The steady increases in food prices that culminated in the spikes of 2007–08 have brought food security back on the global policy agenda. Climate change, population growth, inefficient markets, the unsustainable use of natural resources and consumption patterns converge in putting pressure on current and future food availability and access. But while there is a growing interest in food systems that encompass all dimensions from production to final consumption, most policy prescriptions focus on addressing rural food production and tend to neglect the crucial importance of access and affordability for low-income groups and more specifically for poor urban residents....

Food security has been a development and equity concern for many decades. As Amartya Sen pointed out over three decades ago, ‘starvation is the characteristic of people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being enough food to eat’ (Sen, 1981). The definition that is still most widely used was coined at the 1996 World Food Summit. It states that ‘food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy...

Progress in reducing global chronic malnutrition has slowed down since the major spikes in food prices in 2007 and 2008, and recent estimates put the total number of chronically undernourished people in the period 2010–2012 at 870 million; all but 20 million live in low- and middle-income countries. But while in 1990―92 and 2010―12 the number of chronically undernourished people as a proportion of the total population declined in Southeast and East Asia and Latin America, it increased disturbingly in South Asia (from 32.7 to 35 per cent) and sub-Saharan Africa (from 17 to 27 per cent) (FAO et...

Climate change amplifies the environmental and socio-economic drivers of food insecurity, as its impacts are deeply affected by poverty and inequality. Over time, climate change will affect all four components of food security: availability, access, utilisation and stability (FAO, 2009; Vermeulen et al., 2012). Currently, attention focuses mainly on availability, that is, on production. However, climate change’s impacts on incomes and livelihoods and thus on access is equally important for the vast and growing majority of people, and in particular for low-income groups in both rural and urban areas, who purchase their food rather than produce it. The majority of...

Increases in food prices affect net food buyers, that is, those individuals and households that produce less than what they consume. One widely held assumption is that rural residents have been relatively less affected by the price hikes of 2008. But more detailed examination shows that this is not necessarily the case. In Guatemala, a country where almost half the population lives in urban centres, with high levels of dependence on food imports and a high rate of rural landlessness, it was the rural poor who were most affected by the prices crisis. Even among farmers — even some large...

In many cases, urbanisation is implicitly assumed to lead to changes in consumption behaviour and dietary patterns that are resource intensive, such as greater consumption of meat, and therefore have a negative impact on increasingly scarce natural resources. A review of the relationship between urbanisation and food prices suggests, however, that there is little evidence to support this view (Stage et al., 2009). The term urbanisation is often used to include urban population growth, urban expansion, income growth and cultural change. But conflating all these dimensions can be problematic and of little help to understanding the role of urbanisation in...

Urbanisation is often conflated with the expansion of built-up areas and the loss of agricultural land. To some extent this is inevitable: most cities tend to be located in areas with fertile soils, and in many cases it is precisely such fertility and the availability of fresh water that determine the location of urban centres (Satterthwaite et al., 2010). Overall, urban built-up areas represent a very small proportion of global land area at 0.5 per cent (Schneider et al., 2009) and only in Europe does this exceed 1 per cent. Other estimates suggest 2.7 percent, taking into account open land...

Comparisons of the nutritional status of children in rural and urban areas almost invariably show that urban children are better off than their rural counterparts, although differences diminish when stunting and underweight are taken into account (Ruel and Garrett, 2004). However, aggregate figures tend to underplay inequalities within locations. Urban centres typically concentrate wealthier and better-educated groups, but while much poverty is still located in rural areas, urban populations are highly unequal with regard to incomes, education and access to basic services. Dietary diversity — the number of foods and food groups consumed over a set period of time —...

The root cause of urban food insecurity is income poverty. Urban residents rely primarily on food purchases, and any decline in incomes and/or increases in food prices can have catastrophic consequences. In recent research on how the food, fuel and financial shocks affected low-income groups in the period 2008―2011, food security emerged 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 only provide low and irregular earnings. In low-income nations, it is estimated that informal employment accounts for half to three-quarters of all...

In addition to the income-related challenges that low-income urban groups face daily in accessing food of sufficient quality and quantity, non-income dimensions can also have considerable impacts on their food security. These include lack of space and lack of time, and since food preparation is typically one of women’s responsibilities as primary caregivers, they are also heavily gendered.

Lack of space in the home is an additional obstacle to buying food in larger quantities and thus more cheaply. In Greater Cairo, where poverty is assumed to be low and almost negligible compared to other Egyptian governorates, the majority of households...

With half of the world’s population estimated to live in urban areas, and virtually all population growth expected to be in urban areas of low- and middle-income regions, now is the time for policies to address the challenges but also take advantage of the opportunities of this momentous demographic, social and economic shift (UNFPA, 2007). Food security will continue to be one of the key challenges of this century, and climate change will act as a multiplier of the many underlying factors that underpin growing insecurity. Increasing and more volatile food prices will continue to affect all net food buyers,...