Lebanon is facing a food security crisis. An over reliance on imports at the expense of investment in local food networks and sustainable domestic agriculture, has left the country vulnerable in the face of acute shocks. As conflict and climate change cause increasing turmoil and food security rises up the global agenda, Zeead Yaghi – scholar, writer and editor – explores why Lebanon is at such severe risk of food shortages and the lessons that can be learned.

Three weeks into the latest Israeli war on Lebanon, the second in as many years, its bombing campaign has unleashed a devastating humanitarian crisis. Over one million people from south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut have been displaced, and roughly 20% of the entire population have been pushed into emergency refugee centers.

Some refugees with enough means have opted to find housing on the private rental market, but the price shock driven by increased demand and sectarian anxiety over the displaced has left many unable to afford such alternatives. This has left tens of thousands of displaced people without any shelter and no recourse but to sleep rough on the available public spaces in the capital: the seaside corniche in Ras Beirut facing the Mediterranean, large sidewalks in downtown and the small scattered few parks across the city.

“Prior to the start of this war, Lebanon was already undergoing a severe food security crisis. Recent assessments by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimate that around 1.26 million individuals are facing crisis-level food insecurity (Phase 3), including approximately 85,000 in emergency conditions (Phase 4)…”.

Emergency relief efforts by the Lebanese government, local mutual aid networks and international organisations provide the displaced with shelter, medicine and especially food. This is occurring within the backdrop of Lebanon, which has undergone a series of economic and political crises that have undermined its already fragile and precarious food sovereignty and security systems.

Prior to the start of this war, Lebanon was already undergoing a severe food security crisis. Recent assessments by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimate that around 1.26 million individuals are facing crisis-level food insecurity (Phase 3), including approximately 85,000 in emergency conditions (Phase 4), highlighting the urgent need for humanitarian intervention. Refugee populations are particularly vulnerable, with significant proportions of Syrian and Palestinian refugees experiencing acute levels of food insecurity. In response to worsening economic conditions, displacement and conflict, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) have identified Lebanon as a major hotspot of concern globally.

This brings us back to the current moment.

Lebanon depends on imports to provide roughly 80% of its food needs. This model works as long as the global supply chain that provides the transport of food resources to the country, stays intact. Currently, the Israeli government has refrained from bombing the Lebanese International Airport and the Port of Beirut, the main arteries for food supply into the country. Should Israel strike these two sites, as it did in the early days of the 2006 war, rendering them inoperable, the country could stand to face a major food catastrophe.

Other geopolitical circumstances also threaten this fragile food system. The Israeli war on Lebanon is partly an extension of the current American/Israeli war on Iran that has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, all but blocking the transfer of oil, natural gas and fertiliser out of Persian Gulf states to the rest of the world. This has had the immediate cost of increasing the prices of these commodities across the world, and countries dependent on the oil from the region have begun to ration resources in anticipation of price shocks and further delays. The cascading effect of the blockade on the supply chain is the gradual increase in cost of transportations of material, not only oil and gas, but all supplies transported across the globe to astronomical prices, whose costs will be borne by the poorest nations and people across the globe.

“Currently, the Israeli government has refrained from bombing the Lebanese International Airport and the Port of Beirut, the main arteries for food supply into the country. Should Israel strike these two sites, as it did in the early days of the 2006 war, rendering them inoperable, the country could stand to face a major food catastrophe.”

Lebanon is already seven years into a large-scale financial crisis, engineered by its oligarchic elites, which liquidated the savings of the majority of the country and decimated the value of its national currency. The crisis pushed 44% of the current population into poverty according to a 2024 report by the World Bank, as well as driving the costs of everyday necessities into hyperinflation. Since the resumption of the fighting in Lebanon, food prices have gone up quickly in a matter of weeks, with foods like bananas jumping 41%, while the price of lamb has increased by 21%.

One week into the war, the Lebanese Minister of the Economy and Trade, Amer Bisat, reassured the residents that the country had high-level storage of basic commodities in flour, food and gas, insisting that food security was “safe for several months”. But that was early into the war and the situation, both in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, have escalated quickly with no end in sight.

“Since the resumption of the fighting in Lebanon, food prices have gone up quickly in a matter of weeks, with foods like bananas jumping 41%, while the price of lamb has increased by 21%.”

Hani Bohsali, the head of an all-powerful food import syndicate, told local television on March 23rd that although fuel costs have risen by 40%, it has only so far been reflected in a minimal raise in local food prices, nothing “above 5%”. There are, however, no guarantees that food importers will not use the opportunity to price gouge local consumers and drive an already anxious and destitute population into further poverty. The government has, so far, only paid lip service to a monitoring role to prevent importers from abusing their leverage, yet we have not seen any significant action towards that role.

Meanwhile, the Israeli onslaught continues to devastate the country’s natural resources. The Israeli bombing campaigns of 2024 and 2026, the use of white phosphorus, and targeting of agricultural fields in both southern and eastern Lebanon have destroyed and polluted precious important agrarian land which will take years to recover. Last February, Israeli drones sprayed pesticides over agricultural fields in southern Lebanon, and tests reveal the substance was glyphosate which destroys vegetation and poisons the soil. The purpose of Israel’s ecocide in these parts of the country is to both unravel the local economy and ecology of the region making it uninhabitable to its residents. Israel seeks to create a depopulated buffer 15 km into Lebanon up until the Litani river. By rendering the land unlivable this objective becomes easier. On March 15th an Israeli strike on the border of Chebaa in southern Lebanon killed two shepherds.

