Hot and Hungry Cities: The Future of Urban Food Wars

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 | JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN

JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN
DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, MANAGING ACROSS BOUNDARIES, STIMSON CENTER

This century will be defined by two trends: how we manage climate change and how we manage the rise of megacities. Over the next 20 years, the global urban population will grow from 3.5 to 5 billion people. The strain on resources and the environmental stresses that accompany the growth of cities – especially in brimming urban centers like Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lagos, Nigeria; and Mexico City – will create even more challenges as access to food and clean water become increasingly limited. It is no wonder that in 2015 the National Intelligence Council determined that food security is a national security matter. Countries facing severe shortages of food or affected by climate change are also the most vulnerable to destabilizing conflicts that affect U.S. interests around the globe.

Yet it is only recently that food security practitioners, traditionally focused on rural areas, have begun to turn their attention to megacities. In the world’s massive urban centers, migration from rural areas – often the result of vulnerable populations fleeing conflict or environmental degradation – has created new challenges to ending global poverty and hunger.

Many of these urban migrants will be forced out of the countryside by the ongoing impact of droughts, conflict, and the lack of opportunities for employment in rural areas. But consider this: roughly 60 percent of the world’s cropland lies just on the outskirts of cities. China is expected to lose one-quarter of the global cropland because of the expansion of cities into peri-urban areas that once were the source of local farming and food supplies. The disappearance of productive land near urban centers will impact the availability of staple crops like maize, rice, soy, and wheat – the basis of global food security. This is especially true in countries like Nigeria or China, where projections for crop loss due to urbanization means that the states will have to import more food.

When people think about food insecurity, they often associate it with the impact of climate change on rural areas. Make no mistake, drought and conflict, as well as an enduring lack of infrastructure that limits farmers from selling what they produce, continues to devastate sub-Saharan Africa. But these factors also push people to migrate to cities. By 2030, urban areas will triple in size and will have a significant impact on productivity of agriculture in farmlands that were once used to supply food to these megacities.

More than other challenges we face in this century, food security is complex precisely because to ensure access and availability of food requires that many other factors align, such as good governance and the resilience of infrastructure. It requires more changes in behavior, the development of new farming technologies, and a radically different approach to land use.

Most important to a country’s ability to feed its citizens is the quality of its governance. Weak or failing states are incapable or lack the political will to support the needs of their citizens to obtain food or to gain technical assistance from NGOs and foreign governments to enable them to grow more crops, have better access to technology, or even basic information about weather. Many countries are unable to enforce land rights because adequate legal protections are not in place. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, conflicts will continue to drain state resources and extend this cycle. Conflicts that show no signs of ending send a troubling signal to private sector investors who are essential partners in many programs geared toward expanding a nation’s capacity to grow and market food – and make it more widely accessible to vulnerable populations.

Mobile phone companies and software producers are among the business interests most able to help conditions in Asia and Africa, which happen to be the two fastest growing markets for these technologies. By 2025, there will be more than 360 million smartphones in Africa. With small farmers producing 80 percent of the food in developing countries, integrated agricultural data apps are playing a powerful role in helping farmers set prices for their goods. M-Farm, a messaging application, is doing this for more than 7,000 users. These apps also help women in urban market settings with information about competitive pricing of crops. Syngenta, and agriculture biotechnology company, created a text-driven app, Kilimo Salama, that is providing up-to-the-minute information to farmers in Kenya. These same applications also play a significant role in protecting crops by alerting growers of adverse weather events.

In the near-term, food security assistance must address the immediate needs of those moving into cities. This challenge will only grow as the world’s population continues to urbanize.

Technological advances in urban farming are now beyond mere experiments. They are becoming disrupters of more traditional approaches to agriculture. Vertical farms both afford crops and provide employment for many people who reside in cities.

Food security requires complex, multi-system approaches that still seem out of reach to most of the countries slated to be megacities by 2030. Plans for addressing these needs must consider how food production and consumption can be transformed to be both carbon neutral, abundant, and available to the world’s growing appetite. Failure to address these challenges in the short run will create conditions that are ripe for more conflicts and more climate migrants. We could be looking at new era of urban food wars if we do not address the issues of how to feed 9 billion people by mid-century.

THE AUTHOR IS JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN

Johanna Mendelson Forman is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center’s Managing Across Boundaries Program in Washington, D.C. and an Adjunct Professor at the School of International Service at American University. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work has been informed by field experience in Haiti, Guatemala, Colombia, Iraq, and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations Foundation,... Read More

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