Transportation of Food and Urbanization

The 21st century may become known as the century on urbanization. Today, more people than ever are living in large cities and urban centers. For example, nine out of ten Canadians now live in a major city. Fifty years ago, only half of all Canadians did. This trend is not unique to Canada. It is happening in every continent, all over the world.

And it is creating huge problems for our food systems.

All over the world, cities are depending on rural farms for their food. In order to feed a city, massive quantities of food must be transported thousands of kilometers from the rural farms into the cities. The problems is, this process of transporting food is incredibly inefficient. It consumes tons of resources and causes horrible pollution. It also costs billions of dollars, which are injected into your food prices. And with the rising costs of fuel, those food prices are only going to get more and more expensive.

So can we save all the resources that are currently being wasting by the transportation of food?

The answer is simple: stop transporting food altogether.

Because urban agriculture allows people to grow food in the cities where it will ultimately be consumed, we no longer have to rely on rural farms for our food supply. We don't need to keep wasting all the resources we are using to transport food. And we certainly don't need to keep paying the mark-ups on our food caused by transportation.

The trend of urbanization certainly isn't going to chance to accommodate our food systems. So we need to change our food systems to accommodate urbanization.

And urban agriculture is the way to do that.