The immediate and historical circumstances of war, financial collapse and political deadlock, paint a dire picture for Lebanon’s food sovereignty and future food security. Unless there is an immediate cessation of hostilities which allows displaced people back to their homes and the implementation of a massive humanitarian relief campaign, the civilian population stands to lose most. Once, and if, the fighting is over, unless Lebanese officials implement structural changes to agricultural and economic policies that shift the country’s food regime away from import dependence towards resilient agroecological and sustainable systems, we are bound to find ourselves in similar predicaments many more times in the future whenever a geopolitical crisis erupts.

 

Featured image by Diana Salloum.

In February 2026, a new Prison Food Policy framework comes into force for all prisons across England and Wales. SFT’s Senior Research Officer, Imogen Crossland, takes a closer look at the framework and explores what it could mean for the quality and procurement of the food served in prisons.

For years, prison inspections have painted a bleak picture of the food served behind bars, with serious and wide-ranging consequences for those who eat it. Unlike schools or hospitals, prisons are responsible for providing virtually all the food that people eat, often for months or years at a time. What ends up on the plate, therefore, matters enormously.

However, for the past 16 years, the guidance available to prison governors and their catering teams has been shockingly minimal. A four-page document published in 2010 set out plenty of food safety regulations, but as far as the meals themselves were concerned, the advice was lifted from the ‘Prison Rules’ legislation written in 1999: 

“The food provided shall be wholesome, nutritious, well prepared and served, reasonably varied and sufficient in quantity.”

Unsurprisingly, this did little to guarantee a healthy, balanced and enjoyable diet for people in prison.

That may now be about to change. In July 2025, the Government published an updated Food in Prisons Policy Framework, due to take effect in February 2026. The new document is ten pages long, accompanied by a 106-page guidance manual. While the document’s length does not guarantee better food on the plate, clearly a little more thought has gone into it this time around.

It seems hard to comprehend, living as we do in the twenty first century, that food security would ever be something we would need to concern ourselves with. But it’s a thing now. It’s a sign of the times when a cargo ship full of grain sailing across the Black Sea becomes a major international news story. And you’d better believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg; the impact of war, as terrible as that is, is nothing compared to the effect that climate change is going to have in terms of our food security.

One thing that we really must be doing, both in terms of preventing the worst-case scenario of climate change and also helping us cope with the inevitable food security troubles we will face in the future, is to create resilient local food economies. And for qualification of that statement, should it be required, simply cast your mind back to the lockdown in March 2020 and remember how local food enterprises up and down the country not only continued to supply their customers, but quickly scaled up to meet the surge in demand, while supermarket shelves were bare for weeks.

Such local food economies would be characterised by an abundance of independent food enterprises: farmers and market gardeners who grow food specially for the local market, artisanal processing businesses who lovingly add value to locally grown food, and independent shops and restaurants which sell local food. And more to the point, when a local food system has taken root, it is possible to coordinate the supply-chain between these local enterprises according to ‘circular economy’ principles, and dramatically reduce the environmental impact of food in comparison to the industrialised system currently in place.

These days, I have the privilege of meeting small-scale food producers and other food enterprises from all over the UK, as I travel from place to place doing my workshops on ‘Pathway to Local Food Ecosystems’. These incredible people, who I have the utmost respect for, invariably tell me the same thing…they are finding it hard. They are finding it really hard, especially financially. Many of them exist on a knife-edge, where the smallest of things could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

This staggers me.

Not that they are finding life tough, that’s very easy to relate to. The thing that staggers me is just how undervalued these people are by society. These are the people who produce our food, for goodness’ sake! And they do it sustainably. These will be the people who are feeding us if (or should that be when?) the next global catastrophe strikes. If we don’t get our act together soon and change things so that someone can earn a decent living running a food enterprise at a local level, then we risk losing something very precious indeed.

How can we support local food economies?

Well, we can encourage people to buy and eat locally grown food, of course. But then, we’ve been putting that message out there for decades and most people that are inclined to support local growers through their buying habits are already doing so.

To my mind, we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of ‘protecting’ our grassroots, sustainable food industry. No, we should be thinking in terms of making it thrive, giving it the opportunity and resources to scale to the point where it is no longer ‘niche’, and rather, representing a significant portion of the total amount of food eaten in this country. Achieving this is not at all impossible, but it’s going to take a lot more than a publicity campaign. This is where local authorities and government can step in, by implementing policy and providing resources to put infrastructure in place that would support local food production and trade. This could take the form of ‘food hubs’: local food storage and distribution centres whose purpose is to manage local food supply-chains in ways that enable producers, processors, retailers, caterers and food related social projects to work in unity with one another as part of a sustainable food system.

The solution to our food security problems does not end with the provision of this infrastructure. If we really want to do something transformative with our food system, we’ve got to be bold and start re-thinking the economic models that underpin it. The economic model currently driving our food system is based on exploitative, linear systems which are destructive, wasteful and geared to meet the needs of shareholders above the needs of people and planet. This economic model is the only thing we’ve really known, which makes it very difficult to look beyond, or indeed, to change. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways of doing things. In this respect, we can certainly look to ‘Principles of Harmony’ for inspiration, as described by His Majesty the King in his book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. And we’ve also got to be brave enough to put them into practise.

