7 - Countryside–City Revisited

Summary

In Chapter 6 we have shown how the ongoing transformations in the Brazilian agri-food system can only be properly understood once the urban dynamics are integrated into the analysis. Throughout the book, we also draw attention to the radical implications of the ongoing agri-food innovations for the redefinition of the place of the urban in the organization of the food system.

Independently of these considerations, the theme of urban agriculture had already been imposed by the emergence of urban groups from the 1970s onwards claiming the right to grow food for their subsistence. In the North, the combination of deindustrialization and the phenomenon of ‘food deserts’, neighbourhoods with only fast-food outlets, led community and religious groups to stimulate the production of food and small-scale livestock farming on vacant and abandoned land. This resulted in the emergence of the food justice movement, which has generated an important academic literature (Lyson, 2004; McClintock, 2010; Ladner, 2011; Cockrall-King, 2012) in addition to public policies for its promotion and regulation, as in the case of Paris where temporary contracts allow a short-term ‘nomadic’ agriculture (Demailly and Darly, 2017).

In developing countries and especially on the African continent, the acceleration of emigration from the countryside to the cities has been associated with only fragile integration into the urban labour market, placing pressure on populations newly arrived in the cities to develop forms of urban agriculture for their own survival. International organizations such as the FAO have highlighted this phenomenon, and calculations of the global number of farmers who generate an income from urban agriculture vary between 100 million and 200 million (UNDP, 1996; Orsini et al, 2013).

At the same time, local governments and urban planners are becoming more aware of environmental and food security issues. One example was the Resilient Cities Congress in Bonn in 2013, which called for ‘the development and implementation of a holistic approach to the development of urban food systems to ensure food security and stimulate local biodiversity’ (ICLEI, 2013). Another was the network created around the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact in 2015, with over 200 cities committed to re-examining their food supply and distribution systems.