Toward evidence-based Local Food Policy: an agroecological assessment of urban agriculture in Rome

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 agroecology arise as two different but converging paradigms capable of fostering an inclusive and sustainable transition of the food systems, especially in 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 Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) model on a sample of 20 farms to analyse 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 considered. 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.