This article was originally published here by the C40 Knowledge Hub. It is part of a new report Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery set out by leading mayors and a complementary set of policy briefs written by C40 for cities beginning their recovery phases which can be found here.
The World Food Programme is forecasting the impact of Covid-19 to double acute hunger globally by the end of 2020, putting 130 million lives and livelihoods at risk. Many cities are seeing a dramatic increase in vulnerable populations with restricted access to food, particularly among the newly unemployed, whose livelihoods have been disrupted, and those homebound due to quarantine. At the same time, the pandemic has exposed weaknesses at all levels of the food system, and food supplies into cities have been disrupted on every continent.
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This article looks at how cities can ensure that people have access to sufficient healthy food, both during the Covid-19 crisis and into the recovery phase. It explores the measures cities are taking to provide food aid for vulnerable people and to maintain and enhance the supply of food into cities, to meet needs now and to build a better food system in the longer term.
For more on physical-distancing approaches to food retail, restaurants and more, please see Emerging best practice on physical distancing in cities (which draws on experiences around the world) and Between lockdown and outbreak: a middle path for containing Covid-19 in global south cities.
Ensuring food access and feeding vulnerable citizens
Cities that have been hit by the effects of Covid-19, that are observing full or partial lockdown measures to contain the virus and that are experiencing the resulting economic fallout, have experienced a spike in the number of people requiring food aid. Many cities are working to ensure food access for vulnerable populations by providing food parcels, prepared meals, food vouchers or direct financial support. Such measures aim to complement national government assistance – where it exists – to reach those needing food aid faster, including groups who may not be eligible for national schemes.
High numbers of city residents will continue to require food aid for at least the next year, as the sustained need for a degree of physical distancing and the knock-on impacts on city economies and individual livelihoods continue to restrict people’s access to food. Providing an enhanced level of food support through this next phase of the Covid-19 pandemic would also help to reduce travel within cities and crowding in food-shopping locations, as well as to protect existing food-sector jobs and to create new jobs in the distribution of food.
As economies reopen and we adapt to living with the virus, food-aid schemes introduced or ramped up during the Covid-19 emergency response phase could be adapted to meet the needs of priority groups and those who request support:
- Those with suspected and confirmed cases of Covid-19, who are in isolation in their homes or in dedicated facilities for a quarantine period (usually 14 days).
- People who are vulnerable to Covid-19, particularly elderly people, those with underlying health conditions and immunosuppressed groups, who may be self-isolating or otherwise shielded from their community for the longer-term to reduce their risk of catching the virus.
- People whose livelihoods have been lost or disrupted and who face new difficulty accessing food.
- Existing food-aid recipients, who had been previously identified by the city as requiring support.
Read more about these examples and more in Covid-19 and Food: Frequently Asked Questions, which is available in the ‘From our networks’ tab in the Covid-19 portal. This FAQ document is updated regularly by the C40 Food Systems network team.
The main ways in which cities are providing food aid are set out below. In addition to providing direct assistance, they are also working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private donation and distribution initiatives to coordinate food aid and support their operations to meet the increased demand. In addition to facilitating financial and food donations, for example, some cities are encouraging those who are less at risk to volunteer at their local food banks as, prior to the pandemic, many volunteers were older and more vulnerable to Covid-19. Cities are also reassigning city staff and unemployed groups to support this food-aid effort.
City approaches to food-aid distribution
Direct distribution of food. Cities are delivering food directly to targeted households, as well as using facilities such as schools, libraries and more as food collection hubs (food banks).
- Rio de Janeiro is distributing food baskets to 140,000 low-income families and delivering 20,000 basic food baskets to those out of work or facing a fall in income, starting with street vendors and taxi drivers, the elderly and those with physical disabilities.
- In Johannesburg, the city is distributing emergency food parcels containing 15kg of vegetables (to last for two weeks) to vulnerable households previously enrolled in food-aid programmes. The city buys the food from markets, on the advice of a nutritionist. Initially, recipients were notified about time and pick-up location by text message, but the city has since reverted to door-to-door delivery to discourage crowding and to reach more vulnerable households. Some 56,000 households had benefited as of the beginning of May 2020.
- In Wuhan, neighbourhoods closed during lockdown were provided with food by groups of volunteers who organised food purchasing, with large volumes of food delivered using repurposed city buses (see photos). Quito has also adopted Wuhan’s approach of mobile food hubs, using municipal buses to facilitate food access.
