The number of people living in urban environments is growing at a rapid rate. Urban living fundamentally changes how people eat, as they are more reliant on needing paid employment and are more limited with growing their own food. This shift towards more urban living is also seeing big changes in food environments for most people, and what food is available, affordable and accessible to them.
Food systems are essential to food and nutrition security. They are also major drivers of economic, environmental, and social development and can be positive forces for urban development. This is critical, as increasing urbanisation of the global population is shifting the relative burden of poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition to cities. To keep up with this growth, greater urban infrastructure, are required.
This paper considers whether Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) focused on improving diets and nutrition can simultaneously advance public health nutrition goals and business goals. Discussion around the efficiency of PPPs is polarised in the field of nutrition.
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated control measures have been having far-reaching effects on societies worldwide, and food systems have not been spared. To better understand these impacts, GAIN and partners, including the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Business Network, undertook a survey of over 350 food system SMEs in 17 countries in early May 2020, aiming to assess the impacts of the COVID-19.
Animal-source foods (ASF; meat, poultry, fish, dairy, and eggs) have attracted considerable attention for both their role in diets and their environmental impacts - and their production also plays an important role in livelihoods, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The Building Business Contributions for the 2020 Global Nutrition Summit conference in The Hague took place as part of Workstream 2 on food systems, which is coordinated by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Nutrition programmes within commodity value chains provide a unique opportunity to improve health outcomes for workers, farmers, their households, and communities. They bring benefits to communities, businesses, governments, and markets. In order for these programmes to be viable in the long term, businesses need to be willing to invest, and the business case for doing so must be understood.
This paper posits the urban food environment as an extremely useful policy-making framework for developing actions to improve nutrition, as it is the point at which people and food interact. It describes the nutritional challenges of urban areas and how urban food environments influence nutrition through the affordability, physical access to, convenience and desirability of healthy foods.
The world is urbanising rapidly, and malnutrition in urban areas (including both undernutrition and overweight/obesity) is an increasing problem. City policymakers in all countries are well placed to address urban malnutrition by virtue of their access to a wide variety of policy-level entry-points to food access and physical activity.
Food supply chains are challenged to deliver affordable, safe and nutritious food. GAIN has developed a tool for analysing specific supply chains identify weaknesses or bottlenecks and suggesting potential interventions to improve nutrition along the supply chain, i.e. Supply Chain Analysis for Nutrition (SCAN). Supply chains structure how goods and services move from producers to consumers and are key components of the food system.
