Quito’s Resilient Agrifood System

Summary: Quito, Ecuador has built a resilient, inclusive agrifood system through two decades of coordinated, multi-stakeholder action. Faced with economic, geographic, and climate-related vulnerabilities, the city addressed the risk of food insecurity by integrating local government, civil society, academia, and businesses into participatory food policy networks. Key initiatives empowered communities to grow food, boost income, and influence policy. Using systems mapping, the city identified food system weaknesses—such as affordability, accessibility, and supply chain fragility—and transformed governance through data-driven, participatory planning.

This grassroots-to-policy approach exemplifies the SRR criteria relating to principles of Complexity, Collective Agency, and Transformation, improving urban food security, while advancing public health, social inclusion, and climate resilience. With nearly 4,000 urban gardens, 200 food enterprises, and institutionalized food governance structures, Quito demonstrates how collaborative, adaptive systems thinking can drive sustainable urban transformation and resilience. This case study is part of ASRA’s Systemic Risk Response Case Studies series—find out more in From Benches to Boardrooms: Responding to Systemic Risks.

Case Study: Quito’s Resilient Agrifood System

Overview: Over two decades, Quito in Ecuador, has woven together multiple initiatives to create a more resilient agrifood system. At the core of this transformation lies a fundamental belief: tackling the root causes of food insecurity and socioeconomic exclusion requires a collective effort, led by the local government and supported by a diverse network of stakeholders. Quito struggles to secure a stable food supply. The city produces far less than it needs, and maintaining a healthy diet costs 60% more than a typical one (RUAF, 2020, Resilient Cities Network, 2020). Its landlocked location exacerbates vulnerability, with limited transport links and exposure to natural disasters like earthquakes, landslides, floods, and wildfires.

Economic instability can compound these challenges. A late-1990s financial crisis led to deep public spending cuts, triggering migration surges and leaving nearly half of the population below the poverty line by 1999 (FuturePolicy, 2018). In response, Quito convened local governments from Latin America and the Caribbean, culminating in the Quito Declaration, a regional call to embrace urban agriculture.

The Quito Declaration sparked action. The Metropolitan District of Quito engaged stakeholders to assess food security challenges, leading to the 2002 launch of AGRUPAR (Participatory Urban Agriculture Program), managed by CONQUITO, the city’s Economic Development Agency. The award-winning initiative laid the groundwork for the Agri-food Pact of Quito (PAQ)—a coalition of public and private sector, civil society, academics, and cooperatives tasked with shaping local food policy (RUAF, 2020).

PAQ fostered collaboration between governments, businesses, and communities, strengthening Quito’s ability to address structural weaknesses in its agrifood system. Local leaders played a key role in identifying vulnerable populations, addressing language barriers, and coordinating neighborhood-based support networks (Jácome-Pólit, 2020).

Highlights in Systemic Risk Response

A systemic risk response encompasses any action that deliberately seeks to mitigate, prepare for, adapt to, and/or transform away from the harms of systemic risks. This case study demonstrates how collaborative, adaptive systems thinking can drive sustainable urban transformation and resilience.

Individual and Collective Agency

Quito’s success in building a resilient food system hinged on multi-stakeholder participation, ensuring that both individuals and communities played an active role in diagnosing, informing, and addressing food security challenges. Three key initiatives illustrate this approach:

1. Participatory Urban Agriculture Program (AGRUPAR): AGRUPAR empowers vulnerable groups through urban agriculture, enhancing food security, incomes, and social inclusion (FuturePolicy, 2018). The program supports food production, processing, and distribution via urban and peri-urban gardens, providing technical assistance and training, infrastructure and livestock support, micro-entrepreneurship and market access, microcredit facilitation, and applied agroecology research.
2. Agri-food Pact of Quito (PAQ): The PAQ, a coalition of 25 organizations, unites public and private sectors, civil society, cooperatives, and academia to strengthen Quito’s food system resilience (Alvaro, 2022). It played a pivotal role in drafting the Agri-food Letter of Quito, which set the stage for a long-term sustainability plan. Using complexity assessments and food system mapping, PAQ identified key intervention points to enhance resilience (Jácome-Polit et al., 2019, p. 277).
3. Community leadership engagement: Quito’s engagement with local leaders ensured targeted, community-driven food security efforts. Neighborhood leaders provided essential insights into vulnerable populations, helped coordinate food distribution, and raised awareness about food security initiatives. They also identified specific needs among non-Spanish-speaking communities, improving accessibility and inclusion (Jácome-Pólit, 2020).