A new generation of young farmers, growers and landworkers are coming into agriculture, motivated by a need to do something meaningful in the face of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. None, however, come from a farming background. Here, they talk about the issues that they face as new entrants and the choices they’ve made and why.

Finn Halsall

Finn Halsall is 23 and has been working in Cornwall for the past 4 years. He aims to help tackle the key problems of our world and to try and make the planet a better place. For him, this means focusing on the climate crisis and social injustice through growing food in an ecological way. Since graduating in Conservation Biology and Ecology, he’s been working at two growing projects – as a trainee and now grower at Goonown Growers , and at a community field called ‘Love Land’, which is a branch of Falmouth Food Co-op, where he’s leading on the creation of a new commercial growing project.

Tell me about yourself – how did you get interested in growing? Do you come from a farming background or is this new territory?

I work at a market garden and also a community growing project – I’m part-time on both. I got into growing about four or five years ago, when I was in Nepal. I was really inspired by the self-sufficiency that I saw over there, where local people were so resilient and growing a lot of their own food in rural areas. I was hooked and came back from travelling and made a huge garden at home and started reading loads of books and watching videos, and it escalated from there.

After travelling, I went to university to study conservation biology, and I still thought that I’d just garden and grow my own food on a large home garden scale and work in wildlife conservation as a career. But shortly after starting uni, I decided that what I actually wanted was to have a career in growing, and after completing my course, I took my first job in farming.

Did you at any point do any kind of formal training?

No, not like qualifications – just lots of time spent volunteering and visiting places, and it was great to have experienced so many different projects first hand. I’m yet to discover a formal qualification that really fits into what I’m interested in. Especially because conventional agriculture colleges and courses barely touch on organic.

You work on two different projects as an employee – how did you find the work?

Yes, at the market garden I’m an employee; I started out with a paid traineeship scheme. And at the community garden, I’m also an employee. There, I’m leading the growing project and I manage the actual vegetables, so it’s a lot of responsibility. Fortunately, this year, my salary has been funded externally, but going into next year, we’re going to try and make it sustain itself financially, which is a big deal. It’s definitely a great step on from voluntary roles to getting paid to work on farms.

Is your long-term goal to own and farm your own land, or are you happy working for and with others?

Definitely the dream is to own my own land, largely because I would like to also have a bit of land to live on. But helping on someone else’s project or getting involved in an existing project isn’t out of the question – it just requires finding the right project. I’d love to be involved in a project from the start – whether that’s on my own or with other people.

What are the main issues you face as a young grower?

There are obviously key issues in getting started: access to land, the financing that you need. Many of those setting up their own projects come from privileged backgrounds, owning their own property or having financial help from family. There are definitely a lot of barriers getting into farming. I’m lucky to work on a farm which pays me a wage, and to also be involved in a community project which has access to funding. If I was to set something up on my own, I’d need a huge amount of money and access to land, which is ever increasing in price and harder to find.

I’d like to live on the land I work, but there are all kind of rules and regulations and planning issues and policies regarding that. The One Planet Development policy in Wales is a step in the right direction.

In terms of support for the work you do, are there things that you feel young people need to go forward in farming and growing?

I don’t know how anyone can make young people feel attracted to farming. I think there needs to be more education – I learnt how important farming is and that it’s a meaningful way to take action on the various injustices in the world. It needs to be talked about more and encouraged from top down and in schools. Volunteering offers great opportunities for young people to learn, but how do we get more young people to volunteer? More training opportunities would be great – the Kickstart scheme, which was government funded training, was brilliant and a lot of farms took advantage of it. It allowed young people to be paid for their work.

 

 

Earlier this year, the UN’s State of Food Security and Nutrition report led with a depressing summary: “the world is moving backwards in efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition”. Its findings make for grim reading. Close to one third of the world’s population is food insecure, and after falling for decades, the number of people affected by hunger has risen to well over 800 million people, nearly 10% of the global population.

With the situation set to get even worse over the coming months due to the war in Ukraine, and the threat of climate change growing ever greater, the question of how we ensure food security for all, could not be more pressing. To date, most efforts have focused on increasing food production and fortifying and supplementing foods with key nutrients. But while this has improved food security for millions, it has also come with some major costs – perhaps the most notable being the environmental damage caused by intensive agriculture.

A more fundamental issue is that having a plentiful supply of food is only one part of the solution to hunger and malnutrition. Recognition of this fact has given rise to a third approach to improving food security, based around ensuring the right to food. It has also driven an evolution in the definition of food security itself, from its original focus on availability, to a broader understanding that emphasises the importance of factors like access, resilience, nutrition and culture. More recently, two new dimensions to food security have been added: sustainability, and ‘agency’ – in short, the ability of individuals and communities to influence decisions around the production, processing and distribution of the food they eat.

Food security and land rights

This growing focus on the importance of rights and agency to food security is especially relevant when it comes to the question of who has a stake in the ownership and management of land. In the developing world, there is good evidence to show that the extent to which people have secure land rights has a major bearing on food security. In part, this is because having access to land represents a hugely valuable means of producing food and income, but it’s also because it gives individuals and communities greater control over their food supply. A good example of this, in a negative sense, can be seen with the impact of foreign land acquisitions in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Despite an increase in yields there, food security has suffered – both as a result of farmers losing their land, and the decision by the new corporate owners to grow energy-rich but nutrient-poor crops for export.

