Using the CRFS approach to assess the resilience of Bengaluru's local food supply
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In 2020, a team of researchers adopted the City Region Food Systems (CRFS) approach to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply from rural producers to urban consumers in the Indian megacity of Bengaluru*. This article recounts the drivers of the study, and why the CRFS lens was ideally suited to the study objectives.
The study, funded by the German Research Foundation, was prompted by media reports that described how lockdown was impacting peri-urban farmers supplying the urban market in Bengaluru, explained Neda Yousefian, Doctoral Researcher at the University of Göttingen, Germany. With this sudden big shock to the food system, no-one was able to predict what would happen.
“Resilience becomes evident when a shock occurs. We can’t measure resilience without understanding how the shocks impact the food system,” said Yousefian.
The impact of the pandemic on Bengaluru’s food system
The immediate impacts of the lockdown included major disruptions to urban food supply. Initially the lockdown was extreme. Food producers were not allowed to travel, and wholesale markets were closed. Farmers lost their markets overnight. They had no option but to dump their milk, fruit and vegetable harvests.
As travel bans for food producers were lifted and food markets opened for a few hours each day, city residents were allowed to leave their homes to buy food – but there were some significant price increases.
Concern for farmer welfare grew and “lockdown farmers’ markets” emerged, supported by urban consumers who sought ways to buy directly from farmers. Other initiatives included Resident Welfare Associations sourcing fruits and vegetables directly from farmers via personal contacts, and farmer-controlled collectives that provide shared marketing and access to inputs, like Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) selling from mobile units outside apartment complexes.
Adopting the CRFS approach
In response to these events, Yousefian studied the impact of the pandemic on short food supply chains in Bengaluru and the emerging direct marketing activities. She found the CRFS methodology to be a good fit for the assessment: “As a PhD student, at the beginning of my studies, I was looking how to approach my work on food consumption practices and urbanisation in the context of a mega city in the global south. I came across the CRFS framework and it made sense. It’s very inclusive, adaptable, not a case of one size fits all. You can select CRFS elements that are more relevant to the local context and leave out others.”
Yousefian explained that in Bengaluru smallholder farmers in peri urban areas tend to own a few hectares of land and sell through FPOs. “FPOs have proven to be quite successful in improving farmer livelihoods,” she said. “From a policy perspective of how to strengthen food system and gain access to farmers in the city region, there is great potential to transform local food systems through these farmer-led organizations. The CRFS model fits well.”
Using the CRFS approach helped Yousefian and her team to identify key elements of resilience to investigate. These included: existing marketing channels for produce from the city region (see report, Chapter 6); the diversity of marketing options available to producers; the range of alternative markets available to consumers (from supermarket to box scheme deliveries, informal markets and push-cart street vendors).
Yousefian sought to understand both how these alternative markets were operating, and how they were perceived, given that consumer support is critical to their survival. In India there is a very strong emphasis on freshness of food, with customers preferring to purchase fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, or at least multiple times during the week.
The holistic CRFS approach enabled the researchers to consider not only economic factors, but also the social and the cultural aspects of the food system. They focused on how urban consumers engaged, and how they reached out to organise and support farmers.
Reflections
The research team concluded that the network of Resident Welfare Associations throughout the city is a promising target for FPOs to reach consumers and diversify their marketing activities, thereby strengthening rural-urban linkages and making the city region food system of Bengaluru more sustainable and resilient.
Yousefian reflected: “The CRFS approach is a really useful road map for policy makers, government officials, agricultural extension workers, and those working in food system. It helps them to identify the different food system components, why they are important, how they contribute to the bigger picture – for example, nutrition, food security, food waste, alternative markets & informal vendors – and how these can all be integrated. It helps to understand strategically where the food system can be strengthened.”
She added that simply by developing short food supply chains or investing in cold storage to reduce food loss and waste, food prices can be stabilized. These are all elements that can help to increase resilience of the food system and serve the local community that depend on it.
“In the context of a mega city, where a large part of the population can quickly become food insecure in an extreme case, it’s important to invest and build a stronger food system now.”
- Written by Joy Carey, RUAF
Photo credits: Prasad Shivarudrappa