As a signatory of the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, Quito developed indicators to guide participatory action and track governance, sustainable diets, and food waste challenges. This effort catalyzed a broader shift toward a right-to-food approach, reinforcing participatory governance in food policy (Alvaro, 2022).

Complexity 

To guide strategic decision-making within the PAQ, a technical working group—including AGRUPAR’s technical lead, the Metropolitan Directorate of Resilience, international NGO Rikolto, and others—conducted an in-depth analysis of Quito’s food system, incorporating: food system mapping (operations and modelling); vulnerability analysis (identifying weak points and critical points of connection within and across a system); and, a system analysis (evaluating the quality of connections within the system), revealing risks affecting food security in Quito (Jácome-Polit et al., 2019, p. 286):

1. Food is inaccessible:- High prices and low incomes make food unaffordable.- Physical access is limited for those beyond a 500-meter radius of food sources or facing mobility challenges, poor infrastructure or unsafe public spaces.

2. Food availability is unstable:- Supply chain failures disrupt production, processing, distribution, and retail.- Food donations are unreliable due to interruptions in food banks and related programs.
3. Food is not always adequate: - Does not always meet religious, cultural, or social dietary needs.- Food safety risks arise from contamination, poor storage, and improper handling.

4. The food supply is not resilient:- Vulnerable to economic, political, and environmental shocks.- Weak risk management leads to gaps in knowledge, inadequate storage, and unreliable emergency responses.

Using a complex systems approach and an open-source mapping tool, the PAQ working group mapped the eco-agrifood chain. This enabled the “identification of key agents, connections, vulnerabilities, and threats” (Jácome-Polit et al., 2019, p. 280).

Transformation 

Quito’s food security overhaul was driven by systemic policy shifts and resource reallocation, reinforcing resilience across institutional, social, environmental, financial, and technical dimensions. The goal was to secure daily food access while ensuring adaptability to crises and climate change (Jácome-Polit et al., 2019).

Collaboration was key. The PAQ strengthened ties between government, private sector, civil society, cooperatives, and academia, enhancing food governance (Jácome-Polit et al., 2019, p. 277). At a cultural level, Quito reframed food resilience as central to sustainable development and urban stability. Nearly 4,000 urban gardens now provide fresh produce, over 20,000 people have trained in urban agriculture, and 200 entrepreneurial ventures—including 13 businesses—have emerged, boosting the local economy (FAO, 2021). By promoting local, organic food production, the city diversified distribution, strengthened markets, and bolstered Bioferias—Quito’s organic farmers’ markets—ensuring supply chain stability during disruptions (Resilient Cities Network, 2020).

Beyond food security, Quito’s Resilient Agrifood System has delivered wider social and economic benefits, improving public health, fostering gender equality, and reducing socioeconomic vulnerability. By tackling informality and unplanned settlements, the city mitigates systemic risks, preventing knock-on challenges in education and urban planning (Personal communication: David Jácome-Pólit, 2024).

Key Insights and Lessons Learned

Quito is an exemplary systemic risk response, serving as a model for other communities on how to harness individual and collective agency and complexity analysis to move from idea to plan to action. Specifically, undertaking participatory mapping of their food system serves as a key example for understanding complexity in response. Quito’s decades-long focus on systemic risk response offers some key insights: 

1. Build a diverse network of supporters: Through a combination of multi-stakeholder collaboration, technical working group and informed policymaking meant that in 2019 when the municipal government change briefly halted key initiatives, including the PAQ, it was reinstated within a year and proposed as a Municipal Council. This is proof of the strong foundations laid by a diverse group of key stakeholders. Quito’s resilient local food economy helped it weather the COVID-19 crisis, and the pause enabled knowledge-sharing with other cities (Alvaro, 2022) (Alvaro, 2022).
2. Recognize the value of adaptive capacity: Ultimately, the city’s experience highlights a stark reality: food system resilience is only as strong as its weakest link. “It might not fail for everyone at the beginning, but as fragility or vulnerability expand, more will be left exposed as a result of planetary boundaries being crossed and changing the state of critical systems that provide stability to the planet” (personal communication: David Jácome-Polit, 2024). Resilience hinges on diverse actors working across multiple levels, exemplified by Quito’s resilient agrifood system.