Over the past decade, food security has emerged as a major challenge in cities and as a crucial issue for urban planners. Despite being a relatively new aspect of urban planning, local food system management has a long and varied history.

Key messages
>Urbanisation affects every aspect of food systems, from how food is produced to how it is processed, packaged, transported, marketed and consumed – and to how food waste is handled and recycled.
>Feeding rapidly growing cities in a sustainable manner is one of the key challenges for the coming decades.
>The main problems in this respect include long and distant supply chains, poor infrastructure, waste, the underuse of opportunities for local production and, of course, urban over-nutrition and under-nutrition.
>Growing evidence is now available from cities around the world of what works in practice.
>Relevant local stakeholders must be involved, in order to create bottom-up support from key population groups.
>Integrating food with urban planning requires the use of open data and information and communication technology (ICT), planning methods that properly connect informal and formal food-related activities, and the definition of comprehensive food profiles for cities.
>City networks and alliances offer lessons and enable best practices to be shared.

About: The European Think Tanks Group (ETTG) is a network of European independent think tanks working on EU international cooperation for global sustainable development:
>The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)
>The European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM)
>The Institute of International Affairs / Istituto per Affari Internazionali (IAI)
>The Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations / Institut du Développement Durable et des Relations Internationales (IDDRI)
>The Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

These five institutes can count between them on some 350 researchers, covering all aspects of international development and humanitarian policy. They share a strong commitment to higher global welfare, and a strong belief in the importance of better collective action to achieve global goals. As think-tanks, and as policy-focused research institutes, they also share a commitment to effective outreach and engagement with policy-makers and policy processes.
ETTG mission
The members of the ETTG recognise the importance of the EU as a global player, in relation to developing countries and more widely.