Urban Food Security: The Role of Women in Poor Neighbourhoods

Urban food security is the capacity of a city's households to access sufficient, nutritious and affordable food reliably, and in poor communities it depends largely on the work, almost always unpaid and little recognised, of women. Caroline Moser, the British researcher who followed the families of the Cisne Dos neighbourhood in Guayaquil for three decades, showed in her asset vulnerability framework how women manage household resources, stretch incomes, cook collectively and organise exchange networks so that food is on the table when jobs, wages and services fail.

Caroline Moser: the triple role and women's strategies in crisis

Moser starts from the triple role of poor women: productive, in informal and poorly paid jobs; reproductive, in caring for the home, children and the elderly; and community-managing, in running collective services such as canteens, childcare and common pots. In times of crisis, structural adjustment or inflation, that triple role intensifies: women work more hours outside, cut their own consumption to feed others, switch to cheaper and less nutritious diets and multiply informal strategies, from street vending to credit from the corner shop. Moser documented how in the 1980s and 1990s those strategies cushioned adjustment in Latin America at the cost of women's health and time.

Food deserts, distance and time: the barriers to access

Physical access to food is the second barrier. The poor neighbourhoods of many cities are food deserts, areas without markets or shops offering fresh produce at fair prices, where supply shrinks to small expensive stores and ultra-processed foods; to that is added distance, because the women who shop depend on public transport and walking, and time, because shopping, preparation and cooking are added to already long days. The result is the paradox of contemporary urban poverty: households with food insecurity and, at the same time, obesity and chronic diseases from cheap, calorie-dense diets.

Community kitchens, common pots and gardens: the invisible infrastructure

Women's collective responses are the least visible part of food security. Lima's community kitchens, born in the 1970s and 1980s and run by tens of thousands of women, the common pots that multiplied in Peru and Chile during the 2020 pandemic, the community gardens of Rosario or Nairobi and bulk-buying groups reveal an informal food infrastructure that sustains millions of people. Moser insists that those organisations are real social capital, and that policies that ignore them or replace them with individual transfers lose the collective capacity that makes them effective.

Urban food policy: Belo Horizonte, Toronto and the Milan Pact

Urban food policy has begun to recognise this. Programmes such as Belo Horizonte's, which since 1993 has combined popular restaurants, subsidised markets and support for family farming with a municipal budget and the participation of women's organisations, or the food policy councils of Toronto and of the cities of the 2015 Milan Pact, show that cities can guarantee access to food as a public service. The common keys are local markets in poor neighbourhoods, transport and time, support for women's collective organisations and recognition of the care work that sustains eating.

The lesson of Moser and of urban food research is that the food security of the poor is produced in households and in women's networks before it is produced in markets, and that this production carries a cost in health, time and opportunities that policies rarely count. A city that wants to feed its residents has to bring fresh, affordable food to the neighbourhoods that lack it, sustain the organisations already distributing it and lighten the burden of those who today guarantee, through invisible work, that their families eat.