Cape Town is one of the wealthiest cities in the Southern African region. Yet, the vast majority of households in poor areas of the city experience food insecurity. This paper uses AFSUN data to examine the characteristics and drivers of food insecurity in Cape Town. While food insecurity correlates closely with income poverty and household structure, broader factors also impact upon urban food security, most notably urban design and market structure. Efforts to address urban food insecurity should therefore not simply target the household. Instead, a food systems approach is necessary, which considers supply chains, procurement, nutrition support programmes, public health, environmental sustainability, water and waste, the support of local enterprise and so on. Furthermore, this approach must consider the geography of the urban food system, in particular planning and zoning regulations regarding the location of both formal and informal food retail within low-income areas of the city.

This book investigates food security and the implications of hyper-urbanisation and rapid growth of urban populations in Africa. By means of a series of case studies involving African cities of various sizes, it argues that, while the concept of food security holds value, it needs to be reconfigured to fit the everyday realities and distinctive trajectory of urbanisation in the region. The book goes on to discuss the urban context, where food insecurity is more a problem of access and changing consumption patterns than of insufficient food production. In closing, it approaches food insecurity in Africa as an increasingly urban problem that requires different responses from those applied to rural populations.

Food Systems for an Urbanizing World is a joint report prepared by the World Bank and FAO. It aims to stimulate discussion and suggest pathways to support local and national governments, and civil society and private sector actors in their efforts to improve the performance and capacity of food systems. The report describes the diversity and ever-changing nature of food systems, with interlinked traditional, modern and informal channels that respond to different market segments and different consumer preferences. It also underscores the importance of targeting support to the type of city and food system. The task is not an easy one. Data are weak and empirical analysis is weaker. As cities’ engagement in urban food issues is relatively new, the institutions, governance mechanisms and capacities needed for effective design, implementation and delivery of this agenda must be strengthened. Finding effective ways to prioritize, mobilize and coordinate contributions from multiple sectors will be essential for achieving food system goals.

An electronic version of this book is available Open Access at www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. One of the major challenges of urban development has been reconciling the way cities develop with the mounting evidence of resource depletion and the negative environmental impacts of predominantly urban-based modes of production and consumption. This book aims to re-politicise the relationship between urban development, sustainability and justice, and to explore the tensions emerging under real circumstances, as well as their potential for transformative change. For some, cities are the root of all that is unsustainable, while for others cities provide unique opportunities for sustainability-oriented innovations that address equity and ecological challenges. This book is rooted in the latter category, but recognises that if cities continue to evolve along current trajectories they will be where the large bulk of the most unsustainable and inequitable human activities are concentrated. By drawing on a range of case studies from both the global South and global North, this book is unique in its aim to develop an integrated social-ecological perspective on the challenge of sustainable urban development. Through the interdisciplinary and original research of a new generation of urban researchers across the global South and North, this book addresses old debates in new ways and raises new questions about sustainable urban development. .

Over the last decade, two issues have risen to the top of the international development agenda: Food Security & Migration and Development. Each has its own agency champions, international gatherings, national line ministries and voluminous bodies of research. There is thus a massive institutional and substantive disconnect between these two development agendas. The reasons are hard to understand since the connections between migration and food security seem so obvious. Food security needs to be “mainstreamed” into the migration and development agenda and migration needs to be “mainstreamed” into the food security agenda. Without this happening, both agendas will proceed in ignorance of the other to the detriment of both. The result will be a singular failure to understand, and manage, the crucial reciprocal relationship between migration and food security. This paper aims to promote a conversation between food security and migration experts and policy-makers with particular reference to the crisis of urban food security in Africa. The empirical basis of the conversation is an AFSUN survey in 2008 and its findings on the differences between migrant and non-migrant households in 11 cities in Southern Africa.

