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Today, about three billion people live in cities, or a little fewer than half the world's population. By 2025, the number of the city dwellers will almost double, to some 5.5 billion, 60 percent of a global population which will by then have reached eight billion.
This represents a massive change in the way people live. Most of this change will take place in the developing world. There, the drift of people from the country to the cities will increase every year, and whole new cities will be born, as existing smaller towns swell to absorb new migrants from the country.
This demographic shift has profound implications for the way food is stored, processed, and distributed after harvest. That in turn has led DFID and its partners to launch a series of intensive studies on urbanization in an attempt to discover just what the phenomenon could mean over the next few years.
Urbanization goes hand in hand with economic development, and most economies in the world are expected to grow in the years ahead. It follows that tomorrow’s city dwellers will be generally wealthier than today’s rural populations. One result will certainly be a rise in spending on food, and a shift in demand from staples to higher value foods, especially fruits, vegetables and meat.
The growth of cities is also bringing about striking changes to that pattern of eating habits among the people who live there. More people tend to eat outside the home, often because they can’t get home from work for a midday meal. At the same time, city families tend to be smaller, nuclear units than their rural equivalents and women of the household are much more likely to go out to work, rather than spend time at home preparing food. As a result, city-dwellers eat more snack foods and processed foods of all kinds. They are increasingly prepared to pay for semi-processed foods which were once prepared entirely at home. In Kenya, for example, city dwellers prefer buying pre-cooked maize and beans so as to save time and fuel when preparing the food.
The drift to the cities will also mean striking changes in patterns of employment for those who remain in the country. In most developing nations the number of people actually engaged in work on the farms will probably continue to rise for some time to come, although slowly. But the really rapid growth will be in the rural non-farm sector which embraces a wide variety of activities other than farming- among them food processing, food storage, manufacturing, transport and services. This sector already accounts for somewhere between a quarter and half of all economic activity in rural areas in the developing world. The sector will probably grow to meet changing patterns of demand from the cites.
But DFID-supported research shows that this doesn’t mean that urbanization will automatically lead to more off-farm employment in country areas. It is often more convenient to locate food processing, storage, and transport activities in the cities they have been created to serve. Nor does it follow that farmers will necessarily grow richer because of the increased demand for food from burgeoning urban centers. While city-dwellers will be prepared to pay more for food than their counterparts in the country, most of the extra money goes to pay for processing, and little of it is likely to trickle back to the farm.
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