Participate in the FAO Forum on Food, agriculture and cities now

See FAO’s Food For The Cities brochure here.

Invitation to participate in the FAO Forum on Food, agriculture and cities: challenges and priorities:

More and more of the world’s population is becoming concentrated in and around large cities. Ensuring that the billions of people living in cities have their rightful access to adequate amounts of safe and nutritious food represents a global development challenge of the highest order. Promoting sustainable agricultural production in urban and peri-urban areas and developing food systems capable of meeting urban consumer demand will become increasingly important to global food security. Currently however, the important relationship between food security, agriculture and urbanization is often not sufficiently recognized.

In order to pursue the work, broaden the approaches, bring new insights, for cities both of developing, intermediate or developed countries, FAO proposes a discussion on the forum http://km.fao.org/fsn/fsn-home/en/ . The Forum is open from this week onwards and will run for the coming 3 weeks.

FAO Food for Cities October 2009

Food, agriculture and cities:
challenges and priorities

Recommendations at the local and national level

At local and national level it is imperative to support the development of policies and programmes that address the issue related to food, agriculture and cities. Support to local and national governments should contribute to enhancing the productive capacity of urban and peri-urban areas for sustainable food production, with particular attention to
indigenous foods. This enhanced food production would require that important natural areas and agricultural lands be preserved and included in city development and land use plans. To ensure the sustainability of this food production, it will be crucial to safeguard the environmental health of these areas by strengthening the integrated management of natural resources, including trees, land and water throughout the entire urban and peri-urban landscape.

Improving sustainable agricultural production in urban and peri-urban areas can be accomplished by using planning mechanisms that ensure:

• urban and peri-urban agricultural development contributes to supporting other environmental and social functions, such as mitigating and adapting to climate change, reducing urban heat islands and preventing floods.

See FAO’s Food for the Cities web page here.

See “FAO briefing note highlights the major issues related to food, agriculture and cities and provides a set of recommendations for action at the global, national and local level” here.