Do you find the proposed scope comprehensive to analyze and discuss the key issues concerning the role of urban and peri-urban food systems in achieving food security and nutrition? Are there any major gaps or omissions?
Urban Agriculture (UA) should be viewed from economic, social and environmental dimensions to explore the benefits and impacts, including food and nutrition security. The food security and nutrition status of the people actively engaged in farming in the urban and peri-urban areas are largely governed by the income and employment opportunities of the city people. The issue of land (i.e. more profitable use) along with policy bottlenecks has been well covered in the document, but also, the issue of employment is equally important as agriculture is the major source of livelihood in developing countries. For example, in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal (a UA environment), many educated youths from rural Nepal have been doing UA practices focusing on vegetables and livestock through a short-term contractual arrangement of land that has created income and full-time employment benefits ( indirect indicators for food security and nutrition indicators). In the city areas, the local governments have a lot of unutilised public lands, and those can be utilised in UA practices like urban gardening ( for recreation) and commercial UA, including edible gardens for better social, economic and environmental benefits leading towards food and nutritional security and minimising carbon footprints, but there is a lack of regulatory framework for long-term utilisation of lands and integrating UA component in the city development plan The document raised the issue of policy incoherence which is a very good aspect for the development of UA.
Share recent literature, case studies and data that could help answer the following questions:
The following three recent articles will be insightful ( for questions 1 to 11):
Mr. Arun Kafle