DEVELOPMENT: Farms Grow in Cities on Rooftops and Backyards

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 14 1996 (IPS) - Rooftops, garbage dumps, and vacant lots serve as farmland for millions of city dwellers around the world, according to the United Nations Development programme (UNDP).

Urban agriculture is a growing global phenomenon, producing 10 percent of the world’s food supply, the UNDP says in a report released here Tuesday.

The report, ‘Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities’, estimates that 800 million people practice urban agriculture — from growing crops on rooftops to raising livestock in backyards.

“Many find urban agriculture as a new concept, but it is a concept whose time has come,” says Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network and chief author of the 250-page report.

The study draws on three years of field research in more than 18 countries mainly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It includes 300 interviews with farmers, government officials, and representatives of non-governmental organisations.

The report concludes that though urban agriculture is growing it is not recognised as a viable industry, because many view the practice as “archaic, temporary, and inappropriate.”

“Urban farming is often minimised as being merely ‘kitchen gardening’ or marginalised as a leftover of rural habits,” states the report, produced as part of Habitat II, the U.N. conference on cities to be held this June in Istanbul, Turkey. “The benefits of urban farming are lost behind myths that are the products of cultural, planning, and policy biases.”

“The reality is that cities are feeding themselves” by making the most out of scarce land, waste and water, and other natural resources, says Dr. Smit.

According to the report, countries such as Costa Rica, Japan, Mozambique, the Netherlands, and Russia carry out urban farming on a large scale. But the mostly women farmers are poor and farm only part time.

“Many developing countries will enter the end of this decade deeply in debt and with a poor foreign trade balance,” says the study. “For some of them, it is possible and appropriate to put their good rural agricultural land into export crops and to let the cities provide for their food and fuel needs as much as possible through urban agriculture.”