Abstract
Urbanisation in low and middle-income nations presents both opportunities and immense challenges. As urban centres grow rapidly, inadequate housing and the lack of basic infrastructure and services affect a large and growing proportion of their population. There is also a growing body of evidence on urban poverty and its links with environmental hazards. There is, however, limited knowledge of how these challenges affect the ways in which poor urban residents gain access to food and secure healthy and nutritious diets. With some important exceptions, current discussions on food security continue to focus on production, with limited attention to consumption. Moreover, urban consumers are typically treated as a homogenous group and access to food markets is assumed to be sufficient. This paper describes how, for the urban poor in low and middle-income countries, food affordability and utilisation are shaped by the income and non-income dimensions of poverty that include the urban space.
Highlights
Debates on food security and nutrition have shifted in the past decade or so, with growing attention to consumption and especially to access, affordability and utilization
This is due to a number of interrelated factors that broadly reflect two transitions: the urban transition, with the majority of the world’s population residing in urban centres [1], and the nutrition transition, with a growing proportion of overweight and obese individuals, often living in the same households as malnourished children [2]. Notwithstanding this shift in focus, food production remains to a large extent the predominant concern of policy-makers at global and national levels, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals, with little indication of an understanding of the major challenges in securing adequate diets facing the urban poor in low-income urbanizing regions [3,4]
While urban agriculture can play a role in enhancing food security and dietary adequacy, its role should not be overemphasized as it is often quite limited, albeit with large inter-city variations [4,21,22]
Summary
Debates on food security and nutrition have shifted in the past decade or so, with growing attention to consumption and especially to access, affordability and utilization. Living in ‘slum’ settlements creates additional, non-income deprivations These include the lack of policing, often resulting in high levels of violence and insecurity; lack of financial services and entitlement to vote, both of which usually require legal addresses and official land tenure documents; higher prices to purchase privately provided basic goods such as water and food, and services such as the use of latrines, school and health care—and high costs of renting what is usually inadequate housing
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
