Tags: Food security, Urban challenges, Policy gaps, Food retail

This paper begins by presenting data from the African Food Security Urban Network’s (AFSUN) Cape Town baseline survey to support the assertion that food insecurity is an increasingly urban phenomenon with specifically urban characteristics. It then interrogates the framing of food security within the Integrated Food Security Strategy and highlights the limitations of this framing with reference to urban food security and a wider politics of the food system. The paper then discusses how the framing of food insecurity in the IFSS, the location of the IFSS in the Department of agriculture and wider assumptions on the location of poverty and food insecurity in South Africa have all led to the absence of an explicit urban food security focus. This policy gap is argued to be a fundamental barrier to the right to food in cities. The paper concludes by calling for a reframing of food security at a national scale to include an explicitly urban focus and for an urban mandate for food security and food systems to be created.

Urban Food Security and the Urban Food Policy Gap.pdf