Food: What is the future of food production and supply in growing cities?
While conventional food production often occurs in the countryside, cities are now at the forefront of sustainable food production, consumption, and waste management.
While conventional food production often occurs in the countryside, cities are now at the forefront of sustainable food production, consumption, and waste management.
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As cities grow, the demand for food production and supply becomes increasingly complex. The need to ensure that urban populations have access to fresh, healthy, and sustainable food has become a major challenge for many cities around the world. This challenge is particularly acute in the immediate suburban areas surrounding cities, which often face unique pressures and constraints related to food production and supply.
One of the key issues facing suburban areas is the loss of agricultural land to urbanization. As cities expand, prime agricultural land is often converted into housing developments or commercial areas, reducing the capacity for local food production. This loss of agricultural land can also lead to a loss of biodiversity, increased runoff, and reduced ecosystem services.
The future of food and cities have much in common: they have similar characteristics and aspirations, and for them to be successful, their systems must be circular, and multifunctional. In the immediate future, rural and peri-urban landscape remain critical to food production and to absorb the expansion of the nearby urban landscape. A key dimension in the future of food production in cities is to maintain or develop efficient and multifunctional peri-urban agriculture.
Two research teams are working on this topic on food and settlement systems, but at two very distinctive locations: in Southeast Asia and Madagascar.
In a first project, we are particularly interested in the monsoon Asia region which covers the majority of South and Southeast Asia. We call these rapidly urbanising and food producing regions agropolitan territories.
The landscape of these regions are very different from the West: its proximity to some of the largest megacities in the world, its rich and complex history, its unique development patterns, and more importantly its ability to support density and multi-functional communities.
Urban-rural food system flows are often one-directional: they go from production to consumption, and result in a linear nutrient flow, which heightens rural soil and water resource degradation, and increases food waste.
A future-proof food system must pay attention to waste management. Therefore, we propose a system that allows planners and scientists to work together and more importantly to track progress towards food system circularity over time.
Black Soldier Flies are fast-growing endemic insects but also one of the nature-based solutions to tackle food waste in fast growing cities. These insects can convert food waste into high- quality animal feed and fertilisers, which can then be used by other forms of urban agriculture such as vertical farming, indoor farming, aquaponics etc. Using Black Soldier Flies, typical Singapurian dishes, such as chicken rice and prata with curry, are upcycled into high-quality by-products that carry back valuable nutrients into the food chain, such as fish and chicken feed and fertilisers.
In our second project, in the city of Antananarivo in Madagascar, we engage with decision makers about the possibility that investing in multifunctional peri-urban agriculture can provide many benefits, as potentially valuable future strategy. Next to the obvious function to provide food, this type of agriculture can contribute at the same time to regulate floods, store water, provide income as well as build beautiful and agreeable green spaces for a good quality of life.
Ideally, we muster diverse science disciplines to this agriculture, assess the bundle of benefits provided and engage discussions at a policy level to give a chance for this idea before conventional urbanisation and artificialisation of soil takes that option away.
Sustainable Development Goals
