Category: Uncategorized

The question of how food and nutrition should be positioned within the New Urban Agenda was the subject of a meeting of experts at the United Nations on May 12, 2016 that resulted in a detailed set of recommendations. On June 18, 2016, a Habitat III preparatory committee released a revised zero draft of the New Urban Agenda that included some, though not all of the expert group’s suggestions. The following are excerpts from the draft that address food security, hunger, nutrition, and urban and regional food systems. Comments on the zero draft are being accepted until July 4, 2016:

Shared Vision

We envisage cities and human settlements that: 
(a) fulfill their social function, including the social function of land, ensuring the full and progressive realization of the right to adequate housing, as well as equal access for all to public goods and services, food security and nutrition, quality and accessible public spaces, livelihoods and decent work.

Sustainable Urban Development for Social Inclusion and Poverty Eradication

We commit to ensure equitable and affordable access to basic physical and social infrastructure for all, including affordable serviced land, housing, energy, safe drinking water and sanitation, nutritious food, waste disposal, mobility, health, education, culture and information and communication technologies. We further commit to provide that these services are gender-sensitive and responsive to the rights and needs of children and youth, older persons and persons with disabilities, and other people in vulnerable situations such as refugees, displaced persons and migrants, with no legal, institutional or socio-economic, nor physical barriers.

Environmentally Sound and Resilient Urban Development

We commit to promote the creation of well-connected and well-distributed networks of open, multi- purpose, safe and green public spaces, including the creation of ecological corridors, to improve the resilience of cities to disasters and climate change, reducing flood risks and heat waves, and improving food security and nutrition, physical and mental health, household and ambient air quality, and attractive and livable urban landscapes.

We commit to give particular consideration to urban deltas, coastal areas and other environmentally sensitive areas, highlighting their importance as ecosystems’ providers of significant resources for transport, food security, economic prosperity, ecosystem services and resilience, and integrate appropriate measures to factor them into sustainable urban planning and development.

We commit to support local provision of basic services, leveraging on the proximity of resources, recognizing that a heavy reliance on distant sources of energy, water, food, and materials pose sustainability challenges, including vulnerability to service supply disruptions.

We commit to strengthening the of resources like land, water, energy, materials, food, oceans and seas, freshwater resources as well as the production and environmentally sound management of waste, minimization of hazardous chemicals, and the mitigation of emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, taking into consideration urban-rural linkages, functional supply and value chains in the full-range of resource requirements vis-à-vis the environmental impact and sustainability, striving to a progressive transition towards a circular economy.

Planning and Managing Urban Spatial Development

We will implement polycentric and balanced territorial development policies and plans, strengthening the role of small and intermediate cities in enhancing food security and nutrition systems, providing access to housing, infrastructure and services, and facilitate effective trade links, ensuring that small scale farmers are linked to larger supply chains. We will also support urban agriculture and farming as an option to contribute to food security.

We will promote the integration of food and nutrition needs of urban residents, particularly the urban poor, in urban development planning, contributing to the elimination of hunger and malnutrition. We will promote coordination of food security and agriculture policies across rural, peri-urban, and urban areas to facilitate the production, storage, transport, and marketing of food to consumers. We will further promote the coordination of food policies with energy, water, transport, and other policies in urban areas to maximize efficiencies and minimize waste, recognizing the food-water-energy nexus. 


On Monday, December 1, 2014, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) published its final rule requiring nearly 300,000 retail food establishments and approximately 9,000 operators of food vending machines to post calorie counts at the point of sale, and provide additional nutrition information. The regulation, required by the Affordable Care Act of 2010, is designed to enable consumers to make better decisions about their diets by giving them calorie information about the food they consume away from home at the moment they make decisions about what to order.

The regulation is an effort to stem the health problems associated with overweight and obesity. In the US, 34% of adults are obese, and 34% are overweight. Among children and adolescents (2-19 years old), nearly a third are overweight or obese. Targeting restaurants (and cafes, grocers, vending machines and other places to buy ready-to-eat food) is critical because Americans consume an increasing percentage of their daily calories away from home — up from 18% in the 1970s to about 1/3 today. Moreover, the meals we buy ready-made away from home are higher in calories than those prepared from scratch at home (134 more calories/meal for those purchased by non-overweight consumers and 239 more for those purchased by obese consumers). (For sources see the Regulatory Impact Analysis of the rules.)

An article published by Reuters today noted that in assessing its costs and benefits, the FDA included the estimated loss of benefits to consumers as they switch from higher to lower calorie foods. FDA estimated that disclosing calorie information would mean lost benefits (or “consumer surplus”) in the range of $2.2 billion to $5.27 billion because there would be a reduction in food dollars spent as the posted calorie information encouraged consumers to switch to lower calorie menu items. This dollar value of reduced consumption of higher calorie food is considered a “cost” in the analysis because the shift in spending is attributed to lost utility (or value and pleasure) to the consumer reflected by our purchasing choices, rather than a gain in satisfaction, taste, pleasure, mental health, and estimated future life benefits that consumers may derive from lower calorie options (or by not purchasing an order of fries at all).

It seems to be a mis-application of the concept of consumer surplus to treat a shift to healthier eating as a consumer loss rather than an indication that consumers derive greater benefits — psychic, gustatory, and health-wise — from eating lower calorie items rather than higher calorie items. Willingness to pay for high calorie food in the absence of information about the caloric content of that food doesn’t indicate consumers are deriving “consumer surplus” by eating that food.

Despite the inclusion of this measure of consumer surplus loss in the cost-benefit analysis, the estimated benefits of the calorie labeling requirement still exceed their costs by $477.9 million over 20 years (at a discount rate of 7%). The regulations are set to take effect a year from now.

In 2012, the average farmer in the was 58.3 years old. Farming is a difficult and often unprofitable business, and transferring farmland can be complex and costly.  These and other obstacles, like the high capital costs of farm equipment, prevent young people from entering farming, making regional food systems vulnerable as existing farm operators retire.

To address the problem of farmland access, the NYS Assembly and Senate have passed legislation (A. 7002/ S. 5377) that would: (1) require state agencies to identify state land that is viable for farming that could be sold or leased for that purpose; and (2) require the state’s Agriculture Advisory Council to provide advice to state agencies on tax, financial assistance and other programs that could address the needs of beginning farmers.  The National Young Farmers Coalition, American Farmland Trust and Agrarian Trust are lobbying to ensure that Governor Cuomo signs the legislation into law.

• The creation of 124 acres of new food growing spaces;
• Establishing 20% of these urban agriculture sites on housing estates and 35% on school sites (with 700 schools growing food as part of the project); and
• Ensuring that two-thirds of the gardens/farms were on land that was unused, derelict, or inaccessible.

New policies are often driven by projects that require legal, administrative or procedural changes. One of the accomplishments of the Capital Growth effort was the generation of policy changes to accommodate the expansion of urban agriculture in London.  Key new policies include:

• Including the Capital Growth project in 
the London Plan, the city’s 20-year strategic framework, so that it encourages local planners to create and protect land for food production;
• Getting the Greater London Authority to include food production in the city’s green infrastructure plan;
• Getting local borough strategies to include food growing as an important land use;
• Challenging perceived legal barriers to growing food; and
• Working with Transport for London on ways to access transportation sites and developing a template lease agreement for these sites.

• support for urban agriculture and connections to the rest of the food system;
• increasing public participation in the activities of neighborhood food networks and community based programs;
• improving access to healthy, local, affordable food;
• addressing the needs for food processing, storage and distribution infrastructure to increase the production and distribution of local food; and
• reducing food waste and increasing the beneficial reuse of discarded food