There are plenty of positive examples, too. For instance, policies which improve land access for women in the developing world generally deliver major improvements for food security. This is because the larger influence in decision-making this gives them, combined with their greater concern for the wellbeing of their households compared with men, tends to result in a wider diversity of crops being grown and better nutrition. One study in Peru, for example, found that where women owned land, households had a 20% greater chance of being food secure.

The situation in the UK

There is the temptation to think that improving land access to enhance food security is not a concern in a country like the UK, where land reform remains a niche topic of discussion (apart from in Scotland) and where food security is often taken for granted. There are, however, some huge issues around land rights in the UK, as well as broader concerns around who gets a say in how it’s managed. Perhaps the most contentious of these, is our highly concentrated pattern of land ownership and, by extension, decision-making power. This has contributed to a social and economic malaise across many rural areas, with the problem being likened to that of corporate monopolies. The ongoing loss of farm tenancies, as well as concerns around a lack of security of tenure, are also a serious problem for social and environmental reasons, while the lack of governance around buying, selling and managing land means there is no real way of ensuring it is managed in the public interest. Food security is a much greater concern in the UK than some might realise, too. Some 8% of UK households are food insecure, a figure that is much higher in many areas. And while the availability of food might not be an issue at a national level today, the UK’s self-sufficiency has declined considerably over recent decades, something which should be of serious concern given the dire warnings around the impacts of climate change on many of the world’s major food exporting regions. At the same time, thousands of hectares of productive agricultural land have been developed for housing, and millions more have been degraded through unsustainable farming practices.

It’s clear, then, that land reform and food security are more important issues than their lack of media coverage would suggest, but the extent to which the former might impact the latter doesn’t appear to have had much attention, with most of the discourse around land rights focussing on other social and economic outcomes. There are, though, some good reasons to think that increasing the number of people who participate in the decision-making process around how land is used, could provide benefits for food security in the UK.

How land access could improve food security

For instance, the nascent implementation of land use frameworks and partnerships should allow for a much greater diversity of voices to have a genuine say in how land is managed. One of the likely pluses of having this more participatory approach to decision-making is a greater emphasis on delivering public benefits – which could benefit food security directly (for example, through more protection against the development of prime agricultural land) and indirectly, through the benefits of a healthy environment to the food system.

Measures which allow communities to have a greater control over land, such as Scotland’s landmark ‘Community Right to Buy’ legislation, could also have a positive impact by tackling poverty – a key determinant of food security. There is strong evidence from Scotland that a move to community ownership has tended to boost economic development, so it is at least plausible that greater community participation in land use decisions could help improve food security in this way.

Another problem facing many rural communities in particular, is the physical difficulty some face in accessing good, affordable food, due to a lack of shops and transport infrastructure. Enabling communities to have a greater say in the management of land could help with this, by promoting more diverse local food systems. There are, for instance, lots of examples of community gardens and CSA schemes which have been able to provide nutritious food for locals at affordable prices, a service that became particularly important over the pandemic. Creating a greater diversity of supply chains through more community access to land, could also benefit food security at a macro level by reducing our reliance on supermarkets and therefore improving our resilience.

How to realise these potential benefits is the key question. Existing approaches to widening land access, including initiatives like the Land Matching Service which aims to help new entrants into farming, previous pieces of land reform legislation (of which Scotland’s ‘Community Right to Buy’ is the most significant) and past reforms of farm tenancies have had some success, but are widely viewed as going nowhere near far enough. The introduction of land use partnerships and frameworks, an end to the selling off of council farms, and greater government support for local food systems could all make major differences in this regard, but there is still likely to be a need for legislation that directly addresses the concentration of land ownership. In recognition of this, the Scottish Land Commission, set up by the Scottish Government to foster a more equitable and responsible use of land, recently produced a number of legislative proposals. These include recommendations for management plans on large holdings, to ensure that local communities are more involved in land use decisions, and perhaps most significantly, a public interest test for purchases of big estates.

A more radical proposal, put forward by some, is the use of a land value tax based on the unimproved site value of land. There are good reasons why many people support this: 60% of the UK’s net wealth is in the land, but our current tax system does a terrible job of realising this potential, and theoretically at least, a land value tax represents an efficient and progressive way of doing so. However, there are some practical issues with land value taxes and in countries where they have been at least partly implemented, there is relatively little evidence to suggest that they result in any redistribution of land. For these reasons, the Scottish Land Commission recently decided not to recommend a single land value tax but did emphasise the importance of tax reform, including a more progressive use of exemptions and reliefs to encourage more community ownership and agricultural letting.

Improving the ability of communities to influence and benefit from land use decisions won’t be enough on its own to foster greater levels of food security. Neither is land reform a silver bullet – the case of Japan, where post-war land reform led to social benefits but not environmental sustainability, is illustrative in this regard. Nevertheless, improving land rights is a key consideration for sustainable development, and one that should be factored into thinking around food security – not just in the developing world, but in the UK too.

Fishing is one of the most important sectors in many parts of the world, supporting the livelihoods and nutritional requirements of millions. This is as true in Ghana, where the industry provides jobs for 500,000 people, and where fish accounts for more than half of all animal protein intake. Of this, as much as 70% is consumed in the form of smoked fish. Not only does the smoking process reduce post-harvest losses by extending the shelf-life of the fish, but it’s also an activity which has been central to coastal communities for hundreds of years, and the smoked fish itself is therefore highly valued for its complex flavours and cultural significance.

The Ghanaian smoked fish industry has worked in much the same way for generations. Local fishermen bring their catch to the beach – catfish, herring, mackerel, or whatever is caught that day – and go about selling it to women (often their wives or family members) on the shore. The fish is gutted and taken back to the home, ready to be smoked in the traditional way.

This is a familiar tale in many countries, as cultural norms dictate that women should not participate in fishing itself, especially in marine waters. Across Africa, women represent approximately 15% of the total fishing workforce yet account for 60% of processing roles. These roles are often low-wage and involve labour intensive, repetitive tasks which frequently have negative implications for health and wellbeing.

The hidden costs of fish smoking

Traditional West African smoking ovens consist of metal drums or mud stoves loaded with firewood to produce smoke, over which the fish are placed on a metal grill. These ovens are notoriously hazardous. Many women suffer from burns and backache while operating the stoves, as well as respiratory conditions, eye irritation and headaches, as a consequence of exposure to the smoke. In some cases, burns to the fingers are so severe that women are unable to obtain official documents which require fingerprint identification.

In 2008, the FAO led the development of a new type of oven, the FAO-Thiaroye. It’s a great deal safer and uses less firewood making it a more sustainable and efficient option. It was also specifically designed to improve the quality and safety of the smoked fish, which often contain extremely high levels of carcinogens called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Reducing PAH content is important, for example, the European Commission requires no more than 12 micrograms per kilogram in smoked fish which is imported to Europe. Fish smokers who are able to meet this standard can receive around 100 Ghanaian cedis per kilogram, roughly ten times more than the price fetched in local markets.

In theory, the FAO-Thiaroye can therefore help women to receive a higher price for their fish, while reducing the health costs associated with the smoking. But how far can such technology go in promoting gender equality in this industry? Modern ovens, cold storage and packing facilities still remain out of reach for the vast majority of small-scale, female fish smokers. In contrast, a small number of industrial-scale smoking units in Ghana are able to cater exclusively for the export market. They produce around 20 tonnes of smoked fish annually, which reaches African communities in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. These larger processing plants are, unsurprisingly, owned and managed by men, with women for the most part only represented in low-paid processing roles.

Gender-based constraints

There are many reasons why, relative to men, women may struggle to accumulate resources which help them benefit from an activity such as fish smoking. These factors which prevent access to resources or opportunities based on gender roles are sometimes termed ‘gender-based constraints’.

As mentioned above, one of the biggest challenges described by women in Ghana is in accessing finance to invest in smoking ovens and cold storage. It’s very difficult for most women to obtain loans from commercial banks in Ghana, for example, due to laws which prevent them from inheriting property or land which can be used as collateral. Without this, women may require guarantee from their husbands to apply for loans, something which is not always straightforward.

A commonly proposed solution to this problem is microfinance, the provision of small loans at low interest rates, usually by smaller banks or NGOs. In Ghana, microfinance has certainly had a positive effect on improving rural women’s ability to receive loans, but unfortunately it is not a silver bullet for a number of reasons. Often microloans are given to groups of women, rather than individuals, to avoid the need for guarantee from their husbands. Yet many describe tensions between group members when it comes to paying back the loans, sadly sometimes resulting in verbal abuse and enormous shame. Another concerning issue is that, according to one study, only 16% of women actually retained control over the spending of their loan.

This uncovers a fundamental problem in addressing gender equality, one which is often overlooked by promoters of microfinance and other schemes to improve women’s economic empowerment. Power to make decisions, whether financial or in other aspects of the household and business, so often lies overwhelmingly with male family members. Some women have admitted that their husbands do not trust them to hand over the money received through loans or selling their smoked fish, which has even resulted in accounts of domestic violence.

The deep-rooted socio-cultural norms which perpetuate this situation also contribute to other gender-based constraints. Women face a great deal of stigma when travelling alone, which prevents them from feeling confident enough to travel to (or indeed being allowed to) important training sessions in food hygiene, for example, or from reaching more lucrative markets in larger cities. Engaging in networks to secure contracts with supermarkets or to connect with service providers, is also a challenge, given that women are not expected to participate in formal business networks; they are encouraged instead to keep social networks to friends and family. Finally, it’s important to remember that in addition to their fish-smoking work, most women face a ‘triple-burden’ of household, childcare and community labour, placing major constraints on time and emotional resources. This is true across the fishing and agriculture sectors in developing countries, where women’s overall work burden is disproportionately greater, and mostly unpaid.

The way forwards

So, the development of new ovens such as the FAO-Thiaroye is greatly beneficial for female fish-smokers and goes a long way to address the health costs they face. But it does not provide all of the answers for solving the wider social issues preventing women from progressing in this industry, which is, of course, essential for sustainability.

A number of communal fish-smoking plants and co-operatives have been set up in Ghana, already helping to improve women’s access to better facilities, educational resources and business networks. The Ghanaian Fisheries Commission has also established a graded certification scheme which rewards small-scale smokers for improving their food safety standards, and that can help them to receive a higher price in local markets or supermarkets.

Crucially however, these solutions must be accompanied by action from the ‘top-down’, at a government level, to address the institutional biases which prevent women’s empowerment in Ghana, such as inheritance laws and a lack of representation in policymaking positions. At the same time, interventions from the ‘bottom-up’ are perhaps one of the most important ways to unpick the deeply entrenched ideas about gender roles and labour distribution within the household and community.

