Abstract
Urban food security, or its lack, is attracting growing interest in global policy debates. Glaringly missing in these conversations, however, are the voices of the urban poor. To fill this gap, grassroots community organizations, with decades-long experience collecting data on their own communities and taking action to improve conditions, decided to ask the urban poor in Cambodia and Nepal how they define and measure food security, what key challenges they face in the daily struggle to put food on the table and what actions might help. Their findings show that access to adequate diets is a major challenge for low-income communities in Asia, and that hunger is widespread, although with great variations and fluctuations between and within households. They also highlight the extraordinary resilience of urban poor women and their multiple strategies to stretch meagre budgets and make sure there is something to eat, even though sometimes this is not enough.
Highlights
In recent decades, policy debates on food security have shifted from a predominant concern with production to a growing attention to consumption, including access, affordability and utilization
In Nepal, the study was carried out by a team that included Lumanti, a Kathmandu-based NGO; the Community Women’s Forum (CWF), a national network of city-based women’s savings cooperatives; Mahila Ekta Samaj, a national federation of urban poor women working on savings and credit, water and sanitation, land tenure and income generation; and the Urban Poor Empowerment Society (UPES), a group of educated youth from the local poor communities in Birgunj and Kalaiya who have of obtaining sufficient high-quality food (Section VI)
At this first regional meeting, it had been agreed that size and location of urban centres are important factors in shaping food security, and so two distinct study locations were included in each country: the capital city (Phnom Penh and Kathmandu) and a secondary urban centre (Neak Loeung in Cambodia and the twin towns of Birgunj and Kalaiya in Nepal)
Summary
Policy debates on food security have shifted from a predominant concern with production to a growing attention to consumption, including access, affordability and utilization. In Nepal, the study was carried out by a team that included Lumanti, a Kathmandu-based NGO; the Community Women’s Forum (CWF), a national network of city-based women’s savings cooperatives; Mahila Ekta Samaj, a national federation of urban poor women working on savings and credit, water and sanitation, land tenure and income generation; and the Urban Poor Empowerment Society (UPES), a group of educated youth from the local poor communities in Birgunj and Kalaiya who have of obtaining sufficient high-quality food (Section VI). It becomes very difficult to escape debt, especially for poorer people as they incur new debts to pay the interest on older ones Another widely used strategy is to reduce the quality, quantity and diversity of food consumed, while reducing non-food expenditure, including on health and education, and working longer hours. On the other hand, were keen to discuss this central part of their lives, and the group discussions were invariably lively, convivial and detailed
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