CCAFS CONCEPT NOTE
Rural-urban food systems: ensuring food security under a changing climate
Background
Half of the world’s population currently reside in urban areas and virtually all of the
projected 2.5 billion increase in human population over the next several decades is
expected to occur in the developing world’s urban areas. High birth rates in urban areas,
as well as accelerated migration from rural to urban areas is driving urban growth, with
the highest annual rates of urban growth occurring in Africa and Asia. These regions face
significant adjustment pressures, as poverty becomes increasingly urbanized and food
producing environments along the rural to urban continuum face significant risks from
climate change and other drivers of global change. Food security is a paramount
challenge in these rapidly urbanizing low-income regions, where the urban poor typically
allocate more than half their income to food (Cohen and Garret, 2009), and people in
rural areas move to urban areas in search of non-farm jobs thus diminishing the on-farm
labour pool.
Climate shocks exacerbate food insecurity, and climate change is expected to intensify
these effects. Over the last few years, food prices have become extremely volatile, owing
in part to climate events. Extreme climatic events, such as drought, heatwaves and floods,
in globally important food producing regions and agricultural land-use conversion from
cereals to biofuel crops, along with an array of non-climate factors, have exerted upward
pressure on food prices, which has triggered inward focused national food policies that
further exacerbate global food price spikes (Von Braun, 2009).
Responding to food insecurity in the larger context of adapting agricultural and food
systems to climate change will require gaining a much better understanding of the
strategies that the urban and rural poor employ to bolster food security, which include bidirectional flows between rural food production systems and urban remittances, and to
understand how climate change could influence this dynamic. Currently, the knowledge
base needed to inform adaptation-oriented policies and investments for urban and rural
food security in a landscape scale of linked rural and urban areas is woefully inadequate
(ISET, 2008).
Description of activities
The consortium of organizations represented in this concept note seek to advance
understanding of the dynamics of food security across the rural-urban continuum—how
and from where food is accessed and how it is differentially accessed across various
socio-economic and environmental settings. The proposed work would have an explicit
climate change focus in that it would examine how climate shocks and covariate risks
affect food security of vulnerable groups, taking into account climate change in the
context of multiple stressors and drivers of change. The proposed work would use a
landscape approach where the two-way flow of people and resources is examined in the
continuum between rural and urban settings. An integral part of this work will be the
development of research methodologies that critically examine the theory of change and
output-outcome-impact pathways in this context.
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To address critical knowledge gaps in this research area, the team proposes to examine
the following issues and questions.
1. The rural-urban continuum and food security: To the extent that rural and urban
realms are mutually supportive and dependent, how do the flows of people, resources
(i.e. goods and remittances) and information contribute to urban and rural food
security? Where are there tradeoffs and synergies with respect to food security,
economic diversification, and functioning of environmental services in the urban to
rural continuum? How might these tradeoffs and synergies change over the next
several decades given climatic and other global change trajectories? Do the spatial
linkages between rural and urban spheres offer novel opportunities for advancing
adaptation?
2. Urban food systems and urban and peri-urban agriculture: To what extent does
urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contribute to food and livelihood security in
urban areas and to the flow of remittances to rural areas? How elastic is UPA as a
response strategy to risks that produce food insecurity in urban areas? What is the
nature of urban food supply chains (high value, staple, etc.)? How much do food
insecure groups depend on the urban food supply chain (e.g. transporters, processors,
storers, marketers, etc.) for their livelihoods, and how can these chains be made more
resilient to warmer temperatures and greater incidence of extreme events?
3. Policy, governance and institutional factors and drivers: What are the critical policy,
governance, and institutional capacity issues within and across formal and informal
sectors that influence urban and rural food systems and food access and stability for
the poor? What enabling and constraining factors need to be addressed to allow
policies and institutions to work more effectively, in light of increased extreme
climate events and other proximate and distant shocks to urban and rural food
systems caused by interactions of climatic and non-climatic drivers?
