Urbanization and its implications for food and farming

By D. Satterthwaite, G. McGranahan, C. Tacoli. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2010

909 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper discusses the influences on food and farming of an increasingly urbanized world and a declining ratio of food producers to food consumers. Urbanization has been underpinned by the rapid growth in the world economy and in the proportion of gross world product and of workers in industrial and service enterprises. Globally, agriculture has met the demands from this rapidly growing urban population, including food that is more energy-, land-, water- and greenhouse gas emission-intensive. But hundreds of millions of urban dwellers suffer under-nutrition. So the key issues with regard to agriculture and urbanization are whether the growing and changing demands for agricultural products from growing urban populations can be sustained while at the same time underpinning agricultural prosperity and reducing rural and urban poverty. To this are added the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to build resilience in agriculture and urban development to climate change impacts. The paper gives particular attention to low- and middle-income nations since these have more than three-quarters of the world's urban population and most of its largest cities and these include nations where issues of food security are most pressing.

Subfields: Plant Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af0c2379af7ca6f6fdc677e87d99864c8243d57e

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Citations in the corpus

Identifying determinants, pressures and trade-offs of crop residue use in mixed smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (2015, background): “Major drivers include agro-ecological constraints and opportunities; human population dynamics; urbanisation/migration; institutional developments; and agricultural policies influencing access to information and markets (Anderson, 1992; Tiffen, 2003; Kuyvenhoven, 2008; Satterthwaite et al., 2010).”
Urban agriculture: a global analysis of the space constraint to meet urban vegetable demand (2014, background): “…of growing crops and grazing livestock in urban, suburban and peri-urban areas (UNDP 1996), and is often proposed as an environmentally friendly agricultural production method, providing food in the place of highest demand with available labor (Satterthwaite et al 2010, Smit and Nasr 1992).”
Urban agriculture in the developing world: a review (2013, background): “Over the past 60 years, there is a strong association between economic growth and urbanization, and most of the world's poorest nations remain among the least urbanized nations (Satterthwaite et al. 2010).”
Sustainable intensification in agriculture: the richer shade of green. A review (2017, background): “The common trends in that type of agriculture are that soil fertility is in decline (Tittonell and Giller 2013) and that labor availability is increasingly scarce because of migration of farm household members to cities for wage labor (Qin 2010; Satterthwaite et al. 2010).”
Beyond Technology: Demand-Side Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation (2016, background): “Importantly, agriculture and land use account for a large proportion of the emissions from developing countries (96), and it is predicted that growing urban populations will demand more resource-intensive foods such as meat, reflecting the strong relationship between higher income and consumption of”
Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “…von Thünen (1842(2011)) noted the spatial correlation between cities and intense terrestrial or aquatic food production, with the produce sold on urban markets (Bairoch, 1988; Deng et al., 2006; Isendahl and Barthel, 2018; Satterthwaite et al., 2010; Sinclair et al., 2019; Yang and Xiubin, 2000).”
Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System (2015, background): “23 climate change, primarily through disruption of the transportation and distribution of food (Satterthwaite et al. 2010).”
Soil and Crop Management Strategies to Ensure Higher Crop Productivity within Sustainable Environments (2019, background): “[16], worldwide, the ratio of rural to urban dwellers was 6.”