In cities, towns and rural communities alike, all must be fed to survive, and those with the means have two or three meals a day. The right to food cannot be separated from the right to housing, adequate water and sanitation, decent employment and all the other rights related to a life of dignity. In rural and smaller communities, it is fairly easy to see how people are fed or go hungry; the larger the community, however, the more difficult it is to comprehend the food system.

Significant attention has been paid to many issues that will be part of this year’s Habitat III conference on cities as well as the global urbanization strategy that will come out of it, the New Urban Agenda. But there has been a notable lack of reference to food, nutrition and the provisioning challenges to urban sustainability in the preparations for the conference, despite the fact that many key urban issues — housing, transportation, infrastructure, health, ecosystem resilience, urban-rural linkages, territorial development and spatial planning — have important food-system and rural components. Compared to Habitat I and II, there is a marked overemphasis in the Habitat III preparations on the urban with inadequate reference to the rural. Read more……