- Washington, DC is providing healthy food-aid boxes, including healthy dried goods and shelf-stable foods. The city is also distributing bags of fresh produce at school sites.
- Kampala has launched a door-to-door delivery service to provide maize flour and beans to vulnerable people. The programme is targeting child-headed households, persons living with HIV and the elderly, and aims to reach 1.5 million urban poor.
- Milan has established 10 hubs to deliver food to vulnerable people, feeding 100,000 people per week. The city has also hired furloughed employees from educational cooperatives and transport companies to pack and deliver food to vulnerable groups.
Providing "good food" aid
In all cases, food distribution and access schemes should prioritise healthy and plant-based food, with fresh produce and legumes as the main proteins. Milan**,** for example, has a mainly plant-based food-aid procurement system in keeping with the Planetary Health Diet. As part of the Covid-19 food-aid system, the municipality has also worked with partners to open a specific hub where fruits and vegetables are collected and redistributed to the city’s 10 food hubs and added to food-aid packages – an approach that has helped to improve the quality of food provided. The fresh food from this hub has been donated by retailers and wholesalers.
Toronto has repurposed its public libraries to serve as food hubs for the community. Many cities have also repurposed public facilities as food markets to decentralise shopping for physical-distancing purposes; Lagos is using schools, for example. Read more in Emerging best practice on physical distancing in cities.
In New York City, the NYC Food Delivery Assistance Program has contracted large catering organisations and more than 11,000 unemployed taxi drivers to deliver food to vulnerable groups.
Prompted by the Covid-19 crisis, London is strengthening its food-aid system by coordinating a decentralised approach through the London Food Alliance.
Providing meals through dedicated food kitchens and school meal programmes. Food kitchens serving poorer neighbourhoods and school meal programmes are helping to feed low-income communities, people on daily wages and others who are unable to work in lockdown conditions.
- Delhi is providing meals in schools and other venues.
- Washington, DC is offering free meals to anyone under 18 years of age at more than 50 food hubs in the city, many of them schools.
- In New York City, the Department of Education has set up 400 meal hubs in schools, providing 400,000 free meals a day, available to anyone in need, with no ID required.
Safe food distribution
In some contexts where food is scarce, including in some informal settlements, food distribution services can expose those distributing and receiving food to risks such as violence, gender-based violence and crime. Cities should work with community organisations and leaders to find safe solutions, such as distributing food in more locations to smaller groups.
Providing financial support through food vouchers and/or cash transfers. Cash transfers have the advantage of providing recipients with the autonomy to make their own food choices and can reduce the burden on food-aid systems.
- Curitiba is giving families enrolled in an existing national programme, called Bolsa Familia, an additional BRL 70 (around USD 13) a month for food credits to be used at local markets. Around 120,000 children are now receiving this supplemental financial support, which aims to cover food expenses during the pandemic.
- In Bogotá, the Home Solidarity City System (Sistema Distrital Bogotá Solidaria en Casa) is providing a basic household income to the poorest and most vulnerable families in the city for as long as the lockdown lasts. The system is currently reaching 350,000 families, with plans to extend to 500,000 families through private donations.
- Seattle has provided one-off cash transfers of USD 800 per family to 6,250 vulnerable families to enable them to purchase food and other essential household goods at participating local grocery stores.
- In Nantes, over 7,000 low-income families in the city’s school meals programme have received a one-off payment of €100 per child from the Nantes’ Welfare Centre.
- In Panama, identity cards are being converted into debit cards to help those who do not have a bank account access aid to buy groceries and essential items.
Supporting at-risk communities in growing more of their own food.
- Accra is promoting home gardening in homes and schools. The city is raising seedlings, which are then distributed to households once they are ready to be planted.
- Freetown is providing informal settlements with equipment and training to grow their own vegetables, helping people to comply with lockdown rules and improve their food security. The city is also installing rainwater harvesting tanks to improve water access, distributing locally made masks and more. This case study outlines Freetown’s Covid-19 response plan, which is informed by its experience of the Ebola crisis.
