Content area
Full Text
With more than half of the world's population urbanized and two-thirds of urbanites in developing countries, populations are moving away from agriculture-based livelihoods. However, people still must eat. This paper provides case study analyses of food security policies and programs in three cities at varying levels of development-Addis Ababa, Bogota, and New York City-and examines the food security issues faced by these changing urban populations, and how policies in these cities have addressed these concerns. It will explore the efficacy of policies and food security interventions by analyzing government and international community capacities as food production, distribution, and consumption change along with the processes of urbanization in both the developing and developed context. This includes an overview of Mayor Garson's food security policies, such as "Bogotá sin Hambre," in Bogotá; the international community's and NGOs' food security interventions, including an urban agriculture program in Ethiopia; and some of the Bloomberg administration's policies in New York City that encouraged urban and economic development through access to healthy food. The paper highlights the importance of the following issues in creating appropriate food security policies: the effects of rising food prices; transportation of food; differences between rural and urban hunger; urban food production; and increasingly significantly, the challenges posed by rising obesity rates.
As of 2008, more than half the world's population had migrated to urban areas, leading to fewer people living and working agricultural lifestyles.2 As more people leave rural or agricultural lifestyles and move into urban and industrial lifestyles, the methods by which food is produced and people feed themselves will change-but this does not change the fact that we all still must eat.
As lifestyles change, the interactions people have with food-what they eat, how they eat it, how they get their food, how often they eat, and where the food comes from-also change. Even as our food system becomes increasingly globalfessica ized, the way lower-income people eat in urban centers is often very different from the way higher-income people eat, which leads to variance across income level of both nutrition and diet-related diseases.3 Due to a variety of factors, including greater capacities and resources of governments in higher-income countries, and the fact that many urban poor in lower-income countries have the experience and...