How Can Cities Improve Food Security and Become Resilient?

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak on Building Food Security into Resilient Cities at SHIFT20, an annual gathering of thousands of food innovators . Fellow panelists included author Ted Fishman, economist Geoffrey Hewings, and moderator, Harry Epstein of the p-chip Corporation. The topic could hardly have been more timely, as COVID- and social injustice-related disruptions have tested and troubled cities. Even prior to the pandemic, cities, particularly those in the US that I am most familiar with had some significant gaps in terms of both meeting the food security needs of their populace and resilience to social and environmental disruptions.

From deadly outbreaks of COVID among meat plant and farm workers, to price gouging at both ends of the beef supply chain, to produce plowed into fields and milk dumped down drains, to long lines of cars and pedestrians waiting to receive food from food banks, to empty grocery shelves and spotty inventory, food system flaws and weaknesses have been on full display over the last few months. COVID-19 disrupted all nodes of our food system: food production, manufacturing, and distribution. While COVID certainly revealed these challenges and worsened some of them, food insecurity, food loss and waste, monopsonies, monopolies, among others all predate the emergence of COVID.

There have been at least 30 million food insecure Americans for more than two decades. This high baseline level of food insecurity spiked to nearly 50 million people after the 2008/2009 recession, remaining at that level until 2014, when it began declining, just finally reaching pre-recession rates in 2018, although remaining slightly higher than in 2007 in absolute terms. Overall, that translates to about 11% of Americans facing food insecurity in 2018. Unfortunately, the rate of food security in American cities is nearly double the overall rate, with rates exceeding 30% in some cities in the Northeast, based on household income data and the cost of food. The high costs of housing and healthcare paired with extreme income inequality leave households in the bottom quartile with insufficient food access due to insufficient income due to low pay or inconsistent hours.

During COVID, we’ve seen this resource-related type of food insecurity soar as almost a third of the workforce, or nearly 40 million Americans lost their jobs in March through June. The government recognized the potential impact of COVID on the food system, but focused relief on producers rather than eaters allocating about 85% of the food relief funding to producer payments, or about $16B to producers on top of the $16B in Market Facilitation Program funding distributed to producers impacted by trade war-related disruptions. Of the $3B that was allocated to improving food access, Sec. Perdue elected to make the food available via a box program administered via “food banks, community and faith based organizations, and other non-profits” rather than expand SNAP. This decision has been roundly criticized because it aims to force creation of an alternative supply chain to serve hungry people, rather than utilize existing food system infrastructure of the dominate grocery supply chain.

Despite policy efforts to avoid SNAP, more than 6 million people enrolled in SNAP over the same time period from 42 states, not including major COVID hotspots like New Jersey. Despite this increase in enrollment, SNAP benefits remain quite low, even for households with no income at all. The maximum monthly benefit for an individual with no income is just $194/month for a maximum of 3 months, and the minimum benefit for individuals making up to 130% of the federal poverty level is just $16/ month. More than 2,500 organizations have advocated for increasing the minimum SNAP benefit by 15%, as there has been the largest increase in the cost of food since 1974 (estimated at 5.6% in the most recent Consumer Price Index). However, we also saw another disquieting type of food insecurity, unrelated to the financial capacity of people to purchase food: supply chain disruption related food access challenges. Grocery stores around the country implemented limits on staple goods to try to better ration available supply to customers, yet many Americans still confronted bare shelves in many sections of the store from meat to tofu to beans and pasta.

These disruptions resulted from highly consolidated, large-scale supply chains. When single meat processing plants account for 5% of pork supply, a closure can leave many stores without supply, particularly when the US was also exporting a record 258 million pounds of pork to China in April. Together, these events demonstrate that cities and their food systems lacked resilience and critical baseline performance, and disruption, in the form of the pandemic created new urgency to build a more resilient urban food system.

So what is resilience?

I like to start from the ecological definition of resilience, which conceptualizes resilience as an emergent property of a system, rather than the engineering definition of resilience as the rate of return to the pre-disturbance state. Ecologists define resilience as the amount of disturbance that an ecosystem can withstand without changing self-organized processes and structures (defined as alternative stable states). For me, the collection of biotic and abiotic factors that maintain key processes for an ecosystem to maintain consistent structure and function ARE resilience. So, it is not one crop, or one size that makes the system, but rather the whole collection of climate, soil, plants, animals, businesses, policy and people that determine resilience. The greater the diversity of the component parts, the stronger the emergent property of resilience is or the staying power of the system. 

To translate this concept into a practical tool that can be used to manage cities and food systems to a greater level of performance, I first think about the elements and processes in natural systems that confer resilience - diversity and redundancy at different scales. When looking at species diversity in ecosystems, ecologists generally talk about diversity as alpha, beta and gamma diversity. Alpha diversity would be the diversity within one ecosystem in a region, beta diversity would be the diversity between two ecosystems (unique, non-overlapping diversity), and gamma diversity is the total number of unique species across the whole region of ecosystems.

Borrowing this concept to develop measures for the food system and cities, I look at the degree of diversity within producers, processors, distributors, retailers, and other D2C ventures supplying urban residents with food. Then, I examine the degree of diversity across nodes in the supply chain:

• How much vertical integration exists?

• Are there checks and balances?

Finally, look at unique diversity across cities at different scales.

Doing this exercise reveals that there is not a tremendous amount of gamma diversity - diversity in the food system across cities. This means we have the same meat processors serving not just all US cities, but also cities abroad, so while diversity might look decent at the scale of one city, zooming out reveals a lack of redundancy that leaves the system vulnerable to disruption across multiple cities and even countries due to disturbance that impacts a single processor. Because so few players control meat processing in the US, which sits between production and end consumers, they've increasingly been caught displaying both monopsonistic buying behavior with producers, cutting the prices they would pay for animals, while simultaneously displaying monopolistic sales behavior increasing prices for retailers and end consumers.

At the alpha scale, distribution is another concerning node in food systems for urban areas, with few distribution centers serving retail markets in many cities. Consolidation and lack of competition in the distribution sector left it weak to disturbance by COVID, which limited retail supplies in many, particularly small corner retailers in US cities. 

Using the ecological concepts of diversity, resilience, and redundancy we can see where we have opportunity to build in capacity at the regional scale, as well as diversify our food system from production to retail to increase access and combat anti-competitive behavior apparent in our current system. I have recently been inspired by webinars and broadcasts organized and hosted by A Growing Culture, an organization working to diversity not just the scales of production, but to achieve a more equitable distribution of power across the food system to overcome the current issues of access that are so prevalent in cities.