Why Food Policy is Urban Policy

Consider: 1. By 2050 we can project that about 70 percent of the world's population will live in urban centres, and the majority of urban growth will occur in developing nations. [1. Population Reference Bureau, Human Population: Urbanism.]

2. By 2050, to feed a global population projected at nine billion, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000". [2. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Quoted here.]

6.3 billion urban dwellers, mostly in poorer nations, within the next 40 years. Urban growth and sustainability depends not only on rural sustainability, but on imbrication of producer and consumer systems – the two must be considered as a whole. Initiatives like the New City Market are the beginnings of a re-imagining of our food systems based on an understanding that there can be no urban/rural divide in a strong food economy. Indeed, that this divide, which assumes consumption as separate or even as wholly divorced from production, is the root of our failing food systems. The competition for resources and land between cities and farms only exacerbates this.

Forward-looking urban policy must understand and incorporate food systems as a primary and foundational precondition to any and all growth. This change can not be limited to just land-use issues, but institutional food procurement policies, tax and fee incentives, waste management, urban food production, transportation infrastructure, regulatory change, downstream/storm water pollution abatement and so on. An urban system based on an understanding of, and integration with, its surrounding food systems can work as an engine of food security instead of an ecological and economic liability.

We not only need to think of the food economy as an endangered ecosystem that exists right on the borders and shores of our cities and act as if a city's continued prosperity depends on the survival of that system (it does), we also need to act with the understanding that cities are a part of and can strengthen that system as well.

UPDATE: This timely video from the WWF illustrates the above mentioned situation with stunning efficacy.

More videos here.