Try to work with informal food sector, not get rid of it: Delia Grace
Currently, 1.7 billion of the world’s 2.2 billion people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity live in urban and peri-urban (U-PU) areas.
This is according to a report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN), which is the science–policy interface of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS).
The report was released last month. Although urban areas have a lower prevalence of stunting compared to rural areas, further disaggregation of urban areas by poverty showed that urban poor have very high stunting rates, as high as those in rural areas.
Down To Earth spoke to Delia Grace, professor of Food Safety Systems at the Natural Resources Institute and joint appointed scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). A co-author of the report, Grace spoke on how critical the issue of food insecurity in U-PU areas is and how food systems can be transformed there. Edited excerpts:
Q: What was the genesis of this report and the rationale of focusing on urban areas?
A: It is generally understood that urban people, even the urban poor, generally have greater access to food and some elements of their food and nutrition profile are better than the rural poor. But we feel that with huge urbanisation, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, urban food security has been neglected.
I have been working in the development sector for 30 years. There is a lot of focus on the rural poor, along with a misperception that food insecurity and stunting are rural problems. Undoubtedly they are rural problems, but they are also urban problems. I have been based out of Africa for many years and it is the last continent where poverty and population is predominantly a rural phenomenon. If we look at other places, like Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, the people in U-PU areas are exceeding their rural counterparts. Three quarters of the food insecure people in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs) are actually in U-PU areas. So that is where a big part of the problem lies. Our report is the first high level analysis, one of the first UN studies, that focuses exclusively on U-PU. It meets a gap in a neglected area.
Q: The report compared the ultra-processed food consumption in rural and urban areas and found that it was higher in urban areas in LMICs. What is driving this?
A: As people become more urbanised, poverty has also become an urban phenomenon, apart from Africa where poverty and population (increase) are predominantly a rural phenomenon.
Urbanisation then drives an increase in ultra-processed foods. Modern retailers sell the most processed foods.
Modern retail consists of three main things: the supermarkets and hypermarkets, convenience stores, and modern restaurants.
‘Convenience’ stores are very big, especially in Southeast Asia, even getting into small towns. Something like ‘7*11*, which again are small, franchised stores, often sell ultra-processed foods.
Q: What about the local markets or non-modern retail? The report highlights that it is essential to support and strengthen local and territorial aspects of U-PU food systems.
A: Non-modern retail or informal, traditional markets is where a lot of urban poor and urban middle classes still source their food. A lot of that food is fresh and not processed.
There is thus an importance of this informal, traditional sector. But there are some neglected issues in this. Informality, for instance. In African and Asian LMICs, most U-PU poor continue to get a lot of food from what we call the ‘informal’ or traditional system and this consists of public markets, the wet markets or open markets, kiosks or dukaans, hawkers, small food outlets which sell ready-to-eat food, pavement cafes in places like Vietnam and China.
Many of these sell fresh food, but a lot of these actually fall in the informal market. And while these informal markets offer great advantages, in terms of benefitting small producers, one of the big risks is food safety. So unfortunately, a lot of these foods don’t comply with food safety standards, and we estimate that more than 90 per cent of the food-borne disease burden comes from fresh foods sold in informal markets in LMICs, especially in Africa and Asia.
That is, thus, a big challenge. The burden of food-borne disease is comparable to any one of the big three infectious health diseases problems in the world: malaria, HIV AIDS, and tuberculosis.
The other big challenge, especially in Southeast Asia, is that these wet markets are associated with spill-over of diseases such as COVID-19 and the SARS epidemic. The informal food markets in Africa are associated with diseases like Ebola and mpox.
Other problems include generation of very large amounts of organic waste, which is not being properly managed and is causing pollution.
Thus, while there are many benefits for nutrition, livelihood and food culture, there are also challenges around health and the environment.
Q: What policies did you document while making this report? Does urban nutrition or urban food security feature in national food security policies of different governments?
A: There is a general neglect of urban food security and a lack of it being covered comprehensively in policies.
In some countries, especially in Africa or Asia, some policies have been problematic because they have tried to get rid of the informal sector. There has been this feeling that, for example, street-vending hawkers should not be a part of modern cities. So, in many places there have been very active attempts to get rid of these sectors and these have actually been harmful because the informal sector typically sells food that is cheaper and is closer to people’s homes. It’s more small scale. So, it is both cheaper and more accessible, which means it is very hard to get rid of this sector.
What happens is you just force it underground and the studies we reviewed show that when you force anything underground, it tends to make the standards in quality worse.
In fact, policies that embrace the informal sector acknowledge that it has problems with hygiene and selling food safety. But instead of trying to get rid of it, try to work with it and gradually improve its quality and safety.
These have been more effective and also more equitable, and we recommend that these are the sorts of policies we need moving forward.
Q: The report talks about monthly hunger cycles, linked to high cost of living and instability, in urban poor segments.
A: A fundamental challenge which we find in urban areas is that a lot of people’s income just goes on food. In high income countries, it is 10 per cent. About half of that is eating out which you might say, is voluntary.
In some urban settings of LMICs, it can be 60 per cent. In others, it is 40 per cent, which is a very high proportion of people’s wages.
One challenge is there are cycles depending on when people get their payments and salaries. That is when they have food and then, as time passes, their available income falls down until the next salary is received.
The next challenge is when there is any shock. For example, COVID-19 was a shock or the war in Ukraine, which used to supply a lot of wheat support.
Q: There has been a contrast in our food production records, which are increasing every year. But at the same time, hunger has also been rising. So, it is not a problem of production.
A: The global human population also hits new records every year. Moreover, hunger is driven not only by production of food but by distribution. The world produces enough food to provide everyone with sufficient calories. But people do not have access to food.
This mainly occurs because of a) shocks and disasters, such as droughts, wars, pandemics, etc., which disrupt food supplies and b) poverty, which means people can’t buy the food that is available and that they want. The urban poor are especially vulnerable to the latter.
Q: A trend that has been observed is that food producing countries, for example countries in Africa, are becoming net food importers, despite their vast agricultural potential. Is the problem being aggravated because countries are moving away from production of staple crops to more cash crops?
A: Africa is the one remaining continent where we are getting rapid growths in population. In other continents, population is actually stabilising and in some cases, dropping. In Africa, it’s growing rapidly and these countries in Africa are becoming increasingly reliant on imports.
Africa is the only region in the world where demographic transition (reduction in population growth) is either not happening or happening very slowly. Africa is also the only region that has failed to implement a “green revolution”. The two factors mean Africa is becoming more dependent on food imports each year.
For food security, the most important is “net” food imports. The US is one of the biggest food importers but also one of the biggest food exporters. This is not a problem: as Americans have become more prosperous and diverse, they have started eating more meat, tropical fruits, spices, and imported gourmet foods. Germany is one of the biggest food importers. But it generated enough other money to pay for its food.