Urbanization and Agriculture to the Year 2020

At present, the global population is half rural and half urban, but the world's - cities are swelling. By 2025, two-thirds of the world s people will live in urban areas, and 80 percent of these urban residents will live in developing countries. As urbanization increases, policymakers in developing countries will be challenged to design ways to feed their cities ideally by relying mostly on their countries' own agriculture sectors. They must also work to prevent undernutrition, cope with changing diets among urban residents, and seek to quell the trend toward obesity.

In light of the exploding urban population, the world s governments will convene the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul, Turkey, from June 3 to 14. The conference will - address the future of the world s cities, focusing especially on the management of cities, one of the keys for preventing the vast social problems that can plague rapidly growing urban areas. This topic is particularly relevant for developing countries.

"The developing world is now experiencing urbanization in the way developed countries did in the past, with urban populations doubling and tripling in one or two decades," says Wally N Dow, secretary-general of Habitat II. "The difference is that urban dwellers in the developing world earn as little as $200 per person in annual income, compared with more than $20,000 in the United States. That means that cities must manage their money aggressively because there is less to invest in services and infrastructure."

"Urbanization means good news and bad news," said Jorge Wilheim, deputy secretary-general of Habitat II. "Urbanization contributes to national economic and social development. However, when the speed of urbanization is great, it is almost impossible for governments to follow the growth with water, energy, and other basic services."

The result is often poverty, unemployment, inadequate shelter, poor or non-existent sanitation, contaminated or depleted water supplies, air pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation. Substandard housing, unsafe water, and poor sanitation in densely populated cities are responsible for 10 million deaths worldwide every year, according to the United Nations. The UN reports that 600 million urban dwellers now live in life- and health-threatening housing situations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Reducing Pressure on the Cities

Much of the current and future urbanization in developing countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, is occurring as a result of rural-urban migration and the transformation of rural areas to urban centers. According to IFPRI, one way to reduce the pressure on cities is for developing-country governments to invest in the rural areas, particularly in the agriculture sector the base of the economy in most developing countries. This would make people less inclined to leave their agrarian lifestyles in search of better jobs in the cities. An investment in agriculture reverberates across the whole economy, generating more income and employment. According to IFPRI, each additional dollar of agricultural production spurs more than two dollars in spending in other sectors of the economy.

"If you increase agricultural productivity, then farmers make more money and have more to spend on other goods and services such as food, clothing, housing, education, and health care," said James Garrett, a researcher with IFPRI. "If the rural areas are not supported and the well-being of rural people improved, the cities will implode. People will continue to move to the cities, but the cities won't be able to support them in terms of either jobs or services."

Generally, urban areas offer people more jobs and health and social services than are available in the rural areas. As people move to cities, birth rates also tend to go down, mainly because fertility tends to fall as women's level of education rises, and cities offer greater educational opportunities. "Urban areas offer a higher life expectancy and lower absolute poverty and can provide essential services more cheaply and on a larger scale than rural areas," says Mathias Hundsalz, coordinator of the Global Report on Human Settlements by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat).

But experts agree that policies should not favor cities over the countryside. "People vote with their feet," said Richard Stren, director of the Center for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto. "They perceive that their lives will be better off in the cities, and this is often the case. But, even though people are able to live better in urban areas, development should not favor urban areas over rural areas or vice versa. We don t want to discourage development in one sector at the cost of development in the other. We must invest in the whole economy so that people will have the freedom to live where they want and so that there continues to be a dynamic interaction between the rural and urban areas."

The Rural-Urban Connection

But urban policies are greatly needed to help manage urbanization. "The trend has been for urbanization to be concentrated in one city, and hence we've seen the growth of the megacities of the South such as São Paulo, Mexico City, and Cairo," said Wilheim of Habitat II. "We are encouraging countries to set up urban policies to stimulate a network of medium-sized cities. This would help provide people in the rural areas with employment and other benefits."

According to Stren from Toronto, this trend is already taking place. "The megacities have stopped growing rapidly in the South with the exception of cities in China. Since the 1980s, small and middle-sized cities have begun to grow more rapidly. This has implications for agricultural production because these cities are more connected to the agricultural hinterlands and, with good communication systems, can interact with the rural agricultural sector."

