Publisher’s abstract as follows: There is enormous current interest in urban food systems, with a wide array of policies and initiatives intended to increase food security, decrease ecological impacts and improve public health. This volume is a cross-disciplinary and applied approach to urban food system sustainability, health, and equity.

FCRN member Colin Sage from University College Cork, Ireland, is co-editor of this book. The following information was provided:

This report highlights the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector and how, in the future, this is increasingly threatening food security for millions. The report states that meeting the goals of eradicating hunger and poverty by 2030, while addressing the threat of climate change, will require profound transformation of food and agriculture systems worldwide – which is of course a major challenge. 

Drawing on studies from Africa, Asia and South America, this book provides empirical evidence and conceptual explorations of the gendered dimensions of food security. It investigates how food security and gender inequity are conceptualized within interventions, assesses the impacts and outcomes of gender-responsive programs on food security and gender equity and addresses diverse approaches to gender research and practice that range from descriptive and analytical to strategic and transformative. 

A key objective of this Special Issue is to provide a creative space for scholars who may be limited in the scope of their publication outlets, especially when it comes to proposing “out of the box” ideas.  

In this short article, the authors argue that the explicit absence of the ‘right to food’ in the Sustainable Development Goals is unjust and is due to opposition by the US and a self-contradictory position by the EU. The Sustainable Development Goals do name access to water, health and education as universally guaranteed human rights.

This study evaluates the attainability of sustainable targets for better integrating food security and environmental impacts. Many studies have looked at how much food production could increase given a plausible mitigation solution, for example if food waste was halved from 24% to 12% then an additional 1 billion people could be fed. These studies, however, lack a temporal component that this study attempts to include, which enables evaluation of whether these advances can keep pace with projected increases in human demand.

Between 2013 and 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) undertook a survey of innovative approaches that enable markets to act as incentives in the transition towards sustainable agriculture in developing countries.

As urban populations rise rapidly and concerns about food security increase, interest in urban agriculture has been renewed in both developed and developing countries. This book focuses on the sustainable development of urban agriculture and its relationship to food planning in cities.