, 172 supermarkets 386 processing plants 185 procurement systems first stage 179–81 organizational change 161 rural–urban value chains 154

supermarkets 114, 121–2, 170–71, 385–6 product categories 151–2 productionist approach 343, 348, 359, 367 productivity gains 62–6, 73, 205 promotional policies 389 property developers 135 Pruitt-Igoe social housing project 100, 105 Prydz, E.B. 253 public finance 54 public good, food as 365, 368–70 public health 161 public wholesale markets 176–7 Purcell, M. 354, 356–8 purchasing consumers 170, 173 government agencies 183–4 Quist, D. 316 rain-fed systems 48, 235 Ramlogan-Dobson, C. 208 Rand, J. 211 rapid urbanization, effects 23–33, 63, 319 Reardon, T. 124, 145, 147–9, 158–61, 203 reciprocal remitting 284, 296–301 refugee camps 268 refugees 268, 270–72, 275 regional economy 341–62 regional food sourcing 123–4 regionalization, supermarkets 129–30 regulatory responses 139, 158, 209–10, 212, 321 remittance flows 262–3, 275, 282–306 Republic of Korea 389 resilience 52, 101–2, 105–8 resource recovery 184 resource scarcities see scarce resources retail/retailers agrifood system 170–74 business models 119 de-seasonalization 181 diversity 190 expansion strategies 119 financial relationships 159–60 food waste 334 internationalization 115, 118–21

410  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South market size/scope economics 157 modern food channel 51, 125–7 packaged food 127 policies/programmes 389 retail markets 157, 176–7 retail segments, value chains 151 retrenchment/recovery strategies 119 reverse remitting 288–9 revolving door cities 262, 266 rice sector 150, 152, 156–8, 160–61 Roberts, W. 368 Rockefeller Foundation programme 94, 98, 101–5, 107–8 Roy, A. 357 Ruel, M. 80, 89–90 RuLIS see Rural Livelihoods Information System rural, comparative definitions 237 rural consumption, commercialization 149 rural development, Africa 5–6 rural livelihoods, industrial agriculture 66–8 Rural Livelihoods Information System (RuLIS) 236–41, 250, 253 rural non-farm economy 148–9 rural population decline 2–3 rural–rural remittance flows 294 rural–urban development 34–5 rural–urban interface food systems 166–97 policy adjustments 187–91 rural–urban migration 24 rural–urban remittance flows 283, 288–9, 291–2, 293–9 rural–urban value chains 151, 153–4 Rwanda 243–4, 250, 268 SADC see Southern African Development Community safe food 52 see also food safety St Lucia 82 Salet, W. 353 salt consumption 42 sanitation facilities 29 Saunders, D. 2 scale context and 13–14 industrial agriculture 64–6, 72

midstream firms 158 supermarkets 134 urban experimentation 101–2 scale-centrism 352 “scale mismatch” problem 353 “scale theorizing” 354 scarce resources 43–5, 69 Schafran, A. 369 Schmitz, H. 122 Schneider, M. 153 scope economics 157 Scott, A. 351 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals seasonality 149, 152–3 secondary cities 4, 37, 55, 179, 262 secondary stage food processing 170, 172 security see food security self-employment 238 semi-tropics 70 Senegal 225, 244, 286 services provision 104, 180, 369 SES see socioeconomic status Seto, K. 4 Shillington, L. 225 shocks, effects 43–5 shopping malls 134 Shoprite supermarket chain 132–3 short food supply chains 181–2, 190 Shurman, R. 375 Sierra Leone 243, 247–8, 257 Singh, G. 90 Sithole, S. 273, 275 Slater, R. 225 slums child health 26 definition 25 demographic changes 37 dietary narrowing 68 food system changes 167 multiscale approach 23–4 nutritional status 79 poverty and 27, 28–9 street vendors 30–31, 172 small farming/smallholders 67, 73–4, 122, 156, 177 consumer links 183–4 market access 186–7 market changes 171, 174 small and medium cities 167–8, 180, 186

Index  411 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) 161 smaller-scale firms, agrifood investment 185–6 smart cities 55, 94, 102–4, 106–8 SMEs see small- and medium-sized enterprises social capital 182 social diffusion 170 social housing 100 social inequality 332 social movements 329 social networks 225 social programmes, informal sector 213 social relations of farming 74 social remitting 282, 296 socio-economic implications food security 308–9 social housing 100 urban agriculture 235–6, 238, 248, 253–6 socioeconomic status (SES) 80, 90 socio-spatial relations 352 socio-technical experiments 98 “soft infrastructure” 150 soil health 65 Solis, P. 353 Somalia 268, 272 sourcing food 47, 123–4, 390 South Africa agrifood system 171, 185 food-system governance 370 food wastage 332–6 gendered food consumption 226 income poverty 27 informal food sector 200, 203, 224 migration 268, 271–6 modern food retail 172 nutrition transition 389 remittance flows 288–9, 291, 299 retail adaptability 121 smallholder markets 174 street vendors 29–30, 209–10 supermarketization 114–16, 125–38, 385 South America 115, 385 see also individual South American countries South Asia demographic changes 63



