Millions of smallholder farmers face limited production capacity and access to technology and finance, making them increasingly vulnerable to economic shocks and other disruptions. Food safety issues are also a major concern for consumers.
In addition, managing food loss and food waste to reduce the footprint in the food system is another challenge. Limited investment in logistics and storage facilities has caused high food losses, which expose system inefficiencies and pose considerable aggregate costs. The availability of unhealthy, less nutritious food is increasing due to modern technologies, which is undermining the health of young children and contributing to the alarming increase in overweight and obesity among children and adolescents in urban and peri-urban areas.
Finally, food systems have multiple implications for the environment. Unsustainable practices like intensive farming and environmentally unfriendly processing technologies are leading to climate change, degradation, and pollution of natural resources. Farmers' overusing fertilisers and pesticides has also adversely impacted both farmers' health and the environment. The need to balance the increasing demand for food in urban areas while ensuring sustainability in production and reducing negative environmental impacts is a significant challenge.
At Rikolto, we believe that cities offer critical opportunities to test innovations in ways that keep urban food systems within the ecological limits of the planet, while meeting the needs of urban dwellers and food chain workers.
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To catalyse collective action among local food system actors to make urban food environments and food supply chains more conducive to healthy, sustainable and nutritious diets for all citizens as part of resilient and inclusive city region food systems.
We catalyse collective action among local food system actors to make urban food environments and supply chains more conducive to healthy, sustainable and nutritious diets for all citizens. Our Good Food for Cities programme operates in five cities in Indonesia and four in Vietnam. Our ambition for 2026 is to pilot and scale the adoption of inclusive food system innovations that directly improve access to healthy, sustainable, and nutritious food.
Anchored in the Sustainable Food Systems framework, the Good Food For Cities programme approaches urban food systems through a systems-thinking lens.
Co-creation, multi-stakeholder collaborations and learning are at the heart of this approach. We strive to build interconnections between actors and to foster collective action mechanisms through participatory and inclusive food governance structures.
We try to understand how different areas are connected to each other and to identify levers for systems change that help us to navigate difficult trade-offs, such as how to improve access to affordable healthy food, while incentivising farmers and food chain workers to adopt more sustainable practices.
Inclusive business is essential for incentivising smallholder producers in rural, urban and peri-urban areas to produce and market crops that contribute to sustainable and healthy diets. Inclusive business translates into a fair and transparent collaboration between all actors in the food chain (e.g. open communication, fair prices, risk-sharing), driven by a common goal and leading to a more stable market and supply of quality food to cities. It is built on equitable access to services such as credit, technical support and market information and is supported by inclusive innovation that helps make the chain more efficient and fairer. Coupled with strong market demand, it is a key element of the pull factor that contributes to stronger rural urban linkages.
Read more about our work on inclusive markets.
Rikolto's strategy focuses on three pillars: sustainable production, inclusive food markets and an enabling environment.
Industrial farming techniques, which have largely prioritised yields over resilience and environmental sustainability, have already degraded around a third of the world's soils, including in Asia regions.
For healthier and more sustainable food to reach urban markets, there must be incentives for behaviour change at all stages of the chain. Inclusive business relationships are therefore a powerful enabler of the transition to sustainable food systems in cities and beyond. To contribute to more inclusive markets, we focus on:
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Under this third pillar, our interventions seek to incentivise sustainable and healthy diets through policies, collective learning and new partnerships. Below are some of the initiatives we support in our network.
Rikolto works with a variety of partners across many sectors, including:
Find below a non-exhaustive list of the networks to which we contribute:
