Feeding Cities: The Food Conundrum

Food security is a thorny subject. What presenters can all agree upon at the Feeding Cities conference is that it’s a huge challenge.

Mobile farming — could this be a solution?

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As the 2013 Feeding Cities conference unfolds this week in Philadelphia, Next City, a media partner for the event, will feature regular updates from bloggers covering its talks and workshops.

The first full day of Feeding Cities has kicked off with a barrage of data points. Some quick ones:

  • 1 billion people are suffering from food insecurity
  • All the gas flares in Africa could fuel cooking all the meals in Africa
  • The world needs $1 trillion invested in food storage over next 10 years to improve food security

What’s clear is that we all agree: Food security is an enormous challenge that is going to take collaboration, investment and ingenuity. That said, the conference has been short on some of the solutions. We heard from Yael Lehmann and Ridwin Kamil about their solutions last night. Today we heard from Heather Grady of the Rockefeller Foundation, who spoke about the need to improve resilience in communities. Grady and Rockefeller believe that resilience, and improving the capacity of communities to adapt and change when stresses arise, goes hand in hand with better food security. Indeed, as major catastrophes from Bangkok to Breezy Point have shown, a resilient community is one that maintains basic amenities even when there’s chaos.

Later in the day, we heard from a panel about the role of improving energy efficiency in the food process. As Ian Bennett showed, we could circumvent some problems with the food “value chain” by creating mobile food containers. And Harry Stokes showed that alcohol fuel could provide a major improvement over “dirty” fuels in Africa, like recycled dung or ash.

The panelists have done a great job of laying out the challenges ahead of us. But so far, I’m feeling that the solutions aren’t nearly as ambitious in scope.

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Diana Lind is the former executive director and editor in chief of Next City.

Tags: philadelphiabuilt environment

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