Marino, D.; Curcio, F.; Felici, F.B.; Mazzocchi, G. Toward Evidence-Based Local Food Policy: An Agroecological Assessment of Urban Agriculture in Rome. Land2024, 13, 30.
Marino, D.; Curcio, F.; Felici, F.B.; Mazzocchi, G. Toward Evidence-Based Local Food Policy: An Agroecological Assessment of Urban Agriculture in Rome. Land 2024, 13, 30.
Marino, D.; Curcio, F.; Felici, F.B.; Mazzocchi, G. Toward Evidence-Based Local Food Policy: An Agroecological Assessment of Urban Agriculture in Rome. Land2024, 13, 30.
Marino, D.; Curcio, F.; Felici, F.B.; Mazzocchi, G. Toward Evidence-Based Local Food Policy: An Agroecological Assessment of Urban Agriculture in Rome. Land 2024, 13, 30.
Abstract
Recent crises have highlighted the vulnerabilities of global supply chains and, consequently, a profound need for food system transformation. In this scenario, Local Food Policy and agroe-cology arise as two different but converging paradigms capable of fostering an inclusive and sustainable transition of the food systems, especially in the urban contexts. The purpose of this paper is to strengthen the relationship between these two paradigms by proposing agroecological assessment as a tool for formulating evidence-based Local Food Policies. Considering the city-region food system of Rome (Italy) as a reference context, the paper proposes an adaptation of the TAPE model on a sample of 20 farms to analyze urban agriculture and understand the extent to which it contributes to the transformation of the food system. Data processing shows that, in the city-region context of Rome, agroecological principles are not fully adopted by the majority of farms. In addition, farms with the highest agroecological level are those driven mainly by social factors and have a lower propensity for innovation. This could be read as a constraining aspect because it hinders and slows down the transformation process of food systems. However, these data turn out to be essential to the implementation of Local Food Policy and in identifying pathways toward sustainability.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