4. Social differentiation and food security in the rural-urban continuum: How are the
roles of poor men and women changing as they migrate from rural to urban areas?
How do their new roles impact food security in both urban and rural areas? How
could property and tenure rights shift to different groups as urban areas rapidly
expand and how could this influence food security of men, women and children in
urban and rural areas?
Given the significant knowledge gaps around the issues described above, we propose to
conduct a scoping study that would encompass one sphere of urban to peri-urban to rural
in each of the three CCAFS regions. The areas would be located in close proximity to
CCAFS benchmark sites. Because a landscape approach will be used, sites will be chosen
that include cities and towns involved in urban and peri-urban agriculture and rural areas
dominated by mixed cereals, livestock and agroforestry.
Scoping studies in these three areas would inform CCAFS efforts to develop a more
comprehensive research agenda for, and approaches to, advancing understanding of the
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interlinkages between food systems and food security, and the changing role that bidirectional urban-rural migration plays as a food security strategy (or food insecurity
response) under a changing climate. Such research would broaden understanding of how
the rural to urban continuum through which flow food, resources for livelihoods and food
production, and remittances, influence how rural and urban households address their food
security needs. By integrating rural and urban spheres, such research could point to
potential novel approaches for promoting food security and food systems resilience that
could advance the adaptation agenda, which still largely dichotomizes rural and urban.
The steps needed to begin the scoping study will require representatives from the
collaborating parties (the core group and select experts) to develop key sets of questions
that need to be answered in the scoping study; questions that would be refined from those
described above. As part of this process, the core group will identify national level
project partners in three CCAFS countries selected for the scoping study to collaborate
with the core group in implementing the study.
Outputs
The scoping study will result in the publication of peer-review papers and a report
containing recommendations for future research and communication/outreach, as well as
provide policy recommendations related to enhancing food security. This project will
contribute to developing a framework for how to conduct research on the rural-urban
continuum taking into consideration various landscapes and contexts. This framework
would be applicable to other rural-urban spaces for assessing food security in urban and
rural areas in the context of urbanization and climate change.
The proposed work is unique because it focuses on food security and climate change
adaptation centred around critical dynamics between urban and rural areas. The proposed
research directly addresses three important areas of CCAFS that heretofore have not
received much attention, given that CCAFS is just beginning its 10-year initiative. These
areas are 1) a broad focus on the food system; 2) an explicit focus on food security
through an examination of food access, utilization and stability issues; and 3) a focus on
the urban poor within the rural-urban continuum, a group that is rapidly emerging as not
only as a critical food insecure group, but also a culturally heterogeneous group.
Collaboration & Partnerships
The strength of CCAFS as a vehicle for examining food security lies in its coupling of the
CGIAR centres, with their historic mandate to increase food production, with researchers
from within the CGIAR and the GEC research community with expertise in food systems
approaches to understanding food security and environmental change. It is in recognition
of the unique opportunities gained through an interdisciplinary coupling of these two
research communities that a concept note is put forth jointly by START, IHDP, ICRAF,
ILRI, CGC-Bangladesh, and ECI-Oxford to develop a proposal that would examine
urban and rural food security and climate change within the CCAFS programme.
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Results of this study have the potential to link to a wide range of stakeholders. At global
and regional levels, these would include the UNFCCC’s impacts, vulnerability and
adaptation work programme, FAO’s Food for Cities initiative, ASARECA, and
RUFORUM. At the local level the potential stakeholders are quite diverse and include
national scientists, urban planners, national ministries, NGOs, farmer-based
organizations, and various rural and urban food networks.
References
Cohen, M. J. and J. L. Garrett. 2009. The food price crisis and urban food (in) security.
Human Settlements Working Papers series: Urbanization and Emerging Population
issues-2. International Institue for Environment and Development.
ISET (Institute of Social and Environmental Transformation). 2008. Re-imagining the
rural-urban continuum. Research gap assessment.
von Braun, J. 2009. Responding to the World Food Crisis. Getting on the Right Track.
IFPRI Discussion paper.
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