Revisiting the 'Urban Bias' and its relationship to food security

Abstract

Accentuating both damaging environmental change and food insecurity, we focus on the dynamics between national development policies and food systems. Using Lipton’s ‘urban bias’ hypothesis, we position citizen-consumers as a pre-eminent socio-political force facilitated by the urban–rural power relations underpinning the food system. Urban consumers particularly benefit from industrial food systems through cheap food and from cheap manufacturing and service sector labour, released as rural populations become marginal to agricultural productivity gains. Consequently, many cities overflow with redundant workers, while rural areas contain impoverished, insecure agrarian populations often tied to global supermarket supply chains. For these populations, food security can be elusive. While Lipton’s argument applied to three and more decades ago, his hypothesis that policies favour urban populations when policies pursuing economic growth are based on a presumed ‘natural’ coupling between rural outmigration and urban manufacturing jobs could apply more contemporaneously. We apply key urban bias concepts to the unfolding of events in Thailand, detecting conditional support for the hypothesis. We conclude by canvassing food system actions to counter the urban bias with a more ecological view of urban–rural interdependencies linked to sustainable food production and consumption. Show more