Assessing urban food security : adjusting FEWS [famine early warning system] rural vulnerability assessment framework to urban environments

In keeping with this orientation, emphasis in early warning to date has stressed rural food security and monitoring of factors that affect seasonal agricultural production, the mainstay of rural households. Remotely sensed and ground-based data on meteorological, crop, and rangeland conditions, as well as food price data, provide early indications of potentially food-insecure areas. However, while poor rural households confront many of the same risks today as they did 20 years ago, Africa"s urban populations have mushroomed and, as a consequence, new food security issues and threats have emerged. Consequently, there is a need to address urban food security issues, and evaluate the appropriateness of the FEWS"s rural-centric food security assessments and related tools for the urban environment. This paper attempts to introduce and sensitize FEWS field staff to this need by reviewing the current literature and thinking on urban food security, risks, and coping mechanisms, as well as some assessment methods and tools. It also offers suggestions and precautions for selecting useful monitoring indicators and measurement tools. Conceptual differences in rural and urban food security and vulnerability issues are highlighted, and the practical implications of these differences are noted. The report argues that differences between rural and urban food security issues suggest that the FEWS current vulnerability assessment (CVA) method is not directly applicable to urban environments. Unlike rural households that acquire a large share of their annual income through one of two harvests per year and then consume their food stocks over the following months, urban households earn income continuously throughout the year, and there is no equivalent point in time from which to gauge food security for an extended period of time into the future. Taking food security readings at the beginning of the marketing season, as is done with the rural CVA, is not as informative in urban settings. In addition, there is often no dominant seasonal risk to monitor. An urban VA need not be executed every year as is done with the CVA. Although the overarching food security conceptual framework still holds, there is a need to develop specifically urban assessment and monitoring tools to more accurately and appropriately capture relationships between shocks and vulnerability to food insecurity.