Featured image: FAO/Alexander Sasu 

‘The olive tree is like a child. I tend its growth as I would tend my children.’

Awad Melhim sits on a rock on a sunny windy day in Anin, Palestine, and surveys his farm. Behind him, a beautiful semi-wild, semi-cultivated landscape stretches between blue hills in the background and olive trees to the fore. For me, watching from the mild, damp west of Britain, it is instantly recognisable as the dry exotic ‘Holy Land’ that featured in childhood Sunday School picture books. It would appear as if little had changed since the days depicted in those books if it weren’t for ‘The Wall’ – a monstrous blot cutting through an ancient scene, dividing the land from one horizon to the other.

The construction of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, or ‘Separation Wall’ as it is more commonly known, started in 2002. It runs for 440 miles (708 kilometres) with 85% of its length inside the West Bank, often up to 12 miles away from the actual Palestine/Israel border. As a result, approximately 13.5% of the West Bank is on the other side of the Wall, including 20 dunum (2 hectares) of Awad’s land.

Awad is sitting on a rock, talking into a microphone in a wind that sometimes makes it difficult to hear what he and his interpreter, Taysir Arbasi, are saying to those of us listening by Zoom, in offices, kitchens and living rooms across the UK. (Taysir Arbasi is Advocacy and Liaison Officer for Zaytoun – a Fairtrade company that supports Palestinian farmers.) Cathi Pawson, co-founder of Zaytoun, tries to get things in order when the sound disappears altogether, and I take the opportunity to look closely at Awad’s land and try to imagine being separated from a third of my land by a 26 foot (8 metre) high slab of concrete and wire.

The annual Fairtrade Fortnight (‘Choose the world you want’ festival) is focussing this year on the climate crisis, and Awad and Taysir are talking about climate resilience and what that means for farming under occupation in Palestine. Despite the technical difficulties, it is one of the wonders of modern technology that we, in the UK, can join them, ‘Live from the olive groves’, to hear their first-hand accounts and opinions.

Local food movements and systems based around agroecological production are, we know, an important and growing response to the industrial food system that prioritises profit over people. But it’s often seen as the territory of the middle classes, and those who can afford to pay that extra premium for local, organic, fresh food. It’s thought to be inaccessible to so many and yet within it are simple answers that support food justice.

Access to food is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.

COVID-19, poverty, transport, rising housing and energy costs are all creating a world where access to food is becoming more and more difficult for many. Food deserts with no access to fresh food unless you are able to drive or access transport, are a large part of the problem – especially when these areas are also often where poverty is rife, and communities have seen local funding disappear. Youth and mental health services and support for older people have all been cut, along with many projects supporting young families. We know food bank use is rising year on year. Throughout the pandemic this has continued to increase as people struggle with the rising cost of living, which in terms of the cost of food has been recently in the news. Jack Monroe, tireless campaigner for food access, pointed out first in a long social media thread, and then in a piece in the Guardian, that those struggling the most were seeing an exponential rise in food costs, as the cheaper ranges in stores rose in price by often 50-60%.

What does this have to do with local food movements you ask? Well, we may just be staring the obvious in the face. Urban and peri-urban food production is growing in interest, with small producers using the smallest of spaces to grow food for local communities and restaurants. But increasingly, they are growing for food aid for people on low incomes.

This means raising monies to be able to do this, but with creative thinking and the will to feed people good, fresh food, this is beginning to happen. Generally, this is not charity, but a part of a social enterprise business model designed to create positive change and increase accessibility.

Of course, no two enterprises look the same, but using models already proven to work, these new ideas could easily be replicated in every community in the country.

What does a localised food model look like?

Granville Community Kitchen in Kilburn, offer veg boxes at different costs, which are paid depending on income. The cheapest box price is covered by Healthy Start vouchers from government. Also offered, are culturally appropriate veg bags for Caribbean and African communities. Some of this produce the organisation grows in their own garden.

In the US and across the globe, we have seen communities take food access into their own hands, finding their own solutions. From Cuba to Detroit, when there has been need caused by hunger, people have found plots of unused land and grown the food needed to feed their communities. Urban farms and community gardens feed huge swathes of the global population and yet in the UK urban and peri-urban farming is often questioned. Is it viable? Is it safe to eat food grown in a city?

But surely if there are people who cannot access food, taking control as a community and not just growing food, but also creating livelihoods, training opportunities and growing the local economy is the obvious answer?

A peri-urban success story

Over the last decade Edible Bristol have been attempting to do just that by supporting communities to take control of lost and unloved spaces across the city and working with them to share the skills of growing food, so they can be empowered to take some control of their very localised food system. Gardens have appeared in the most unlikely places– in parks, roundabouts and on roadsides and on the concrete walkways of estates. Each garden is different, but all are doing the same thing: connecting people with their food and with each other and empowering them to do more and find their voices.

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that health is vitally important, and as a society, everyone must work together to recover – economically and emotionally.

Volunteers and staff in organisations across the UK such as Trussell Trust, Food Cycle and FareShare responded to the individual impact of job losses, business closures and supermarket shortages and continued to nourish communities by handing out emergency food parcels. The compassion demonstrated through these activities and through prominent individuals such as footballer and food poverty advocate Marcus Rashford with his #WriteNow campaign calling for the end of child food poverty, has retained faith in humanity.