Urban population growth is extremely rapid across Africa and this book places urban food and nutrition security firmly on the development and policy agenda. It shows that current efforts to address food poverty in Africa that focus entirely on small-scale farmers, to the exclusion of broader socio-economic and infrastructural approaches, are misplaced and will remain largely ineffective in ameliorating food and nutrition insecurity for the majority of Africans. Using original data from the African Food Security Urban Network’s (AFSUN) extensive database it is demonstrated that the primary food security challenge for urban households is access to food. Already linked into global food systems and value chains, Africa’s supply of food is not necessarily in jeopardy. Rather, the widespread poverty and informal urban fabric that characterizes Africa’s emerging cities impinge directly on households’ capacity to access food that is readily available. Through the analysis of empirical data collected from 6,500 households in eleven cities in nine countries in Southern Africa, the authors identify the complexity of factors and dynamics that create the circumstances of widespread food and nutrition insecurity under which urban citizens live. They also provide useful policy approaches to address these conditions that currently thwart the latent development potential of Africa’s expanding urban population.

As people increasingly migrate to urban settings and more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, it is vital to plan and provide for sustainable and resilient food systems which reflect this challenge. This volume presents experience and evidence-based "state of the art" chapters on the key dimensions of urban food challenges and types of intra- and peri-urban agriculture. The book provides urban planners, local policy makers and urban development practitioners with an overview of crucial aspects of urban food systems based on an up to date review of research results and practical experiences in both developed and developing countries. By doing so, the international team of authors provides a balanced textbook for students of the growing number of courses on sustainable agriculture, food and urban studies, as well as a solid basis for well-informed policy making, planning and implementation regarding the development of sustainable, resilient and just urban food systems.

This report marks the first stage of AFSUN’s goal of expanding knowledge about urban food systems and experiences of household food insecurity in secondary African cities. It contributes to an understanding of poverty and sustainability in Mzuzu, Malawi, through the lens of household food security. The focus on food as an urban issue not only speaks to the development challenges presented by urbanization, but it also brings a fresh perspective to debates about food security in Malawi. The urban setting highlights the changing food system in Malawi where people in rural and urban areas are increasingly reliant on cash income to buy food. The report’s key findings include that the most vulnerable households are those without a formal wage income, households headed by older people, especially older women, and households that are not able to produce food in the rural areas. The research also shows that the food system is dynamic and diverse, with households accessing food from a variety of formal and informal food sources and relying on rural-urban linkages for urban survival. Urban and rural agriculture are important features of the food system, but there is little evidence that these are the “self-help” responses to poverty that advocates for urban agriculture in Africa sometimes imply.

The ways in which the rapid urbanization of the Global South is transforming food systems and food supply chains, and the food security of urban populations is an often neglected topic. This international group of authors addresses this profound transformation from a variety of different perspectives and disciplinary lenses, providing an important corrective to the dominant view that food insecurity is a rural problem requiring increases in agricultural production.

The urban population in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) is expected to expand rapidly from 376 million people in 2015 to more than 1.25 billion people by 2050. Measuring and ensuring food security among urban households will become an increasingly pertinent task for development researchers and practitioners. In this paper we characterize food security among a sample of low- and middle-income residents of Accra, Ghana, using 2017 survey data. We find that households tend to purchase food from traditional markets, local stalls and kiosks, and street hawkers, and rarely from modern supermarkets. We characterize food security using three established metrics: the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS); the Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence (HFIAP); and the Food Consumption Score (FCS). We then estimate the determinants of food security using general linear models. The food security metrics are not strongly correlated. For example, according to HFIAP, as many as 70 percent of households sampled are food insecure, but only 2 percent fall below acceptable thresholds measured by FCS. Model results show that household education, assets, and dwelling characteristics are significantly associated with food security according to HFIAS and HFIAP, but not with FCS. The poor correlation and weak model agreement between the dietary recall metric, FCS, and the experience-based metrics, HFIAS and HFIAP, call for closer attention to measurement of urban food security. Given Africa’s urban future, our findings highlight the need for an urban-oriented comprehensive approach to the food security of urban households.