Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Urban Agriculture In The Third World

Urban agriculture helps improve nutrition and incomes for city dwellers, providing food grown locally, eliminating transportation from rural areas and creating job opportunities. But it is crucial to improve health-related practices so that food is safe to eat.

Tyres and old plastic pots planted with vegetables and sacks rigged up to make vertical gardens. These are just some of the techniques being used by a new generation of urban farmers, who are developing inventive ways to make the most of limited space to produce food. Jennifer Daley lives on the outskirts of the densely populated town of Mandeville in Jamaica. With no access to agricultural land, she uses wheelbarrows and just about anything that can contain soil to grow her crops. Sheila Hope-Harewood farms in a suburban area of the parish of St Michael in what is becoming the newest urban centre in Barbados. She has a drip irrigation system and grows guava, lemon, pomegranate, ackee, sugar apple, mango and banana, as well as a variety of vegetables that she sells at a stall in the local market. Other ACP farmers are producing livestock in urban settings. Husband and wife John and Betty Msowoya have set up several small fishponds on the outskirts of Mzuzu in Malawi. They also keep a few pigs and use the manure to fertilise their ponds and promote the growth of the fish that they supply to city markets. In Nairobi, Kenya, a number of people who lost their jobs as a result of layoffs have turned to urban chicken farming, making an average of €6 per bird and earning additional income from eggs.

For decades, poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition were viewed as rural problems. But with the populations of many ACP countries becoming more urban, poverty and poor nutrition are emerging as growing challenges for city dwellers. More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and 3 billion more city dwellers are expected by 2050. A recent World Bank and IMF report showed that the growth in urban poverty is now rapidly outstripping that of rural poverty, with the urban poor particularly vulnerable to food price rises since food accounts for 60-70% of their income.

Urban agriculture (UA) offers some solutions, ensuring supplies of fresh vegetables and other nutritious food to urban dwellers where poor roads and weak supply chains make it difficult to transport highly perishable produce from rural areas. It has been estimated that some 200 million people are engaged in urban agriculture and related enterprises. For the poorest urban dwellers, the share of income derived from UA often exceeds 50%. UA, which includes peri-urban farming on areas close to cities, may take place on homesteads or at plots some distance away, in parks, along roads, streams and railways and in the grounds of schools and hospitals. It can involve the cultivation of food crops, rearing animals including poultry, goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, guinea pigs, grasscutters and fish and producing non-food products such as medicinal plants. It can also encompass a range of other services such as processing, packaging, compost and animal health services.

FAO estimates that 130 million urban residents in Africa alone engage in agriculture, mainly horticulture, to provide food for their families or to earn income from sales. Advantages include low start-up costs, short production cycles and high yields per unit of time, land and water. UA can be an effective coping strategy when times are hard. In the slum area of Kamae, Kenya, families have been allocated small landholdings by the local administration and given training in growing crops and rearing small livestock. In Havana, the capital of Cuba, urban agriculture developed after imports and exports collapsed following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. With no access to oil, tractors, fertilisers, pesticides or other inputs, urban Cubans turned to organic farming to feed their families. Today, more than 26,000 gardens cover 2,439 ha in Havana and produce 25,000 tonnes of food annually. In Mozambique and Sierra Leone, urban farming developed as a way of feeding the influx of refugees who flocked to the cities during civil wars. In both countries, it continues to be an important source of food, income and employment and has spurred an entire value chain, including processing, packaging, transport and retailing.

City Farmers (Spore)

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