Cities, Food and Agriculture: Challenges and the Way Forward

This policy briefing has been prepared for the international
expert consultation organised by FAO-Food for the
Cities (FAO-FCIT1) and RUAF Foundation2 (24-25 September,
2009, in Rome), attended by some 25 experts on urban
food security and urban agriculture from international
organisations, including senior staff of FAO, RUAF
Foundation, IDRC, CGIAR-Urban Harvest, UN-HABITAT,
World Bank, IFAD, Rockefeller Foundation, IWMI, CIRAD,
IFPRI, ICLEI, GTZ, Heifer Int., Biodiversity Int., WFP and
Milano 2015.

It provides evidence-based “food for thought and action”

to senior policy makers in member states and relevant UN
agencies, for example potential participants of upcoming
events such as the High Level conference “How to Feed the
World in 2050”, the World Summit on Food Security and the meeting of the UN Task force “Humanitarian
Challenges in Urban Areas”. The document intends to
stimulate and facilitate the development of pro-poor
policies for urban and peri-urban agriculture at international,
national and city levels.
Such policies will not only contribute to improving urban
food security and nutrition, especially of the urban poor,
but also to building more resilient cities by providing
vulnerable urban groups with new opportunities for
income and job creation, reducing the urban food(t) print
and food-related energy use, facilitating productive reuse
of urban (organic) waste, improving urban water management
and creating a better urban living climate (urban
greening, heat reduction, CO2 capture, biodiversity). As
such, urban and peri-urban agriculture not only constitutes
an important social safety net in periods of food and
economic crises, but it is also an essential component of
strategies for building sustainable and healthy cities.