Source:Chris Scott, MEATINGPLACE, 4/28/16



A Michigan State University professor is making four recommendations designed to help meet growing global food needs in major cities.

The report from Thomas Reardon notes that 66 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities worldwide by 2050. He adds that feeding urban populations in low- and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America has become an “urgent and critical challenge” as population growth in urban and rural areas will require increases in global food production of up to 60 percent by 2050. Reardon is a professor of agriculture, food and resource economics and nonresident senior fellow, Global Food and Agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The report’s recommendations include:
• Boost U.S. leadership to legislate commitments to long-term global food and nutrition security strategy in addition to developing early warning systems in low-income countries to monitor threats to food systems such as disease outbreaks or food contamination.
• Enable and leverage private-sector investment into small-scale farms and rural small- and medium-sized enterprises in the food system through U.S. government and U.S. businesses.
• Improve regional trade capacity to build sustainable food systems across national borders through trade policy, including establishing a USDA undersecretary of trade and foreign agricultural affairs.
• Strengthen research support and expand the research system to build food systems designed to increase productivity, harvesting and storage technologies and water utilization and conservation, among other initiatives.

The report added that U.S. interests are at stake as these growing markets provide “enormous new investment opportunities” for U.S. business and long-term food affordability for U.S. consumers, among others, on a global scale.

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