Abstract

The future challenges for food security in cities are daunting and the key question of how sustainable our cities are in this important area remains. It is increasingly acknowledged that the discourse of food and agriculture must extend beyond traditional production and consumption linkages to include issues such as nutrition, supply chain efficiencies and links to city land, water, energy, biodiversity and the larger urban economic system. For cities, there is still insufficient theoretical and academic discourse that investigates the subject of food security. There is also a misconception that food self-sufficiency is synonymous with food sustainability. This paper intends to provide a deeper insight, and it explores food sustainability to encompass the dimensions of urban food production, access to food, food utilization, and economic access for households. It also intends to increase the level of awareness and education in the field with a specific focus on resource-constrained cities, using Singapore as a case study. This paper presents an evaluative framework for assessing and evaluating food sustainability using a methodological approach that comprises the Delphi approach to systematically shortlist indicators to evaluate food sustainability.