Foodsheds and City Region Food Systems in Two West African Cities

Abstract

Abstract:In response to changing urban food systems, short supply chains have been advocated to meet urban food needs while building more sustainable urban food systems. Despite an increasing interest in urban food supply and the flows of food from production to consumption, there is a lack of empirical studies and methodologies which systematically analyse the actual proportion and nutritional significance of local and regional food supplied to urban markets. The aim of this empirical study therefore was to compare the geographical sources supplying food to the urban population ("foodsheds") in Tamale, Ghana and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, to record the supplied quantities and to assess the level of interaction between the sources and the respective city. The study was conducted over two years, covering the seasons of abundant and short supply, via traffic surveys on the access roads to the two cities, and in the Tamale markets, resulting altogether in more than 40,000 records of food flow. Results indicated that food sources were highly crop-and season-specific, ranging from one-dimensional to multi-dimensional foodsheds with diverse sources across seasons. Across the commodity-specific foodsheds, city region boundaries were established. Within the proposed city region a relatively large proportion of smallholders contributed to urban food supply, taking advantage of the proximity to urban markets. While food provided from within the city region offers certain place-based benefits, like the provision of fresh perishable crops, a larger geographical diversity of foodsheds appeared to enhance the resilience of urban food systems, such as against climate related production failures.

Validating the City Region Food System Approach: Enacting Inclusive, Transformational City Region Food Systems

“…Food is connected directly to many dimensions of community sustainability including urban-rural food flow linkages, gender and equity, climate change, water quality and availability, land tenure and economic opportunities including livelihoods, and good health through access to adequate amounts of nutritious and culturally appropriate food (for example, [9,57,58]). Food systems can use these as entry points to develop a holistic understanding of food to include short food supply chains/local food systems to create direct links between growers and eaters so that rural spaces and small/mid-size cities and towns are enabled to foster their own well-being and not be seen to be at the service of larger city centers; agroecology/ecological farming as a transformational solution to cool and feed the world; healthy food to address the double malnutrition burden; and territorial and related bioregional areas as the basis for closed-loop resource flow analyses [59].…”

Roadmapping to Enhance Local Food Supply: Case Study of a City-Region in Austria

“…Agri-food researchers agree that urban food systems need to undergo a transition toward sustainability to equally tackle economic, social and ecological obstacles that are caused by a set of intersecting challenges, including climate change, population growth, ecosystem degradation, social inequalities, price volatilities, water scarcity and biodiversity loss [1]. Therefore, lately, increasing attention has been on assessing and planning more sustainable and resilient urban food systems [2][3][4]. In this respect, conceptual links between city planning and urban food system research have also been investigated under the "smart food city" framework [5].…”

A Land-Based and Spatial Assessment of Local Food Capacity in Northern Idaho, USA

“…Foodshed maps and related land-based assessments are not only of great help for leaders of local food movements in the United States, but also are widely used internationally [13]. For example, Karg et al [14] found that although food provided within the city region assisted the provision of fresh perishable crops, a larger geographical diversity of foodsheds appeared to strengthen the resilience of local food systems in West Africa. In Europe, drawing upon the concept of urban resilience, foodshed maps were constructed to help policymakers develop the food self-sufficiency scenario in the cities of London, Berlin, Milan and Rotterdam [15].…”