The Pros and Cons of Urbanization in Relation to Food Security

The world has sworn to eradicate poverty and malnutrition by 2030 as sustainable development goals implemented in 2015 by United Nations. Still, growing urbanization is imposing new challenges to development, and as per latest study, India is principally vulnerable since it confronts another twin burden of under-nutrition. India confronts an absurd situation; its swift financial growth is joined with a much gradual decline in under-nutrition. This essay will discuss the effect of urbanization and its effect on food security in India and its comparison with highly urbanized countries like United States.

The food and Agriculture organization of the UN known as FAO describes food security as a condition that is present when all persons, always, have physical and financial access to adequate, safe and nourishing food to meet their dietetic requirements and food predilections for a lively and fit life. This description includes four important dimensions to domestic food security: accessibility, steadiness, protection and access. Each of the four important features of food security can be examined in the background of municipal environment. The primary dimension which is food accessibility is related to the general accessibility of appropriate amounts of food. This is mostly a function of food manufacture and supply. Both manufacture and supply networks are different in countryside and urban backgrounds. Food permanency necessitates that food can be obtained at all times.

Food security is related to the quality of food. It is not plentiful that satisfactory amount of food is available, if it cannot be used without jeopardizing chief health problems. Several studies concluded that urbanization usually reduce child malnourishment and raise dietary diversity. Though, in Municipal areas food is progressively spent outside the house in India or in several emergent countries the set-up of roadside stalls is undefined. Stands normally lack proper preservation, water, and hygienic facilities. Sellers are frequently not trained in cooking, managing, and stowing food carefully. The last dimension, access to food is linked with the capitals that a separate or domestic owns to get food mandatory for a healthy diet. Therefore, for persons living in city areas, food access depends chiefly on the house's ability to buy food. Most city poor neither have huge food stores, nor do they have availability to areas for own food manufacture. The urban poor frequently pay more for food procurements than do richer urban counterparts, as they are helpless to purchase small extents of food daily since they do not have the capitals or living situations which allow them to obtain and store large amounts of food at home. It is worth mentioning here that probable changes at two dissimilar ends of the spectrum in terms of countries' financial success.

It would be predictable that in states with effective economies and swift urbanization, there will be increasing demands for meat, dairy foods, herbal oils and ‘luxury’ foods, and this infers more energy intensive manufacture and, for several nations, more importations from other countries. Urbanization is also related with dietetic shifts towards more treated and pre-prepared fast foods, in part in response to long occupied hours and, for a share of the urban populace, with decreased physical activity. Food requirement will also be impacted by how this financial growth deviates the circulation of income. It is usually inferred that urbanization is commonly related with financial growth, this does not imply that the number of urban inhabitants facing hunger has reduced in all countries. In India, increased rural-urban links offer both challenges and prospects for urban and rustic areas equally. Attaining food security and nourishment across the rural-urban range includes a series of multifaceted and interwoven factors touching on problems such as sustainable manufacture models, advancement of markets that are helpful to limited manufacturers, satisfactory employment and revenue generation, customer access to varied and nourishing products, safe access to natural resources, delivery of proper services and substructure. Although, the renovation of rural areas stimulated by relations with municipal centers can deliver constructive effects in terms of access to facilities and better incomes, and can subsidize to more supportable urbanization, however, it can also imply that certain parts are left behind, making pockets of poverty and helping people to get away from their areas of origin in search of improved living circumstances.

Only by attending the main causes of food insecurity and malnourishment in both pastoral and municipal areas will it be likely to break the susceptibility cycle and take full benefit of the prospects offered by urbanization and rustic transformation. Indian country implemented food reforms in the form of its National Food Security Act (NFSA, under which almost ninety-nine million families are eligible to five kilogram of subsidized food grain per individual per month. Additionally, “Mid-Day Meal Scheme” under which free lunches were provided to students in schools and “Anganwadi centers” comprised of courtyard centers established to combat child hunger and undernourishment to tackle food and nourishment uncertainty were launched in India. However, regardless of all these schemes to fight hunger problems in India, it still has an elevated figure of undernourishment as seen by the below graph.

Out of thirty-two people million people who relocated from rural areas to city areas between 2000 and 2010, according to immigration data from Survey held in 2012, nearly 8 million people moved for work or business whereas 11 million moved with their families. Approximately twenty percent of India’s urban population, or more than sixty-five million people, lives in slums, a figure that is increasing day by day. According to IFPRI report, poor urban residents are confronted with exceptional nutritional challenges around retrieving healthful food, satisfactory employment, communal protection, and appropriate supply of water, public health, and sanitation facilities, all of which impact food security and nutrition. It is safe to assume that, distress relocation to inner-city areas, unlike developing migration, is urbanizing the problem of food insecurity in India. India is burdened with the dual problem of over and udder malnutrition.

According to a survey, low body weight indices are more predominant in rural areas, obesity and overweight were more prevalent in urban areas. South Korea is one of the countries that has undergone the drastic changes of economic growth and as a result, under nutrition has occurred in rural areas of South Korea. The Seoul urban area contains the metropolis of Seoul and including the urbanization of Incheon, to the west and considerable residential growth in the jurisdiction of Gyeonggi on the other three sides Seoul’s populace density is among the biggest of the world’s prosperous municipal areas. With populace density of twenty-seven thousand people per square mile, which are a result of urbanization. Statistics predict that Seoul metropolitan area will continue to expand with the rapid economic growth. Let’s take a look at the urbanized countries like United States, which is now overwhelmed in an obesogenic atmosphere.

