Food Contributing Cities

As an impact of the protracted Russia-Ukraine war, the "ghost" of the global food crisis has shown its menace.

Food prices have soared, raising serious concerns, especially in countries that are dependent on imports for their food sufficiency. Food resilience systems in these countries are starting to falter and need more support to get back on track.

While hoping for the war to end and the various diplomatic efforts to bear fruit in normalizing the supply chain of food and its supporting production commodities, such as fertilizers, we need to ratchet up our strategic efforts. We need to take up quick responses, one of which is through the urban food system transformation.

According to United Nations projections, two-thirds of the world's population will live in urban areas. Despite occupying only 2-3 percent of the Earth's land surface, with the urbanites’ typical lifestyle and consumption practices, urban areas monopolize three-quarters or 75 percent of natural resources (SDA) and account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (UNEP, 2017; Wei et al, 2021).

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This condition calls for quick actions to transform the urban food system. The food system encompasses the flow of food production — from cultivation to the dining table — involving diverse actors, institutions and supporting infrastructure and the policies to mitigate the impact on three aspects of sustainability, namely social, economic and environmental.

Why urban food?

Urban areas are part of both the problems and the solutions to the challenges of the food system. Expanding urban areas are often associated with increased resource consumption and waste production, which puts pressure on the ecosystem and food supply flow.

However, at the same time, urban areas are also part of the solution.

Urban population growth has triggered people’s settlement concentration in vulnerable areas. Urban areas are a source of problems for the social system and ecosystem, and their negative impacts are likely to increase with the pace of urbanization and demographic change. However, at the same time, urban areas are also part of the solution.

Ideally, urban areas are not merely food consumers. They must be able to meet some of their own food needs. For that, it is time to involve food issues in urban planning. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) mentioned in 2017 that the urban areas’ capacity to provide some of their own food and the inclusion of food issues in urban planning was the essence of the transformation of the urban food system.

Density and proximity within an urban area actually reduce the economic and environmental costs of providing the infrastructure and services for food production. In addition, urban areas also have significant institutional and technical capacities to deal with environmental problems, including food issues.

What also should not be forgotten is that urban areas should become a center of innovation. It is because colleges and research institutions are concentrated there, aren’t they?

Transformation

A sustainable urban food system is a new ideal that the world's cities want to achieve. The growing pressures of the food system on planet Earth are becoming increasingly recognized, not only by the scientific community but also by city policymakers.

There are already 370 advantageous urban food system practices documented in the Milan Pact.

One of the global initiatives to realize a sustainable food system is the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact initiated by Milan municipality, Italy. By mid-2022, 225 cities in the world became the signatories of the pact, including five cities in Indonesia. There are already 370 advantageous urban food system practices documented in the Milan Pact.

Being a center for creativity and innovation, many cities have now started transforming their food system through various innovative initiatives that support the principle of sustainability.

Interestingly, these initiatives have been driven not only by the municipal government but also initiated and developed by the citizens. These innovative initiatives have also blossomed and developed in cities in the northern and southern hemispheres. In essence, these initiatives offer new ways of providing food for urban regions.

One of the cities that see the inevitable transformation of its food system is Singapore. The city-state has an ambitious goal, which is to meet 30 percent of its own food needs by 2030 (30 by 30 Plan) and cater to the rest through imports from 170 countries and overseas farming.

To achieve this, Singapore has implemented a holistic and long-term approach to spatial planning, agri-food technology and the development of national agricultural experts (agri-specialists).

What Singapore has done can certainly be followed by cities in this archipelagic country. In fact, we can’t help holding out our convictions about the prospects because most of our urban regions have abundant supporting resources with the availability of land (including house yards), the existence of secondary vocational education institutions (SMK) and higher education in the agricultural-food sector, as well as the long-ingrained farming culture, thanks to strong urban-rural relations.

On the other hand, urban farming is starting to thrive in our urban areas involving various age groups, including millennials. The challenge is how to elevate urban farming activities to become more than just an urban gimmick that sees farming only as urbanites' hobby.

The transformation towards a sustainable urban food system will have multidimensional impacts. Economically, the strengthened local food security will automatically increase urban economic resilience.

Socially, the local food production capacity that involves people from various socio-economic statuses will form an inclusive local supply chain. Environmentally, the more local the food supply chain is, of course, the more containable the environmental hazards are, such as the issues on water and carbon. Likewise, circularity will be more sustainable when food waste is included as a “new” resource in the food system.

One of the cities that is being facilitated to carry out the transformation of its food system is Semarang in Central Java through the Sustainable, Healthy, Inclusive Food System Transformation (SHIFT) project. It is copromoted by UNEP and the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) and carried out by the Indonesian Biru Lestari Initiative Foundation (WAIBI) and Unika Soegijapranata.

Semarang is a unique metropolis because of its intact agrarian characteristics. Nearly 32 percent of the 373.7 square kilometers of urban areas is agricultural land, with rice fields accounting for more than 22 square kilometers and around 16 sqm has been designated as Sustainable Food Farming Land (LP2B).

It is not surprising that last year, Semarang was able to meet 15 percent of its own rice needs, in addition to chicken meat (67 percent), chicken eggs (54 percent) and various fruits and vegetables.

What Semarang holds, is of course also found in many urban areas in this country. To ensure that our urban areas become food contributors, we need to envision an urban food system that is appropriate and relevant to the conditions of each urban area. The formulation of the vision must involve all agriculture and food stakeholders in each urban area because, in turn, they are the ones who will realize this vision.

As Singapore has shown with its 30-30 vision, our cities should be willing to take up the venture.

KOMPAS/P RADITYA MAHENDRA YASA

Budi Widianarko

Budi Widianarko, Professor at Soegijapranata Catholic University (Unika); Member of Semarang Urban Development Advisory Council (DP2K)

(This article was translated by Musthofid)