Barcelona’s commitment to sustainability travels also through its food strategy. Here follows the city’s vision for a sustainable food system by 2030. Let’s dive into Barcelona’s innovative strategies, in line with the global Sustainable Development Goals.
The overarching goals of Barcelona Healthy and Sustainable Food Strategy for 2030 promote health, sustainability, and equity. The roadmap is witness to a particularly mature system, as compared to Madrid’s, where similar propositions are still under discussion.
Barcelona Healthy and Sustainable Food Strategy for 2030
Among the objectives of Barcelona 2030 food strategy, we can find:
Reducing food waste
We waste over 87 million tonnes of food (approximately 173 kilos per person) in Europe every year. Thus, it is important to facilitate community kitchens and reinforce food-reuse and recycling networks in the city’s neighbourhoods. At the same time, they will organise workshops and communication campaigns raise people’s awareness.
To prevent excessive food loss and waste throughout the entire food chain, Barcelona City Council will organise and/or fund services in favour of food redistribution in large commercial venues and responsible public procurement. The city will create a specific programme to foster entrepreneurship with the aim of developing new products resulting from food reuse and recycling.
While school canteens, hospitals and residencies will be the primary target of responsible public procurement. To this end, it is equally necessary to develop spaces for co-creating projects that have an impact on prevention at origin. The city will create a specific programme to foster entrepreneurship with the aim of developing new products resulting from food reuse and recycling.
Increasing access to healthy food
Through urban circularity, everyone will have access to healthy, organic, seasonal and locally-sourced food. By looking at municipal markets as leading neighbourhood food outlets, we plan to increase the number of healthy, sustainable food establishments. The initiative hopes to eventually create aware and empowered consumers.
We can understand access to healthy food in terms of physical access, affordability (economic access) and availability (products on offer). Thus, the strategy will involve people that are vulnerable to some form of food insecurity in the identification of problems and the design of solutions.
Supporting local producers
The plan is to improve territorial resilience, guaranteeing supplies under increasing drought and extreme climatic circumstances. For this to happen, wholesalers will need to sell locally sourced produce in Mercabarna, a wholesale market of organic food in Barcelona. In the same way, local producers and agricultural cooperatives will have to be present. The overall initiative aims at promoting distribution in shorter, fairer and more balanced food chains.
Training the unemployed & vulnerable population
As per Barcelona 2030 food strategy, they will offer informal training in agroecological practices, with the support of inter-generational knowledge transmission. The plan equally wishes to deliver financial aid to help young people and women undertake agroecological projects in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona and in Catalonia. In fact, food insecurity mostly affects women. This aid will translate into the leasing of land and housing subsidies, as well as into grants for modernising infrastructures and ensuring fair access to the land. These are very important steps in the journey to sustainable food for everyone.
In particular, they would like to extend the Collserola Agricultural Contract and introduce AMB subsidies for the Muntanyes del Baix and the Serralada de Marina projects. Interestingly enough, they suggest making the subsidies conditional upon satisfaction of a set of productivity, biodiversity conservation, water and carbon storage conditions.
Shortening the food supply chain
A sustainable supply chain emerges as particularly important in Barcelona’s food system. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) and farmers’ markets foster direct connections between consumers and producers, shortening the supply chain.
According to Barcelona City Council, self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables is at 15% in the Province of Barcelona. In Catalonia, we devote 22.1% of agricultural land to organic production, out of which 14.8% to pasture and only 7.3% to cultivation. The Urban Agriculture Observatory will collect additional data in the future on the amount and types of food that we consume in Barcelona Metropolitan Area.
Disruptions to the food supply chain due to inflation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have been taking place across Europe. These disturbances reveal the fragility of the supply chain we rely on: our food distribution and consumption network needs to be diversified, rather than highly centralised.
Following the farmers’ demonstrations against the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement, Catalonia’s food supply chain experienced temporary disruptions in 2023 and 2024. These actions highlighted critical issues faced by the agricultural sector, such as rising costs and regulatory challenges that could derive from the influx of imported products.