What does ‘food insecurity’ mean?

Food insecurity remains a mammoth and bleak issue and many factors, including the pandemic, work to increase it. The pandemic created such an economic vulnerability that there was a 33% increase in emergency food parcels distributed between April 2020 and March 2021 by Trussell Trust’s UK network of food banks – shockingly, 980,000 obf these went to children. Although it is clear food banks are important in addressing health inequalities in communities, a reliance on food banks is not a long-term solution. Food insecurity is often associated with developing nations, but it is also an issue of developed nations. Its definition is complicated and encompasses the lack of access to food as well as the affordability of food. This type of insecurity can be brought on by personal or financial circumstances such as poor mental health or redundancy and can be an experience that an individual endures over a long period of time due to a low income or disability. With over 14.4 million people in the UK living in families in poverty, it’s necessary for continued intervention and updates in economic and welfare policy to confront some of the driving forces of food insecurity.

2.5 million people in the UK survive with incomes no more than 10% above the poverty line

There’s little room for discussion on the detrimental impact that COVID-19 has had on those struggling to afford food or get access to it. At the beginning of the pandemic, more than three million people reported going hungry in the first three weeks of lockdown in the UK. The Food Foundation reported that 2.5% more adults with children experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in the six months leading up to September 2020, compared to pre-pandemic levels. The disruption of the pandemic exposed and created many financial fragilities in households and the economy, resulting in food insecurity becoming more apparent and harder to ignore. There are abundant examples of local shops and religious groups handing out food parcels to the vulnerable in local communities in response to these hardships. This resilient, generous and selfless attitude is still very much needed as we move forward. Despite school food vouchers, food parcels and the furlough scheme helping families, the matter surrounding affordability and access to food has not been fully alleviated and poses an even greater concern for children as the pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on their health and development.

How can we address food insecurity?

Impactful food education such as how to reduce food waste and having financial investment in schools and communities to encourage growing food, could prove beneficial in developing thriving local food sectors to help individuals and children access food when the world is in crisis. By educating individuals on these topics, local authorities can offer a more secure food environment. 

Moreover, this approach is beneficial in acclerating the move towards a sustainable food system, as the unpredictability and ruinous nature of climate change is having an impact on the food supply chain and affecting the price, quality and availability of food in stores. While we’ve been living through the pandemic, climate change has simultaneously further exacerbated the food insecurity gap and added insurmountable pressure on agricultural processes. Droughts or increased flooding can destabilise parts of the food supply chain and harm food workers’ livelihoods, with an impact on the end consumer, creating an insecure food environment. This is currently seen in places such as Afghanistan where drought is contributing to a major food hunger crisis – one that cannot be fixed overnight.

How can the UK become more food secure?

The UK’s own dependency on imported foods threatens food security across the country; many foods available in our supermarkets are cultivated abroad and where climate change is affecting the growing process, this has the potential to consequently limit food availability. It is therefore essential for local authorities and the Government to encourage community food growing by promoting urban farming and funding allotments and community growing spaces in order to diversify production and avoid sole dependency on a centralised supply chain. A people-oriented, decentralised food system that includes farmers, food workers and communities can help build resilience in climate change, which threatens the viability of the farming and food sector, and also improves access to healthy food for those on lower incomes. This is particularly important in the face of increased food prices, caused by Brexit, supply shortages and inflation.

Lately, it’s been even clearer that a decentralised and less fragile food system could be favourable as the decrease in HGV drivers shows it only takes one disruption, in one part of the food supply chain, to produce a ripple effect and create food shortages in supermarkets. The recent supply chain issues meant around one in six (17%) of adults in the UK were unable to buy essential food items as they were not available in the stores and 15% were unable to obtain fuel. Where the UK, in particular, is not self-sufficient enough in the production and distribution of food, it shows developed nations are at times just as vulnerable as developing nations, and until there is a focus on sustainable farming and communities working together that’s backed with financial support, food insecurity will continue to permeate in society.

This past June and August made the hottest summer in North American history, yet the increase in heat in the Pacific Northwest was especially shocking. The region, in between the Pacific shoreline and the Cascade Mountain Range, which extends North-South from Canada through Washington, Oregon and Northern California, is known for its cool, moist weather and its comfortable summers. The Pacific Northwest also includes a unique and remarkable biome of ancient cedar and hemlock rainforest that sits almost 700 kilometres from the coast. There is rich biodiversity throughout the valleys of the Columbia and Rocky Mountains which span across Washington, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. The region’s northern latitude, with a cool coastal climate and mountainous elevations usually make it a refuge from heat, but this summer, the region realised hotter record temperatures than the Southwest of the United States, which is known for scorching summers and expansive deserts.

Based on where you are, what you’re used to and the resources you have to manage hot weather, the term ‘extreme heat’ describes a relative level of risk to human health. Excessive heat can cause the body heat stress, which is when the ambient temperature and level of humidity cause the body to be unable to cool itself down. From this, heat events cause more deaths than any other type of weather event and, respectively, heat is projected to be the leading cause of climate change related deaths. In spite of the mounting threats to health and quality of life posed by increasing heat from climate change, efforts have been slow to address risk factors associated with public health and heat stress-related morbidity and mortality. Most significantly among these risk factors is the urban environment.