Better channels of communication between farmers and the cities, and new methods for transporting food cheaply from rural areas to cities will be crucial for stimulating economic growth in the rural sectors and low food prices throughout a country. "There must be ways for farmers to obtain information on what types of food products the urban areas are going to demand so that they can respond accordingly," said Garrett. "Communications and transportation systems should be improved so that farmers know what prices to charge and can get their goods to market."

In many countries, the current costs of "food marketing--the process by which crops leave farmers fields and are transported to food processing plants or to urban markets to be sold--are extremely high. Of these food marketing costs, high transportation costs, caused by factors such as poor roads, high gas prices, and high automotive maintenance bills, can be major inflators of food prices for urban and rural residents. These factors can spur malnutrition by preventing the poor from being able to buy the food they need. Countries need to improve food marketing systems so that these costs remain low.

However, for farmers to take advantage of markets in urban areas, they must have education and other assistance. "You can have great roads, but if you are a poor, small farmer with no access to credit or the right seeds or you are not healthy enough to farm your land, these things don't matter," said Garrett. "Governments need to invest in rural people so that they can gain access to agricultural markets."

Meeting the Demands of Urban Appetites

As people move to the cities, they have less time and are exposed to a wider range of food items than in the rural areas they came from. These factors and others spur significant changes in diets in urban areas. Urban populations tend to eat more meat and processed foods and less rice and other grain and root dishes. This trend has already taken place in the rapidly urbanizing areas of Asia, such as Japan, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea, and in Latin America. Some of the demand for meat will be fulfilled by rural areas outside of cities. Imports will also help take care of the increased demand for meat. According to IFPRI, developing-country imports of meat are expected to increase 20-fold from 1990 to 2020.

But no matter how developing countries increasing appetite for meat is satisfied, urbanization and the accompanying more sedentary lifestyle, as well as diets that include more animal fat, sugar, and processed food, will lead to more obesity. Obesity is closely associated with chronic diseases, such as heart problems, diabetes, and hypertension. Significant increases in obesity have occurred in all regions of the developing world since 1957.

"As they eat more fat than they need or too many processed foods with comparatively low nutritional value, the urban poor begin to experience the worst of both the developed and developing worlds both obesity and undernutrition sometimes in the same household," said Garrett. "Processed foods are often inexpensive, but can rob families of essential vitamins and minerals that can be found in more expensive fresh fruits, vegetables, and grains. While families may be increasing their calorie intake, they are not getting other nutrients they need."

Malnutrition in the Cities

Though malnutrition in the cities is often not as severe as in rural areas, there are pockets of urban malnutrition that can rival the poorest areas of the countryside. "For kids in the rural areas, milk comes from a cow," said Wilheim from Habitat II. "For kids in the cities, milk comes from the refrigerator. The milk must be purchased. Food and nutrition in the urban sector are almost totally dependent on the income of the family."

But sometimes money for food is in short supply, for example, if the family loses a job or if the husband does not give spending money to the wife for food. One way to help ward off hunger among low-income households of the future may be through "urban agriculture"--the farming of small plots of land available in urban environments or on the perimeter of the city. Urban agriculture might be able to supplement the family's diet, according to Dan Maxwell, a Rockefeller fellow at IFPRI.

However, urban agriculture must be managed carefully to address important food safety and environmental concerns. Urban residents must not irrigate edible crops with raw sewage or farm intensively with fertilizers and pesticides in highly populated areas. "Urban agriculture can have a beneficial impact on food security for low-income urban residents, but there are also potential risks, particularly where water is scarce and municipal governments are weak or ill informed," said Maxwell.

As urbanization increases, policymakers have multiple challenges with which to contend. Habitat II will seek to deal with many of these policy issues. However, it will also seek to improve overall human solidarity as more and more people in the world live closer together in the smaller quarters of urban cities.

"There is an urban war in the cities now with divisions between races and ethnic groups," said Wilheim. "We want to reconquer human solidarity. People must learn to be convivial, to live together. We want to prevent cities from becoming Sarajevos. Human diversity is as important as biodiversity."

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