Feeding the city
Adressing the nutritional needs of growing poor urban populations?
Date & Venue
Date & Venue: Monday March 9, 2009 – 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Lyon Convention Center, France
Confirmed speakers
- Florence Egal, Nutrition Officer, Food Security, Nutrition and Livehoods, Co-Secretary Food for Cities (FCIT), Nutrition Programmes Service, FAO
- Nathalie Ernoult, Vice President, Action contre la Faim, France
- Tim Hall, Acting Director: Biotechnologies, Agriculture and Food, DG Research, European Commission
- Philip James, Chairman, International Obesity Task Force, USA
- Jérôme Péribère, President and CEO, DOW AgroSciences, USA
- Ard Jan Vethman, RFID leader Global sector Manufacturing, Retail & Distribution, Capgemini, The Netherlands
The session was moderated by:
Ioan Negrutiu,
Professor of biology, ENS LSH (Lyon), France.
Session presentation
Summary
If nothing is done, the forecasted massive urbanization could transform the problem of hunger and malnutrition into a predominantly urban issue, affecting in priority urban concentration of low resource countries.
This uncontrolled expansion and migration should be limited as much as possible by policies supporting local and peri-urban agriculture.
In both developed and developing countries, cities are dealing with issues of food and nutrition security - of people not having enough appropriate food to eat. Achieving urban food and nutrition security in the developing countries is of major concern of the UN. Making cities more sustainable and enhancing citizen's wellbeing, livelihood and health can greatly benefit from peri-urban agriculture /farming: this will require appropriate access to land and water, clean air and dedicated planning and regulations.
Urban planners, policy decision makers, the civil society, agro-seed companies and agro-food industries need to urgently cope on these grounds.
Presentation
A good majority of the 900 million people suffering today from hunger and malnutrition in the world are poor farmers who cannot produce in sufficient quantity to cover the food needs of their own families. The 2007 edition of the BioVision Forum had addressed the issue of poor farmers: the debates had concluded to the necessity of fostering the development of local productions, especially through an investigation of the potential of local plants that remain largely unknown and that never benefited from the application of classical methods of plant improvement.
The anticipated increase of the world urban population over the next 30 years, resulting from the demographic dynamics of cities and the migration away from rural areas, will transform the problem of hunger and malnutrition into a predominantly urban one. It will also affect in priority the conurbations of low resources countries.
The development of urban populations with a large proportion of poor and undereducated citizens, as well as with a high percentage of vulnerable children, will raise specific difficulties in terms not only of food production and delivery, but also of food stocking, preservation, transformation, packaging and distribution. Because of the costly investments they demand, sophisticated infrastructures like those required by the establishment of a safe cold chain will likely remain lagging and inadequate. Alternative solutions must consequently be invented for the preservation, transformation and packaging of food products, and the mobilization of life sciences resources is clearly essential to that effect. Special attention must also be given to the problem of nutritional deficiencies (iron, A vitamin, iodine) in view of their devastating consequences on children and adolescents. The difficulty of providing a food ratio rich enough in essential elements is all the more challenging that it should not be solved at the expense of quality and hygiene.
The session will firstly examine the possibility of concentrating a maximal production of food around urban centers, primarily in their surroundings, but also in their immediate vicinities. What cultivations and breeding must be privileged? What methods of production? How to organize environmentally the proximity of urban and rural areas? How available are innovative approaches such as an industrialized production based on algae or fast growing aquatic plants in an urban setting? What are the possible contributions of new biotechnologies, especially in the domain of genetics?
The panel will then discuss solutions to the problem of the preservation of food products in situations where no efficient cold chain is available. What methods of stocking, transformation or packaging could compensate for this deficiency? To what extent can the methods used in developed countries be applied? How should they be adapted to offer realistic and truly efficient solutions in environments with lower resources?
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