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G.K. Nair

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Kochi, Feb. 6 For the first time in the history the world's urban population, estimated to be over three billion people, will exceed the number of those living in rural areas this year.

Given this trend by 2030, some two-thirds of the world's people will be living in cities, according to UN projections, which also predict that the world's population will rise to nine billion by 2050.

According to FAO currently, one third of city dwellers, one billion people, live in slums, and in many cities of sub-Saharan Africa they account for three quarters of all urban residents. Thus, there is going to be a huge increase in urban population, which would be an unprecedented challenge to make sure that they would have enough food, the FAO said.

Even in India there has been exponential increase in the urban population as a result of high rate of migration to larger cities in recent decades.

An estimated 30 per cent of the total population of 1,128 million (July 2006 estimate) now live in the urban cities leading to a substantial increase in the number of slum dwellers and urban poor.

The FAO in a bid to battle against hunger and malnutrition in the world's cities where most of global population growth is set to take place over the next decades has opened a new front in the form of "urban agriculture."

It may seem a contradiction, but that is what FAO is supporting as one element in urban food supply systems in response to the surging size of the cities of the developing world - and to their fast-advancing slums - according to FAO.

Under its ongoing "Food for the Cities" programme, an interdisciplinary initiative, FAO is therefore helping a number of cities to support urban and peri-urban agriculture so that they can increasingly contribute to the job of feeding themselves, it said.

More Stories on : Economy | Urban Development

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