المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this important consultation. Attached is my contribution entered in the template provided. I am also pasting the key messages below for easy reference 

A.    Overall, we need a comprehensive food-system approach to understand food security for urbanites, particularly those with low-incomes;

B.    We need to critically examine concepts of urban, peri-urban and rural, and how these are defined in various contexts as well as the blurring of conceptual boundaries.

C.    While urban agriculture is important, it may not play as important a role in urban food security as the urban food-security discourse suggests. Attention to other aspects of urban food supply and distribution is also needed. 

D.    As Amartya Sen argued many decades ago, food security is mostly about purchasing power and entitlements, hence attention to incomes and livelihoods is of utmost importance to the question of food security, particularly in urban areas.

E.    The world currently produces enough food to generously feed the global population, in addition to incomes and entitlements, more focus needs to be placed on reducing food waste throughout the production and consumption change, particularly post-harvest losses (see Yasmeen 2014). 

F.    The important role of women in the agri-food system, should not be ignored. Women play a key role in both food production and consumption in rural and urban areas.

Municipal policies with respect to livelihoods, including within the urban food-system are as important as agricultural and food-distribution systems and related policies.