IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/cfcp12/152401.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Landscape urbanisation and food security

Author

Listed:
  • Bai, Xuemei

Abstract

This talk will explore the crucial linkages between urbanisation and food security, based on our recent and ongoing research studies. Urbanisation is often cited as one of the significant factors threatening food security. First of all, urbanisation leads to land use conversion from agricultural land to urban land use, such as for infrastructure, industrial, residential or commercial uses. Such land use conversion often reduces the most fertile land, and therefore the impact on agricultural production and food security is often larger than the absolute amount of land involved. Our recent research shows that such urban land use conversion is often driven by economic factors, with positive feedback loops between urban land use expansion and economic growth in the city, as well as in the region. In addition, urbanisation also brings about changes in dietary structure, which in turn brings about changes to peri-urban areas, where crop production is replaced by higher economic-value products such as vegetables, flowers, fish ponds, and so on. Furthermore, land use changes associated with urbanisation in developing countries are found to increase social vulnerability in the traditional farming communities in the peri-urban areas. On the other hand, some of our initial research results show that urbanisation might have some positive impacts on agricultural productivity. While all evidence seemingly points to close urban–rural linkages, research and policy approaches often treat cities and rural areas as separate sectors. Such dichotomised concepts and approaches hamper the search for an effective system-wide solution. There is a strong need to consider urban and rural areas as integral parts of a system in the global food-security debate or in urbanisation policy. The challenge then becomes to find how we can harness and maximise the positive effects that urbanisation can bring, and avoid or compensate for the negative impacts.

Suggested Citation

  • Bai, Xuemei, 2012. "Landscape urbanisation and food security," 2012: The Scramble for Natural Resources: More Food, Less Land?, 9-10 October 2012 152401, Crawford Fund.
  • Handle: RePEc:ags:cfcp12:152401
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.152401
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/152401/files/Bai2012.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.152401?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Greenhalgh, S. & Samarasinghe, O. & Curran-Cournane, F. & Wright, W. & Brown, P., 2017. "Using ecosystem services to underpin cost–benefit analysis: Is it a way to protect finite soil resources?," Ecosystem Services, Elsevier, vol. 27(PA), pages 1-14.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:cfcp12:152401. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.crawfordfund.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.