Ancient cities were established, organically, where food production and distribution systems were sustainable. Much later, when the discipline of urban planning first started to emerge, it had a strong interest in food systems as they connect to cities and their hinterland. But, for various reasons, that connection quickly lost out. More and more, food production was gradually seen as part of general agriculture policies, international trade, or other priority is not directly related to local urban dynamics.
There is now an emerging salutary shift toward explicitly recognizing, studying and promoting the linkages between urban settlements and food production and supply systems around them. Why should the study of urban plans include detailed studies of transport systems, electronic communication systems, security systems etc. and not look—and integrate in its planning—something as fundamental as the system to supply food to the urban population? MENA is timidly part of that shift.
Why look at “city region food systems”?
The post-industrialization concept of urban agriculture has come a long way. Twenty years have passed since the UN Development Programme launched during the Habitat II summit in Istanbul the book that I coauthored with Jac Smit and Annu Ratta which helped bring the concept to global attention (Smit, Nasr and Ratta, 1996). From a narrow definition of urban agriculture the haphazard production of food in abandoned urban lots, this publication and others since have helped connect urban agriculture with the concept of “urban food systems”. Components of these “systems” include: the food that urban people consume (demand); the policies that guide where and how food is produced/stored/processed/traded; and the “intra-community and global marketing systems that move food from producers to consumers” More recently, the concept of city region food systems started to be applied to an even more expansive approach that connects urban-rural linkages to food systems.
To the chagrin of many, this recognition of a link between local and global has so far not gone far enough. The strengthening of city region food systems is not an explicit Goal as part of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals globallyagreed to, but it contributes directly to a number of goals including related to poverty (Goal1), food security (Goal2), sustainable consumption and production systems (Goal12), and the protection of natural resources (Goal15).
Closer to the ground, this inter-relationship of sectors and the continuum between rural agriculture and urban agriculture, and between urban planning and urban agriculture led to the “bottom-up” alliance among city leaders around the world into a Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (or MUFPP) first agreed in that city in October 2015. By now, there are 124 cities (including medium-size cities as well as large metropolises like New York and Paris, and (only) two Arab capitals—Algiers and Tunis —that signed the Pact. The Pact includes a handful of commitments by all cities (inclusive and resilient food systems for all; inter-sectoral and inter-departmental implementation; coherence at various “subsidiarity” levels –from local to global; multi-stakeholder involvement in policy definition and implementation; reform of urban policies and plans to integrate food systems). More tangibly, the Pact also includes a framework for action along priority directions: multi-stakeholder governance; increased nutrition; social and economic equity; sustainable food production; equitable, safe and efficient food supply and distribution; minimization of food waste.
In the Arab countries, we would not be (re-)starting from scratch. There are laudable efforts to preserve and promote Urban Agriculture. A shining example is the work done by researchers such as my former colleagues Shadi Hamadeh and Salwa Tohme Tawk of the Environment and Sustainable Development Unit (ESDU) of the American University of Beirut. They demonstrated a few years ago, shortly before the ugly destruction of large swaths of Sana’a, Yemen, that principles of urban agriculture could be integrated in the reform of policies of Amman and Sana’a, to take advantage of the (still significant) arable land within and around Arab cities and put them to good use for the production of safe food to local city dwellers.
The MUFFP seems to address some of the gaps that were previously noted in the SDG-led efforts on the city region-food system front by some. They were advocating for a more complex set of issues to be explicitly addressed by the SDG efforts: the need for more focus on obesity as a form of malnourishment; the need to more explicitly focus on the access component of food insecurity –urban poverty and physical unavailability of food, and the increasing role of supermarkets at the detriment of small stores and the informal sector in the food supply system .
Ultimately, to enable the adoption of systemic responses to urban food supply challenges, it becomes necessary to recognize the multi-faceted nature of urban food security (dealing not only with availability of food and access to it, but also with its adequacy, its acceptability to those consuming it and their capacity to act to secure it.
The next Mayors Summit (grouping the signatories of the MUFPP) will take place in a few weeks in Rome (13-14 October, 2016); on the margins of the World Food Day celebrations). The two practical questions on their agenda: how to ensure that cities are integrated in food supply network as part of a “systems” approach; and how to monitor progress in achieving the ambitious goals of the MUFPP at concrete, local levels. These are important questions for Arab cities, large and small—surviving and looking forward to rebuilding their food systems and the regions underpinning the functioning of these systems on better grounds. Will Arab cities be there?