Identifying and coordinating support needs
The ways in which cities are identifying people in need of food aid and coordinating between agencies include:
- Establishing phone-in lines to enable people to let the city know they need support. Milan is using a switchboard to direct all Covid-19-related support calls, while Delhi has set up a "Hunger Hotline", operated from municipal offices from 11:00 to 15:00 and from 18:00 to 21:00 daily, to inform callers about the nearest shelter where they can access a cooked meal.
- Creating a central database for food-aid data, which can be shared by all food-aid agencies and organisations, so they can coordinate different channels of food aid to beneficiaries. Milan**,** for example, is creating a centralised database of food-aid data for the next phase of its Covid-19 response, to improve coordination among all relevant stakeholders. Cape Town has launched a website where NGOs can register to map and track food distribution during the Covid-19 crisis. The data will be used to identify and address oversupply and undersupply, so that more people can find support.
- Using health data to target current cases and high-risk people who may be "shielding". For example, the government of the United Kingdom has used National Health Service data to make a list of high-risk people who should self-isolate and not leave their house, who are receiving food packages.
The rise in coordination of food aid seen in many cities during the crisis can also ease the path towards the creation of food councils and/or larger city-wide projects on food as we move into the recovery phase. Cities that have already formed food councils include Toronto, Los Angeles, Austin and London.
Enhancing city food supply chains to meet current needs and build better food systems
Covid-19 has affected many cities’ food supply chains. With millions of people homebound, many cities have seen dramatic increases in grocery-store purchases and declines in restaurant and commercial catering business. Because some supply chains have not been able to respond to the shift in demand, food has been rotting in fields and languishing on farms, while lines at food banks have lengthened. The economic impacts of Covid-19 (and the knock-on impact on food access) are likely to linger.
Many cities are already acting to maintain and improve their food supply and minimise food waste, to ensure that citizens can access the food they need. As cities move from response to recovery, they can also seize the opportunity to build a better food system – one that addresses food insecurity today and works to secure nutritious diets and food access for the future, and which makes healthy food the cheaper, easier and more accessible option. In doing so, cities can also create new food-sector jobs and provide local economic stimulus.
Also read:
- Emerging best practice on physical distancing in cities and Between lockdown and outbreak: a middle path for containing Covid-19 in global south cities for good physical-distancing practices, including in food retail, which cities can promote and support.
- Mitigating the economic impact of Covid-19 for information on how cities around the world are supporting businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, to adapt to Covid-19 requirements.
Cities can:
Shorten the city’s food supply chains to support local producers and stimulate a local economic recovery. While this means sacrificing some efficiency, it will improve the resilience of local food systems and help to provide an immediate cash flow for local producers, as well as to create local food-production jobs. City governments can:
- Start where they have most power, by linking procurement for food-aid programmes and municipally run kitchens to local producers, as Johannesburg has done.
- Plan new local food projects, such as community kitchens or community growing initiatives, to produce and source more food locally. Ensure that the types of food and the way it is grown are sustainable, prioritising climate-appropriate foods that can be grown outdoors. Promote seasonal food, and work with the natural, renewable resources available locally. Avoid indoor farming, which utilises artificial lights, heaters and more and is very expensive, energy intensive, and unsuitable for growing most crops except simple greens; indoor-farmed food typically produces more emissions than food grown outdoors somewhere else and transported.
- Encourage residents to grow more food at home. As well as directly providing seeds, saplings, equipment and training to support at-risk communities in growing more of their own food, cities can encourage home growing in the wider population, such as through online training sessions or campaigns to promote home growing. Tel Aviv**,** for example, is developing videos and pamphlets to advise on home or roof gardening.
- Diversify food retail options by supporting smaller shops and markets, which may be better positioned to source food locally than major supermarkets. Many cities have seen an increase in use of smaller food suppliers during the Covid-19 emergency period, as more people shop in their own neighbourhood and avoid crowds in larger supermarkets – a trend that cities can encourage as they move into the recovery phase. For instance, cities can expand technical infrastructure to enable cash-based food-aid recipients to purchase in small-scale shops and markets, where this is not currently possible (such as in the United States, where subsidised online food shopping in most major cities is only available at major suppliers). London is planning to diversify its food retail options by bolstering street markets to avoid a reversion to heavy dependence on centralised supermarkets. Diversifying food retail options also helps to facilitate physical distancing.