The National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assessed that in 2015-2016, the frequency of obesity in the US was around 40% in grownups and 19% in youth. Survey disclosed that, with urbanization, people’s diets are shifting. City populations have a tendency to eat more calories, still a lower percentage of these calories comes from cereals or sugars and more comes from fats. Municipal residents eat more meat and other protein, or devour various animal protein sources as compared to rural counterparts, but fewer dairy products are used. They also consume more fruits and vegetables general, however ingesting of these food groups varies between more affluent and minor urban populations. Urban residents consume more non-basic diets, which includes sugary snacks among kids, takeaways from restaurants rather from home, and processed foods. Studies show that urbanization in USA is linked with high blood pressure in males and with cardiac disease and cholesterol in other residents. With more folks assuming ‘urban diets’, there have been some variations in the food supply change.

For example, the move away from grains and oats such as rice and wheat to vegetables, fruits, dairy, meat and fish have been changed. There is also a trend for shopping from retail supermarkets rather than the traditional markets among urban consumers. In 2018, according to an estimate, one in eight Americans were food insecure, associating to forty million US citizens including more than twelve million youngsters. The U.S. Department of Agriculture known as USDA describes food insecurity as a deficiency of steady access to adequate food for a dynamic, fit life. It is imperative to know that hunger and food uncertainty are strictly related, however, discrete concepts. Hunger denotes to a personal, physical feeling of distress, whereas food insecurity denotes to a lack of existing fiscal resources for food at the domestic level. Policy assessment, through both quantifiable and qualitative study, discloses food insecurity to be an intricate problem.

It does not exist in separation, as low-income households are impacted by multiple, overlying issues like inexpensive housing, social segregation, health complications, medicinal costs, and low salaries. Several do not have what they need to meet basic requirements and these challenges enlarge a family’s risk of food insecurity. Active responses to food insecurity will require to address these overlying challenges. Considering both issues such as reasonably priced housing, social seclusion, education level, redundancy or underemployment and food insecurity are significant social factors of health It can be defined as the “circumstances in the surroundings in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship and age that impact an extensive range of health, working and quality-of-life results and risks.” Poverty and food insecurity in the America are carefully related. Not all folks living below the poverty line experience food uncertainty, and individuals living above the poverty line can experience food insecurity as well.

Salaries and other critical domestic expenditures such as caring for an ill-child can also assist in predicting food insecurity among people living in the United States. While US families are frequently labeled as either food secure or food insecure, there are 4 levels of food security, that define the range of families’ experiences in retrieving adequate food. Families with high food security and peripheral food security make up the food secure group, and families with low food security and very low food security make up the food insecure group, A pyramid chart is given below depicting the above information. The “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” is the basis of national nutrition policy and diet education projects and is “concerned with legislators, nutrition educationalists, nutritionists, and health care providers as defined by United State Department of Health and Human Services and US Department of Agriculture in 2005.

It was first printed in 1980 and has been restructured every 5 years by a committee selected by the secretaries of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. The 2005 strategies and plans include the recommendation that grownups take 2 cups of fruit and two and a half cups of vegetables, and they call for feeding of a variety of healthy foods, for example, selections from 5 vegetable subcategories. The 2005 strategies also addressed problems of safety as denoted by the US Department of Health and Human Services and US Department of Agriculture in 2005, however, they do not mention other dynamic elements of food security such as accessibility, affordability, cultural adequacy, social righteousness, or self-governing decision making. Schoonover and Muller evaluate that the actual cost of fresh fruit and vegetables has amplified by forty percent from 1985 to 2000, whereas the prices of fats and oils and of beverages have reduced by more than ten percent and twenty percent, correspondingly; they claim that United States farm policy has formed this gap by leading food industry investment into inexpensive food additives for treated or fast foods which has caused overnutrition in the United States.

It is safe to assume that, poverty, food insecurity and undernourishment remain rigorous in rustic areas, there is also a necessity to better recognize these challenges in municipal areas. Among kids in developing nations like India, underweight is still a bigger problem as compared to obesity. The most unbalanced outcomes of suburbanization and rural revolution will happen when the same communal groups are omitted and further relegated. which are frequently low-income factions, counting those that are confronted with social segregation for reasons such as gender, age, background, race, belief, or community class. All of such factions are confronted with the risk of being left out from prospects afforded by larger access to facilities and substructure, employment and income producing opportunities, and access to nourishing foods evolving from rural-urban connections, and will face bigger challenges to attaining food security and nutrition.

It can be concluded that problem of food security such as over- and undernutrition as a result of urbanization are not merely a problem of rich or poor, correspondingly. On the contrary, all too often these issues overlap and co-occur. Presently, policies to handle this dual burden of malnourishment need to be pursued and indorsed independently and thoroughly, as if the two issues were independent of each other. The world's level of suburbanization is probable to continue to be growing, as long as the longstanding trend in most low- and middle-income countries is for financial growth. Among these countries, those with the most financial achievement will usually urbanize most. Higher income countries may no longer urbanize; however, this is mostly the result of non-agricultural labors being able to live in rustic areas or industrial and service initiatives situated in pastoral areas. This will need to transform, and strategies and agendas should be developed that need to address both problems in a unified manner.

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