Asian Cities Food Resilience
By Dr Arvind Kumar
Experts at a recently held UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) workshop in Bangkok on resilient food systems in Asia said that Asia’s largest cities will need to maximize every bit of space, from rooftops to railroad tracks, to feed one of the world’s fastest-growing populations. Although fewer people live in cities than in Asia’s rural areas – approximately 43 percent – the UN projects an 89 percent increase in the region’s urban population (1.6 billion people) by 2050. According to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), Asia had 12 megacities of more than 10 million people each, half the world’s population and the second-fastest rate of urbanization worldwide as of 2010. Brian Roberts, an Australia-based urban management specialist, has opined that feeding this expanding urban population will be a ‘challenge’ due to the widespread lack of land tenure and access to cash and markets – and the resulting lack of incentive to farm – as well as insufficient rural-to-urban food transport and storage.
According to Carla Lacerda, a programme officer with the World Food Programme (WFP) regional office for Asia, it is hard to target hunger in cities because urban issues are intricate. It is easier for humanitarian agencies to get into, but harder to come out because [the issues] are mostly about development and government responsibilities.
Additional challenges include the risk of luring rural dwellers away from depressed economies and degrading farms with urban food programmes; overlapping with agencies pursuing development goals; the increased difficulty of supporting livelihoods in cities rather than rural areas; and the challenge to measure impact due to scattered living arrangements.