Promote access to and consumption of healthy, plant-based food through the economic support packages provided to food businesses. Cities providing financial and non-financial support to food retailers, restaurants and other food businesses have an opportunity to attach conditions to improve the provision and prominence of healthy, sustainable foods. Improved access to healthy foods will help to improve public health and reduce the incidence of conditions such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Cities can also prioritise smaller, neighbourhood food retailers and businesses for any support to further diversify food shopping, which is already helping to facilitate physical distancing in many cities by reducing congestion in supermarkets.
Protect and support informal workers transporting food to the city. Under lockdown rules, some farmers and informal workers transporting perishable food to city markets have faced harassment or been prevented from entering and selling their produce. This has restricted the supply of fresh, nutritious food to cities and, in particular, impacted poorer populations, who may be unable to bulk buy or refrigerate food, or to shop in more expensive supermarkets. It is critical that cities enable informal workers in the food sector to continue trading. For example, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and other South African cities have issued temporary trading permits to informal food traders to enable them to continue operating during lockdown conditions, in addition to the shops and supermarkets that were already permitted to remain open. Formalising these workers on a permanent basis could be a double boon for cities in terms of job creation and enabling a more diversified and decentralised food system.
Support wholesale and commercial food suppliers to adapt to increased retail sales. Reduced commercial sales and increased retail demand is likely to continue throughout this next phase of living with Covid-19, as restaurants and other commercial food buyers reopen with reduced capacity and demand for their services. Cities can:
- Help suppliers to adapt and establish distribution channels. For example, many local food producers have adapted by building an online presence or developing other new processes for delivery and pick-up, in some cases, with the support of the city government. In particular, cities can support and scale sup community-supported agriculture (CSAs), whereby farms deliver boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables directly to consumers – a model that is well suited to physical-distancing restrictions and well positioned to support local farms.
- Help to address local resource shortages. For example, a lack of retail packaging for eggs has led to local shortages and higher prices in some cities.
Support food-sector recruitment and retention. Illness, PPE shortages, closed borders and other challenges have created food workforce shortages. While unemployment has skyrocketed due to the Covid-19 crisis, a mismatch of skills and unappealing work conditions (often geared toward a migrant workforce) has meant that many farms are struggling to attract and retain good local workers. The issue of retention is critical. As many of these jobs are skilled and require training and fitness, farms need workers who can commit for a full season. Cities can:
- Help to connect people who have lost their jobs with local farms seeking workers. In Quebec, the government is incentivising unemployed workers to work on farms due to a temporary lack of international farm workers. Mitigating the economic impact of Covid-19 illustrates how cities around the world are supporting job-search and training opportunities during the Covid-19 crisis. Recruitment can be targeted at those most likely to have the necessary fitness and transferable skills – for example, an apple and pear picking recruitment drive in the United Kingdom has targeted those usually employed in the hospitality sector or in industry, as well university students.
- Help to make farming jobs more attractive and accessible to potential local workers, based on locally reported problems. For example, in countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany, farms commonly require workers to live on site in shared accommodation. In such cases, cities could provide public transport to farms in the local area enable city-dwelling workers to stay in their own homes.
Keep more food local. In response to market shocks, and where the closure of national borders is impacting food exports, cities can take steps to keep food previously destined for export at home for local consumption. This is particularly relevant for Global South cities.
Reduce food waste by redistributing surplus food. Edible surplus food – which has been produced but is nearing its best-by date and can’t be sold or used by the producer, and which would otherwise become waste – can be redistributed to people through food banks and charities that provide food to those in need. Tackling food waste in cities: A policy and program toolkit provides useful advice and examples of how to do this (it is United States-centric, but widely applicable). Cities can step up efforts to reduce food waste during and after the Covid-19 crisis, to help address local food shortages and build a better local food system. Cities can:
- Directly connect hotspots of food surplus with food-aid programmes by collaborating with retailers to develop ways of ensuring that food that would otherwise be wasted is donated to vulnerable families.
- Ease restrictions and regulations to allow food-surplus hotspots to donate edible surplus food more easily.
- Establish tax incentives to discourage food waste to increase efficiency across the city food system.
Maintaining healthier food behaviour
One food-sector positive during the Covid-19 emergency response period has been an increase in home cooking, with the use of whole foods, meal planning and eating of leftovers. Cities can look for ways to maintain and support these practices through the recovery phase, so as to promote healthier, more sustainable food behaviour.
(Picture credit: Unsplash)
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