The Rural-Urban Food Systems’ Links with the Agenda 2030: From FAO Guidelines on Food Supply and Distribution Systems to a Dairy Sector Application in the Area of Bogota

Abstract

What should be the policy to meet urban food needs in developing countries and those in transition? This is a key question of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which was posed into the “FAO’s methodological and operational guide to study and understand Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) to cities in developing countries and countries in transition” in order to face the current overwhelming increase of urban population and the increasing urbanization pressures on food systems. Following some previous work in the field where it was argued that clarifying the various problems and structure behind Food Supply and Distribution Systems (FSDS) in urban environments is vital to assess policies that aim at meeting urban food needs, the purpose of this paper is to show that the methodological approach known as system dynamics modeling and simulation can lead, in terms of knowledge and/or theoretical contribution, to the unfolding of complexity in this area of research as well as bring into the analysis the relationships across a few goals of the Agenda 2030. As an additional result, we show how the developed model can be applied (case of the production of milk for consumption in the city of Bogota, Colombia) to analyze the dynamics of food supply and distribution systems in urban environments.