ICLEI and IUFN consolidate efforts on urban food governance at Hungry City forum

Home to over 2.9 billion people, cities are the major consumers of the world’s resources - including food, which urban dwellers consume daily but often lack the knowledge of how and where they are produced, and their effects on our environment.

Recognizing cities’ lack of awareness and planning on urban food governance, ICLEI endorsed a new partnership with the International Urban Food Network (IUFN) at the Hungry City Forum held on 6-7 December in Paris, where they released a joint statement to mobilize city leaders to take a more holistic approach in promoting a more sustainable and resilient food system at the city-region level.

“Creating healthy, happy and sustainable communities in our cities requires resilient food system for the city region,” said Konrad Otto-Zimmermann, ICLEI Secretary General, adding that the issue has largely gone unaddressed by cities at present.    

Covering topics such as local and regional food production, retailing, logistics, rural-urban land use conflicts, food crisis, nutrition and health, the forum illustrated the complexity of the issue and the need for an integrated and multi-participatory approach to address urban food supply – one that looks beyond the administrative limits of cities and engages stakeholders from all sectors.

“We believe that sustainable food should be part of the strategic vision of a territory and of the local land planning. For now, this is still rarely the case, but we intend to contribute actively to a better awareness of this approach amongst the different public actors,” said Markéta Braine-Supkova, IUFN President. 

Calling for a framework and set of guidelines for cities to develop a sustainable urban food system at the city-region level, the joint statement by ICLEI and IUFN will be enhanced by the Resilient Urban Food Systems Forum at ICLEI’s 4^th Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaption – Resilient Cities 2013 in Bonn, German from 31 May to 2 June 2013.

For more information, visit http://resilient-cities.iclei.org/bonn2013/ or read the complete ICLEI-IUFN joint statement.