Urban agriculture findings from four city case studies

The year 2008 marked a critical event in world history: for the first time, the world’s urban population outnumbered its rural population. According to United Nations Population Fund, the world’s urban population is expected to double from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 6.4 billion by 2050, and it is predicted
that by 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities (UNFPA 2007). It is expected that by 2020, 85 percent of the poor in Latin America, and about 40-45 percent of the poor in Africa and Asia, will be concentrated in towns and cities.
As cities expand, so do the food needs of urban families. The urbanization process in many developing countries goes closely together with increasing urban poverty and growing food insecurity and malnutrition especially of the urban poor. Their situation is particularly difficult in the context of volatile food prices and financial, fuel and economic crises, since urban consumers are almost exclusively dependent on food purchases and the urban poor are the most affected.
Poverty and food insecurity have often been considered to be largely rural problems. In urban settings, however, lack of income translates more directly into lack of food than in rural settings. Vulnerable groups in cities often have fewer informal safety nets, including kinship and community networks. Their dependence upon purchased food is further compounded by their incapacity to access and use natural
resources to produce most of their own food. Disadvantaged urban households may have to devote an extremely high proportion of their disposable income to food, between 54 percent and 76 percent in Sub-Saharan capital cities. The higher the proportion of income spent on food by low socioeconomic groups, the more precarious their food situation is likely to be, although food budget shares in different cities may not be directly comparable (FAO 2008b).

source:
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/dcb0ef03-9d44-55df-90b5-fc422c24c6ef