Food and nutrition security in Southern African cities
This book (preview of first chapter) of the Taylor & Francis Group places urban food and nutrition security firmly on the development and policy agenda. It shows that current efforts to address food poverty in Africa that focus entirely on small-scale farmers, to the exclusion of broader socio-economic and infrastructural approaches, are misplaces and will remain largely ineffective in ameliorating food and nutrition insecurity for the majority of Africans. Using original data from the African Food Security Urban Network’s (AFSUN) it is demonstrated that the primary food security challenge for urban households is access to food. Already linked into global food systems and value chains, Africa’s supply of food is not necessarily in jeopardy. Rather, the widespread poverty and informal urban fabric that characterizes Africa’s emerging cities impinge directly on households’ capacity to access food that is readily available. Through the analysis of empirical data collected, from 6,500 households in eleven cities in nine countries in Southern Africa, the authors identify the complexity of factors and dynamics that create the circumstances of widespread food and nutrition insecurity under which urban citizens live. Useful policy approaches to address these conditions that currently thwart the latent development potential of Africa’s expanding urban population. The chapters in the book cover a wide range of topics related to urbanisation and food security, for example: approaches to defining food security from the perspective of food systems (chapter 2); implications of migration for urban household food security (chapter 5); the implications of social protection cash transfer interventions for food and nutrition security (chapter 6); the importance of gender in urban food security (chapter 7) and; the process of supermarket expansion (chapter 12)
The book can be purchased here.