food wastage 333 hunger 62 stunting cases 82, 86, 89 supermarket revolution 116 urban agriculture 238 urban growth 68 see also individual South Asian countries South-Central Asia 5 see also individual South-Central Asian countries South-Eastern Asia demographic changes 63 food wastage 333 irrigated cropland 48 midstream value chains 151 private finance 150 retail changes 172 supermarketization 115–16, 128, 385 urbanization levels 5, 147 see also individual South-Eastern Asian countries South Korea 5, 151, 169 South–North migration 261–2, 264 South–South migration 261–81 by origin 264–5 destination countries 264–6 dimensions/directions 263–71 remittance flows 285–6 typology 269 volume of 265 Southern Africa food insecurity 9 food-system governance 365 gender–urban-food interface 218, 223, 225, 228 nutrition transition 169 remittance flows 284, 286–9, 297 retail 172–3, 176–7 supermarketization 114, 116, 120, 124–38 urbanization levels 5 see also individual Southern African countries Southern African Development Community (SADC) 114, 129– 30, 136 space and poverty 23–5 spatial diffusion 170 spatial elongation 152–3

412  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South spatial-planning concept 351, 353 spatial relations, city-regions 343–4, 345–6, 352 spatial variation analysis 14 spatially-related costs 120 Sri Lanka 27, 179 state-centrism 352, 354 state collaboration, food-system governance 366 state-owned firms 156, 331, 334 Steele, Carolyn 219 Storper, M. 351 street vendors 29–31, 205 FAFH source 41 governance 209–11 migrants as 276 rural–urban food systems 172 WIEGO database 200 women as 224, 387 structural changes 309, 319–20, 323 agrifood systems 170–72 dietary patterns 168–9 midstream value chains 146, 151, 152–7 stunting 8, 26, 79–93, 382 sub-Saharan Africa food wastage 333 hunger 62 imported food 67 obesity 26, 84, 86, 89–91 poverty 37 primary food production 178–9 rain-fed systems 48 retail 172, 176 stunting 84, 86, 89–91 supermarket revolution 116 urban agriculture 238, 241, 243–4 urban growth 68 wholesale markets 175 see also individual sub-Saharan African countries subsidies, cheap food 62–78 Sudan 268 sugar consumption 90 supermarketization/supermarket revolution 113–44 food safety 318–20 food system 203–4 implications 115–24 industrial agriculture 67

in LMICs 385–6 patterns of 113–16 waves of 113, 115–16 supermarkets/supermarket chains buyer power 114–15, 118, 135–7 city-region approach 355 codes of conduct 139 concentration levels 117–18 consumer purchasing behaviour 173 diversification of forms 128 formats/offerings 129 infrastructure 372–3 internationalization 113–16, 125, 128–32 processed food 170 procurement system changes 170–71 scope economics 157 Southern African select countries 131 spread 118–21 standards 123, 136 supplier development programmes 139–40 supply chains demand for food 47 informal food sector 213 supermarkets 122, 135 use of term 145 supply networks, supermarkets 130 supply-side factors food security 308 supermarket revolution 113–14, 116, 118–19, 121–4, 135–7 surplus dumping 66 sustainability, urban experimentation 104 sustainable development 11–13 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 12, 25, 104, 322–3, 342, 346–7 sustainable food systems 52 Swain, R. 224 Swaziland 286, 288, 291 Swinburn, B. 382 “symbiosis” 157 Syria 268 systems view 313–14, 343 see also food systems Tacoli, C. 283 Taiwan 151, 389 Tanzania 39, 41, 178, 241, 250, 294 Tasciotti, L. 234–7, 241, 256

Index  413 Tawodzera, G. 273, 275 tax compliance, informal sector 211–12 technological change 43, 71–2, 80, 159, 308 temperate regions’ productivity 70 territorial development 345 territorial planning 341, 348, 353 territorial/relational divide 351–2 territory-centric approach 357 territory–place–scale network 352, 358 tertiary stage food processing 170, 172 Thailand 151, 155, 158, 315 Thebo, A. 235 tied output-credit markets 159–60 time poverty 29 time trends, stunting/obesity 82, 84, 88, 90 Timmer, C. 147 Torm, N. 211 Towers in the Park (Le Courbusier) 100–101 towns agrifood investment 185–7 functional approach 350 hinterland linkages 348–9 investment environment 189–90 population growth 167 retail choices 173 rural–urban interface 187–8 services provision 180 traceability 320 trade impacts, supermarketization 123–4, 138 trade and investment policies 389 trade liberalization policies 150 traditional food system 49–51, 172, 175–7, 187 TRANSFORM framework 52–6 transgenic crops 316–17 transitions approach 15–16 see also nutrition transition; urban transition transnational retail chains 117, 128, 130 transport systems demand for food 47 food value chains 149–50, 152, 155, 174 infrastructure deficit 373 primary food production 177–8 tropical regions 70

