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.