The reason people in urban conurbations are at greatest risk for heat stress-related illness is, simply, that cities are often hotter than the surrounding countryside. The phenomenon is called an ‘urban heat island (UHI)’ and it has been well-documented since 1833. Yet, today, little research has aimed at identifying strategies to reduce urban heat and adapt to increasing average temperatures. The warming climate compounds the problem of UHI, and cooling temperatures down for urban livability and quality of life turns out to be a complex task. To address the problem, scientists are calling for mobilisation of expertise across professional sectors and policy areas – urban planning, housing, infrastructure, public health, emergency management and climatology. However, little attention has been given to the unique role that urban agriculture can play in addressing the twofold undertaking of living with global warming and extreme heat: heat mitigation and climate adaptation.

Urban agriculture provides a unique nature-based solution that could contribute to heat resilience and ‘marry the goals of both climate adaptation and mitigation’. Preserving and promoting urban agriculture has strong long-term potential to mitigate city heat by addressing root causes that relate to land use change, while also creating adaptive capacity for heat risk management.

Land use change in urban areas increases heat through a variety of factors and dynamics, and it is driven by growing populations. Hence, one of the reasons the Pacific Northwest is projected as an area that will be worst hit by increasing temperatures, is population growth. This projection follows trends from the past five years, which show that US states in the region gained people over twice as fast than elsewhere in the country.

Urbanisation and growing populations interact with the surrounding environment, geography and weather patterns to impact UHI. Other factors are involved with human activities such as a city’s historical infrastructure, types of building materials, amount of open space, vegetation, in addition to spatial patterns of development. In turn, these properties impact residents differently: based on an individual’s neighborhood environment, pre-existing health conditions, socioeconomic status, social networks, and cooling resources like home air conditioning, the threat of high temperatures may vary widely.

The ability to identify the factors and dynamics of urban heat sources, however, can lead to urban planning and design principles that mitigate heat. Among these strategies, the design fixture that is most important for reducing city heat, is plant life. One study on extreme heat planning, led by the University of Arizona’s Dr. Ladd Keith, found vegetation to be the most agreed upon heat mitigation strategy. This includes things like increasing urban green space with the creation of parks and planting native species of trees. The measurable difference greater vegetation makes within cities to ambient air temperatures is clear at a small, even neighbourhood, scale. Where more plants thrive, cooler temperatures follow.

For the sake of using the existing lexicon around heat mitigation strategies to address urban heat, the promotion and preservation of urban agriculture can be thought of as increasing ‘productive vegetation.’ Though vegetation is the most often cited strategy to reduce UHI, there is near complete silence when it comes to the potential for using urban agriculture toward the same end. Incorporating urban agriculture into any long-term heat mitigation plan can look differently, based on place and people. For example, the effort could aim toward preserving existing agriculture within cities or it could focus on the transformation of vacant or existing lots into new sites for agricultural production. Urban agriculture can perform all functions achieved by non-food producing plants – and then some.

More than just providing shade, all plants help dissolve heat in the atmosphere through a process called transpiration, which involves water evaporating from their leaves. Another way vegetation helps to mitigate heat, which can likewise be accomplished with urban agriculture, is by re-exposing soil. Often, land use change involves covering up the soil. This impacts UHI because building materials, such as concrete, stone or steel, have a high ‘heat capacity.’ High ‘heat capacity’ means the material stores more heat than it releases, which effects ambient air temperatures. On the other hand, soil and sand have low heat capacity. Designating space for urban agriculture can preserve soil or safely re-establish its exposure, which can improve the shedding of heat in an area of a city, as it also protects air circulation above the ground.

Air circulation is important for mitigating heat because wind functions to dissipate heat. Wind mixes the atmosphere and can move away hot air. While climate and weather patterns in a particular geographical location have large influence over air circulation, the shape made by city structures are influential because they can free or obstruct winds. Urban planners refer to ‘urban geometry’ when evaluating open air space between buildings that can facilitate wind flow. Like parks and other open spaces, urban agriculture can help mitigate heat by reducing stagnant air.

Where agriculture has the potential to meet multiple objectives for heat mitigation, it can also provide for heat adaptation. Adaptation refers to a community’s capacity to cope with existing levels of heat. This includes preventing heat stress-related public health emergencies through risk management as well as responding to them when they occur. Emergency preparedness involves establishing an appropriate medical response to heat related health events and activities like education about heat illness and how to identify heat stroke. Risk management, on the other hand, can include occupational health regulations for at-risk construction workers or the creation of ‘cool spaces.’ In the absence of medical emergency, a neighbourhood green space can function as a cool space for the people that live there by providing shade and air circulation on very hot days. Neighbourhood parks or community-based farms can fill the role of a non-emergency cool space.

Urban agriculture can build adaptive capacity for managing existing heat, and at the same time, it meets the long-term goals of mitigating heat by changing important root sources of UHI, both of which, could make a difference for health and quality of life. Finally, above and beyond these heat resilience goals, prioritising food producing plants and trees comprise the many benefits of local agriculture. If there is concern about a trade-off between water conservation and increasing urban vegetation for heat mitigation, urban agriculture – by contrast – expands mutual gains: farms and community gardens create a hub for the community and provide education and, of course, healthy, nutritious food.

While there is no easy panacea for responding to global warming, UHI and urban vulnerability to increasing temperatures, there must remain ongoing innovation, trials and re-invention. Professionals across many sectors should make a place at the table for urban agriculture to address ways in which it can help meet heat mitigation and resilience goals.