WUNRN
URBAN POVERTY, FOOD SECURITY &
CLIMATE CHANGE - WOMEN
Direct Link to Full 35-Page 2013
Publication: http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/10623IIED.pdf
The steady increases in food prices that culminated in the spikes of 2007–08 have brought food security back on the global policy agenda. Climate change, population growth,inefficient markets, the unsustainable use of natural resources and consumption patterns converge in putting pressure on current and future food availability and access. But while there is a growing interest in food systems that encompass all dimensions from production to final consumption, most policy prescriptions focus on addressing rural food production and tend to neglect the crucial importance of access and affordability for low-income groups and more specifically for poor urban residents.
Food insecurity is closely connected to poverty; throughout the world, rural poverty remains deeper and more widespread than urban poverty. With the rapid urbanisation of low- and middle-income countries, however, poverty is increasingly located in urban areas and this will continue as virtually all global population growth in the next three decades is expected to be in cities and towns of Africa and Asia. Given urban residents’ dependence on food purchases, food insecurity will increasingly become an urban issue. Low-income urban residents in low- and middle-income countries are also likely to be the most vulnerable to the increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods and cyclones. This, in turn, will have a negative impact on their incomes, both by increasing expenditure and reducing their ability to earn; it will also exacerbate non-income dimensions of poverty related to inadequate living conditions. In addition, the links with relatives and kin in home areas that often provide safety nets for both rural and urban households, including transfers and exchanges of food and cash, are likely to be affected by the disruptions caused by environmental change.
The adverse impacts of the food prices crisis on low-income urban residents have been described extensively; there is also a growing literature that examines the consequences of climate change on agricultural production and, to a lesser extent, on transport and storage systems. To date, however, there have been few attempts to understand the links between climate change and urban food insecurity, albeit with some notable exceptions (Ziervogel and Frayne, 2011; Frayne et al., 2012). One obvious reason for this is that shocks and stresses of various kinds — economic, political, and environmental — and at different scales — global, national, city-wide, community-wide and at the household and individual levels — are ever present in the lives of people living in low-income urban settlements. Such shocks and stresses interact and have a cumulative effect that makes it difficult to attribute their impacts to any specific event. The aim of this paper is to build on current understandings of urban poverty and urban food insecurity to explore how the impacts of climate change are likely to exacerbate current and future challenges.
