Everyone has the right to healthy, sustainable and culturally appropriate food. Yet many people still can't call this their reality. Rikolto and a consortium of organisations, Ecosad, the FUNSAD Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) are working to change this through a participatory and collaborative research project. Their objective is to explore the potential of 'food hubs' or 'neighbourhoods' in creating resilient urban food systems in Quito and Lima.
In broader discussions about food systems, we often overlook the importance of local neighbourhoods. It's within these neighbourhoods that we see actors and dynamics at play that often go unnoticed when we focus solely at the city or national level. In this context, urban gardens, market stalls and community cooking initiatives become increasingly important when we consider their role in providing proximity and accessibility to food.
For example, through these urban gardens or community cooking initiatives, local markets, fairs and participatory platforms, thousands of people in Quito and Lima found access to food during the Covid 19 pandemic. This responded to widespread fears that food would become scarce. In some cases, however, food access in these initiatives didn't always translate into healthy options.
In the cities of Lima and Quito, people faced new challenges during the pandemic, adding to existing problems of restricted mobility due to quarantine and overcrowded markets. Such challenges, such as the availability of and access to healthy food for every citizen, reflected a mix of emerging problems and deeper, more structural issues. Metropolitan areas had experienced significant disruptions before. Roadblocks, strikes, landslides or earthquakes had affected food availability and access. But nothing compared to the scale of disruption caused by the pandemic...
This participatory action research project aims to understand how "food hubs" work and their potential to create linkages between "food hubs" that can potentially contribute to improving the resilience of the food production, distribution and accessibility to healthy, nutrititous and sustainable food.
In this context, we use the concept of 'food hubs', which are walkable spaces (15 blocks) configured around a food centrality (e.g. a food market) and connected by neighbours' relationships with food, regardless of the city's administrative areas. They reflect the link between food supply and demand in the urban area. A neighbourhood can include a district, part of a district or several districts.
Food hubs have the potential to create collaborative systems between producers and consumers around healthy food. These collaborations could increase the resilience and sustainability of the city's food system. Through this project we hope to achieve the following outcomes:
"The contribution of projects like this lies both in the possibility of drafting a municipal ordinance - which is a valuable precedent for further political advocacy - and in creating formal (alliances) or informal (collectives, networks) spaces for organisations and people who share the same vision and mutual trust to promote deeper transformations."
A network of allied agencies and organisationsis implementing the project in Lima and Quito, includes:
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