The Role of Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture in Urban Resilience Recording

Urban households predominantly depend on foods grown from rural and peri-urban areas. Urban agriculture is small-scale and informal, resulting in unstable production and inadequate to meet the growing demands. As a result, poor, vulnerable, and marginalized households in urban areas regularly face food insecurity issues, and they are nutritionally deprived, despite food-related expenses being their significant expenditure.

The shock posed by the COVID-19 pandemic further revealed the fragility of urban food systems, their supply chain, and notably vulnerability and food insecurity of the urban poor. In the future, climate change and its effects on the agriculture sector will continue to disrupt food systems and may pose severe threats to food security.

This session discussed the importance of urban agriculture for resilience and highlight key challenges and opportunities for scaling up investments in urban agriculture in Asian cities.