Module 4 - Urban and Periurban Agriculture

Agricultural activities in and around cities and towns contribute significantly to meeting the needs of these urban areas, providing employment to urban dwellers, especially women, and absorbing city wastes. Institutional and technological innovations are needed to integrate urban and periurban agriculture (UPUA) with evolving urban marketing systems and to satisfy demands of urban consumers. Other investment needs include capacity for supply and demand analysis, awareness campaigns on food quality and environmentally sound practices, technological and institutional innovation for production and monitoring food safety and quality, and an enabling environment for the private sector to distribute inputs and services.

Migration of the poor from rural to urban areas (where basic services are more available and costs of living are less) will continue to be a major trend in developing countries. This results in shifting poverty from rural areas to urban slums and increasing urban and periurban agriculture. Sustainable production, processing, and distribution of food in and around cities and towns contribute to the goal of a safe, affordable, and reliable food supply for the urban poor and provide income and employment to a large number of urban poor, especially women. Critical issues concerning UPUA include the use of pesticides; use of urban waste in agricultural production; environmental pollution caused by agricultural activities in densely populated areas; conflicts over land and water between agricultural, industrial, and housing uses; unhygienic food marketing; and an inability of producers, wholesalers, retailers, and other agents engaged in food processing and marketing to integrate within coordinated food chains.

UPUA includes activities within or on the fringe of a town or city that use natural, physical, and human resources to grow, process, and distribute food and nonfood agricultural products for both local urban markets and for export. As the UPUA production system is close to urban consumers, it can be well connected in terms of input and output markets. UPUA products may reach urban consumers and processing points the day they are harvested. These systems are also characterized by the small scale of production, high proportion of perishable crops (especially leafy vegetables), disease and insect pressure, intensity of input use, crop diversity, and low use of mechanical power.

Benefits

Poor men and women engage in UPUA to increase household food security and to generate income. The contribution of food produced in UPUA to meet the total food needs of different cities varies widely. For Hanoi, it supplies about one-half of the food demand and engages more than 10 percent of the urban labor force in processing, marketing, retailing, input supply, and seed and seedling production (Anh et al. 2004). These percentages are higher for many African and some Latin American cities. Even in cities like Manila, where little land is left for crop-based agriculture, the contribution of agricultural business activities to income and employment remain significant (Ali and Porciancola 2001). UPUA systems can play an important role in environmental and public health by reusing and managing urban wastewaters and solid waste. Home gardening and maintaining a large number of trees in cities contribute to air quality as well as employment. Urban agriculture can also be seen as a survival strategy for the urban poor during crisis periods, and contributes to household food security, especially for women and the elderly.