Urbanization and Diminishing Agricultural Land: Implications for Food Security

Abstract

Urbanization is one of the most far-reaching structural transformations of the twenty-first century. While urban growth is often associated with economic dynamism and modernization, it simultaneously generates profound changes in agrarian systems and food provisioning structures. This paper examines the relationship between urban expansion and diminishing agricultural land from a sociological perspective, arguing that farmland conversion constitutes a structural threat to food security. Moving beyond technical and environmental explanations, the analysis situates land within relations of power, class, gender, and social reproduction. Drawing on agrarian political economy, the production of space, and food regimes theory, the paper demonstrates how urban expansion reshapes agrarian relations, redistributes risk, and intensifies inequalities in food access. Using evidence from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), UN-Habitat, the World Bank, and peer-reviewed scholarship, the study identifies key social pathways linking land loss to food insecurity: erosion of entitlements, livelihood displacement, heightened market dependence, weakening of community safety nets, and gendered dispossession. Particular attention is given to peri-urban zones, where agricultural and urban systems intersect and where transformations are most pronounced. The paper concludes that food insecurity associated with diminishing agricultural land is not an inevitable consequence of urbanization but a socially produced outcome shaped by governance failures, land commodification, and exclusionary planning paradigms. Addressing this challenge requires grounded policy interventions that integrate food systems into urban planning, secure land tenure, and democratize land governance.