To make a sensitive shift in the supply chain, we need to analyse the impact of actions at each link in the chain, and especially, to negotiate the market strength of the primary sector. The Ciudad Condal needs to be able to influence the stages of distribution and consumption more directly, concentrating its efforts on making proposals as inclusive of people with low incomes as possible.
Urban allotments and peri-urban areas
Urban agriculture promotes local food production in green spaces, making the most of rooftops and empty sites. It also contributes to community engagement, biodiversity, and food security.
The Urban Agriculture Observatory maps 541 urban allotments, out of which: 160 are community gardens; 349 school allotments; 15 municipal gardens; and 17 connected to the “Mans al verd” programme. On top of this, we can find hydroponics cultivation, private allotments, vertical, balcony and indoor gardens.
The 2019-2030 Urban Agricultural Strategy, published in April 2019, masterly informs us about the variety of allotments that are in place. In doing so, it carries out a SWOT analysis, paying attention to environmental, social, administrative, financial, and political factors.
According to the Barcelona 2030 food strategy, they will give priority to creating seed banks and new urban-agriculture areas. The strategy aims at increasing the percentage of agricultural land from 9.3 to 13-15% in Barcelona Metropolitan Area. This also means that they will position edible plants in the city’s parks and taken care of through participatory stewardship.
Seed banks in Barcelona’s community gardens
Seed banks are anything but an obvious item when it comes to policymaking. They conserve local crops and wild edible species that we do not normally find on the market. Such species are of great importance to cultural identity. They do not only result in a greater biodiversity but also retain a potential for climate-resilience.
Taking a top-down approach, either national or supranational organisations generally set up seed banks as a centralised repository that separates the seeds from the natural environment and community of origin.
Barcelona wishes to revert this model, proposing initiating small-scale seedbanks right in community gardens. While we appreciate the city’s disruptive take on the subject, we do not quite know if the local administration will eventually gain control of them.
Land recovery in Barcelona’s peri-urban areas
Peri-urban areas are equally part of Barcelona 2030 food strategy. They identify areas like the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat and the Parc Natural Collserola. As they often constitute disused agricultural land, they require renaturalisation processes. They estimate that the loss of agricultural land in Barcelona’s Metropolitan Area between 1956 and 2018 decreased by 80.5%.
It might take some time for these practices to take over and produce the fruits we aim for. Agricultural pilot projects help understand what worked well and what not so well, and what we should change, before adopting solutions on a large scale. Notably, Barcelona’s strategy invites us to distinguish agricultural areas that are particularly productive from those cultivated primarily for the purpose of social cohesion and integration. The food production is in fact very productive in urban allotments at this moment in time.
This plan demands the local administrations — the Área Metropolitana de Barcelona with its 36 municipalities (including the Social and Solidarity Economy network, #ESSBCN2030); the Province of Barcelona; the Generalitat de Catalunya; and the Spanish Government — to consciously share natural resources.
Land recovery will focus on areas where there is a high risk of erosion, revitalising ecosystems and enhancing sustainable agriculture. Root systems and organic matter consistently increase soil porosity and cohesion. This allows restored land to absorb and retain heavy rainfall from extreme weather. While, vegetation reduces the force of surface runoff caused by water and wind.
Restoring disused agricultural land fights erosion while revitalising ecosystems and enhancing sustainable agriculture. In particular, regenerative practices reinforce soil health, while enhancing biodiversity and sequestering carbon. On the other hand, agroecology integrates ecological principles into farming to create resilient systems — by promoting polycultures and crop rotation; taking advantage of natural barriers; and encouraging agroforestry by combining trees and shrubs with crops.
For a stronger agriculture sector
Barna looks forward to developing more sustainable food projects. May these practices serve as a model for other cities. Fostering a collective movement towards a healthier, more sustainable future is key both to educating consumers and fighting unequal access to healthy food. Barcelona Healthy and Sustainable Food Strategy for 2030 effectively adopts inclusive and participatory methodologies, that actively engage with the most vulnerable groups of the population.
Urban and peri-urban agriculture is not for only a few in Barcelona: we can in fact boost it by offering training opportunities and land subsidies to the youth and women. Additionally, shorter, fairer and more balanced food chains — aimed at promoting health, sustainability, and equity — can strengthen the Catalonian agriculture sector as a whole.
