Abstract
Research on food planning has been recently proposed in North American and European planning to account for how cities might change their food provision to respond to the rising demands for a more sustainable and ethical food system. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the agro-ecological potential of the Lisbon city region, Ribatejo e Oeste, to increase its Regional Food Self-Reliance (RFSR), through adopting demand restraint and food system relocalization approaches to food system sustainability. Three new diet scenarios were considered: meat-based, plant-based and strict vegetarian, defined in accordance with healthy dietary patterns. We used agro-climatic and agro-edaphic agricultural suitability models to evaluate the agro-ecological potential for RFSR, and proposed the use of Foodshed Landscape Plans within a landscape planning methodology. Results showed the extent of local food production that could improve food self-reliance, with 72%, 76%, 84% of total food needs in the meat-based, plant-based, and strict vegetarian scenarios, respectively. Thus, food system transformation by means of relocalization, is therefore ecologically feasible and would ensure the sustainable use of the ecological basis of food security. Additionally, a dietary transition would imply significant land sparing, which strengthens the demand restraint perspective for a transition to food system sustainability.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, there have been questions surrounding the legitimacy of the global industrial food regime developed after World War II, which has been defined as the set of stable relationships of power, production, and consumption in the world food economy [1]
The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the agro-ecological potential of the Lisbon city region, Ribatejo e Oeste, to increase its Regional Food Self-reliance (RFSR) by adopting the demand restraint and food system relocalization approaches to food system sustainability
Considering the values obtained for the land footprint of the current meat-based diet (1), i.e., 0.17 ha per capita, the current agricultural area would be enough for a Regional Food Self-Reliance (RFSR) of 56%, or 1,920,653 people, if the food production was only allocated to regional food consumption
Summary
Since the 1990s, there have been questions surrounding the legitimacy of the global industrial food regime developed after World War II, which has been defined as the set of stable relationships of power, production, and consumption in the world food economy [1]. The food system transformation perspective calls for a structural change to food regime and a focus on the production and consumption relationships among the actors and their socio-economic context [8] It strongly advocates food system relocalization as the basis to build new city region sustainable linkages for “food and nutrition security, environmental resilience and economic vitality” [9]. There are other dietary patterns costs that cannot be adequately described without considering food security and social and political conflicts relating to land and water in Sustainability 2017, 9, 2003 non-EU export countries Relocalization is another way to take direct responsibility and internalize the negative outcomes of the current food regime, with regard to environmental, ethical, economic and political issues. In recent years, foodshed analysis has emerged as an approach in food systems planning designed to measure the potential of a given region, city, or any other geographic scale to depend on its ecological productive capacity for food provision [27,28]
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