Bridging sustainability and nutrition: evaluating urban agriculture's role in equitable food security solutions

Food insecurity, undernourishment, and agricultural output are major challenges across African (sub-Saharan, Arab region, Mena and other trade and political regions) and Asian (South, Southeast, etc) countries, influenced by rapid urbanization, higher food prices, and structural imbalances. Urban agriculture is used in this research to assess how food accessibility and dietary diversity are linked with unemployment, poverty prevalence, nutrient supply, and urbanization across cross-country evidence, limiting the inclusion of other variables. This study aims to investigate the structural determinants of food security by examining the role of urban agriculture employment, cost of a healthy diet, urbanization, and related micro and macronutrient supply across selected African and Asian countries. A quantitative and cross-country balanced panel of 50 countries, 25 Asian and 25 African, was selected based on the availability of data across publicly recognized sources such as FAO and the World Bank from 2017 to 2023. By yielding 350 country-year observations, this study employs Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), fixed effects, and panel effect regression models. The findings reveal that agricultural employment is strongly related to underemployment ( β = 0.240, p < 0.001), particularly challenging traditional food security outcomes. Poverty within selected African and Asian countries consistently remained statistically significant across all the models ( β = 0.072, p = 0.001, R 2 = 0.211) and food insecurity ( β = 0.023, p < 0.001, R 2 = 0.067). On the contrary, findings show systematic divergence between the cost of a healthy diet and nutrient supply, as affordability does not show a strong association with nutritional adequacy. Additionally, urban population significantly improves the fat supply ( β = 0.601, p < 0.001), protein supply ( β = 0.237, p < 0.001), and vitamin A supply ( β = 4.252, p = 0.001), as well as the availability of nutrients, but favours highly fat-rich diets, demonstrating the transition towards healthier diets while calorie composition indicators indicate a higher prediction to find nutritional outcomes. Overall, these results draw attention to shortcomings of the role of price and production efficiency approach, highlighting that food security is influenced by multiple and context-specific determinants.