Are we just re-framing current practices or driving new action?

The (mal)nutrition of the urban poor can no longer be ignored.

In the next 15 years over 1 billion more people will be added to cities and around 90% of them will live in cities in Africa and Asia. These projections have led policy makers to finally ask the question: how are we going to feed the world’s cities? However, the discussion has mainly focused on the production side of food systems and looking for new avenues for smallholder farmers to produce for these new markets. This emphasis, however, has potential drawbacks: firstly, we are in danger of using the current rhetoric to just reframe current agricultural and food system strategies as being important to city food security but not actually changing current ineffective practices or attempting to incorporate urban development analysis; secondly, we are forgetting an enormous disenfranchised group of people: the urban poor. If we, however, analyse the entire food value chain, consumption patterns and urbanization trends we will have a better chance to find more effective solutions.

The story of Yasmin and Yanti highlights some of these dynamics. Yasmin is a young girl living in the slums of one of Asia’s megacities whom we wish would eat more fruits and vegetables to improve her nutritional status and Yanti is a smallholder farmer in the surrounding rural hinterlands who has decided to grow more fruits and vegetables instead of rice. The megacity Yasmin lives in has terrible roads connected to Yanti’s farm and the city’s government has not invested in public goods such as public transport in the past decade. Traffic is congested and transport of the fruits and vegetables from Yanti’s farm to the city takes so long that large percentages of the produce is lost. After one year of poor sales and large losses, Yanti shifts back to growing rice, which she can sell to a local retailer.

Yasmin faces also other problems because many of the local wet markets and small supermarkets sell poorer quality fruits and vegetables for a much larger price than in better reachable neighbourhoods.

However, even if fruits and vegetables do make it to Yasmin’s household several more issues could arise. For instance an informal food retailer could purchase the fruits and vegetables from the wet markets and peel them and cut them on the side of the street to earn a living. Yasmin’s mother could afford to purchase some of this produce but only in small quantities and designate the majority of the food to the young girl’s brothers, Azrul and Budi, as girls are often last to be fed. Poor sanitation standards of the slums and low educational levels of the informal entrepreneur create another danger: the food may be unsafe due to contamination and unsafe food handling practices. Yasmin may more often contract diarrhoea thus further depleting her food and micronutrient intake.

The mother of Yasmin works in the informal sector and has to travel every day for more than 4 hours to and from work. She has no time to cook and quite often buys snacks, which are produced by other slum dwellers, e.g., fried tapioca. These products are helping to get a full stomach but are mainly empty calories. Yasmin is not very tall, and this diet will increase her risk of becoming overweight.

These types of issues relating to nutrition insecurity that Yanti, her household and her city face affect millions of other poor city inhabitants living across the globe. In the region of southern Africa, studies have shown that only 17% of the urban poor are food secure, and in some areas this drops as low as 2%, and 57% are severely food insecure. On average, when disregarding non-nutritive food groups such as sugar and beverages, households tend to eat only 4 food groups and the majority of their diet consists of starchy staples. This means many urban poor households are food insecure and lack dietary diversity. Many children suffer from stunting and obesity is rising especially for urban poor women.

These malnutrition trends are common across many low and middle-income country cities; however different country contexts and city specific dynamics create additional unique food sourcing patterns. This is evident within southern Africa. In some cities urban inhabitants source most of their food from supermarkets. However in other cities such as Lusaka small stores and informal street vendors still play a larger role in food sourcing. While, in Harare, due to hyperinflation and political turmoil, food purchasing became so costly Harare became the only city in the region that significantly uses urban agriculture as a food source.

If we are to develop food systems that improve the nutrition of the urban poor we have to look at the entire chain from production, infrastructure, food waste and food safety to gender issues, access and consumption desires.