Tschirley, D. 169, 176 Tunisia 386 Uganda city-region approach 355–6 refugee population 268 remittance flows 286, 294 street vendors 209 urban agriculture 241, 244, 250 UK see United Kingdom UN see United Nations UN-Habitat (UNHSP) 347, 349 see also New Urban Agenda undernutrition 8, 10–11, 26, 81, 380 UNDP sources, urban agriculture 234 UNHCR Database, migrants 268 UNHSP see UN-Habitat United Kingdom (UK) 122, 137 United Nations (UN) 95, 97 United States (US) city-region approach 353–4 distribution centres 121 food banks 329–30 food-system governance 364, 366 industrial agriculture 64, 66 midstream value chains 156 Paris Climate Agreement withdrawal 97 social housing 100 urban population 167 Unwin, Raymond 99 UPA see urban and peri-urban agriculture upgrading effects 124, 136–8 upstream food system 145–7, 150 urban, comparative definitions 237 urban agriculture 13, 27, 48 at different income levels 250–53 data descriptions 236–8 definitions 178–9, 234, 236–8, 256 diversification 256 expenditure measures 250–53 income share from 241–7 in low- and middle- income countries 233–60 participation in 241–7, 250–53 quantifying importance of 234–6 urban experimentation 94, 98–108 urban food-security policies 345 urban growth, industrial agriculture 66–8 urban margins, cheap food 62–78

414  Handbook on urban food security in the Global South urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) 47–9, 179, 225, 387–8 urban population increase 2–4 urban–rural differences city-region approach 344–5 social safety nets 383–4 stunting/obesity 79–93 urban–rural linkages 355–6 urban–rural remittance flows 282–3, 291 urban transition drivers 1 nutrition transition relation 23 second wave 2–6 urban–urban remittance flows 291–2, 293–4 urbanization agrifood value chains 145–65 country variations 5 economic growth 24, 37–9 food system changes 166–8 of poverty 219–20 radiating effects 148 regional levels 3 second transition 2, 5 trends, 1990–2030 4 see also rapid urbanization US see United States value-added growth 37, 38–9 value-based food consumption 40 value chains agrifood 145–65, 170–71 city-region approach 355–6 demand for food 47 dis-intermediation 153–5, 174 midstream changes 174–7, 178 organizational change 160–61 use of term 145 van Hengel, John 329 van Westen, A. 356 Vietnam dietary transformation 149 informal food sector 211, 224, 386 midstream value chains 151, 158, 160–61 poultry sector 315–16, 321 retail changes 172 rice sector 150 Von Thünen, J. 152 Vorley, B. 283

wage labour, migration 67 Walton, Sam 121 Ward, K. 352 Wardrop, J. 224 wasted food 44–5, 328–48 wasting 8, 26 water access to 29 availability reduction 44 contamination 26 industrial agriculture demand 65 Welwyn garden city 99, 101 Western Africa demand for food 47 overnutrition problem 10 primary food production 178 urban agriculture 236, 244, 253, 256 urbanization levels 5 see also individual Western African countries Western Europe 113, 115, 156 see also individual Western European countries wet markets 315–16, 321, 386 White, S. 225 WHO see World Health Organization wholesale markets 171–2, 174–7 wholesalers 50, 122, 150, 154, 157 WIEGO see Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing Williams, C. 205 Windhoek, Namibia, case study 296–301 women farmer fairs 183 food safety issues 321 income poverty 28 informal employment 223–4, 387 LMIC populations 388 obesity 79–82, 85–6, 88, 90–91 poverty and 383–4 slum life 29 urban agriculture 253 urbanization and 219–20 see also gender Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) 200 World Bank Group 34–5, 82

Index  415 World Health Organization (WHO) 79, 81–2 Yi, D. 153 young people 74 Zambia income poverty 27 infrastructure deficit 373 remittance flows 289, 294

supermarket chains 128, 136, 138 Zezza, A. 234–7, 241, 256 Zimbabwe city-region approach 355 informal food sector 209 infrastructure deficit 373 migration 272–6 remittance flows 286, 288–9 supermarket chains 128, 130, 136, 138 zoonotic diseases 309–10, 314, 321