Linkages and Interactions between Urban Food Security and Rural Agricultural Systems

Meeting urban food demand due to population growth, the changing nature of food consumption patterns, and the vulnerability of both local and regional food production to environmental variability presents future challenges. Globalization and international flows and trade of food and commodities are key aspects of how urban areas will meet future food demand. But urban areas exhibit different levels of connectivity to international, regional, and local food systems. Additionally, most urban food security research has focused on large metropolitan areas, despite the reality that significant numbers of urban residents live in small to moderate sized urban places. Given complex patterns of urbanization and their differential engagement with global, regional, and local food supply chains, new research is needed to understand what types of urban places are most vulnerable to impacts of local and regional crop production, and what type of urban agglomerations can mitigate those impacts through food imports from distant areas. This project evaluates the impacts of environmental variability on rural agricultural production and how this affects urban food security, and, in turn, how urban population growth affects the demand for local and regional agricultural production, as measured through food trade and other flows. This large-scale interdisciplinary research partnership involves collaborators from University of Arizona, University of California Santa Barbara, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Clark researchers are responsible for characterizing rural agricultural production using remote sensing and modeling the land use impact of different urbanization scenarios.