Food and Nutrition Security in Southern African Cities by Bruce Frayne Jonathan Crush Cameron McCordic

Author:Bruce Frayne, Jonathan Crush, Cameron McCordic [Bruce Frayne, Jonathan Crush, Cameron McCordic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415786782
Google: jHcTvgAACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2018-01-15T02:28:11+00:00

8 Farming the city

The broken promise of urban agriculture

Jonathan Crush, Alice Hovorka and Daniel Tevera

Introduction

The new international food security agenda largely focuses on raising food production by small rural farmers (Crush and Frayne, 2009). There is a danger that this productionist approach is being transferred uncritically to urban areas in the form of technical inputs for poor urban households to grow more food for themselves and for market. There is already an emerging focus on the technical aspects of urban farming and how these can be supported and enhanced through strategic interventions such as the promotion and adoption of innovative and appropriate urban farming technologies (Prain, 2006; van Veenhuizen and Danso, 2007; Shackleton et al., 2009); training, technical advice and extension services for urban farmers; improved access to agricultural inputs and credit (Drechsel et al., 2006); the strengthening of market chains including creation of farmers’ markets, linking farmer and consumer organizations, support to creation of small-scale preservation and storage facilities; and supporting the growth and activities of urban farmer organizations (Smit and Bailskey, 2006; van Veenhuizen and Danso, 2007). In Southern Africa, these kinds of technical, extension and support activities are less common than in other parts of the world. However, technocratic solutions are likely to fail if they do not first examine why so few poor urban households in Southern Africa grow any of their own food.

In the past, research on urban cultivation has tended to be isolated from analysis of the urban food supply system as a whole. A new approach needs to first situate the existence and potential for greater urban food production within a broader social, economic and political context (Tambwe, 2006). At the household level, urban food production is only one possible component of broader household food access and security strategies. As de Zeeuw (2004) has noted: “It is not its urban location which distinguishes urban from rural agriculture, but the fact that it is embedded in and interacting with the urban system … it is an urban phenomenon that tends to grow when cities grow.” The presence of urban agriculture in African cities has been recognized for many years (Gutman, 1987; Sanyal, 1987; Atkinson, 1994). Urban agriculture involves the production of plants and tree crops and animal husbandry on-plot and in open public spaces and on unused privately-owned land within the city and in peri-urban zones. Studies in the 1980s and early 1990s documented increasing rates of participation in urban agriculture in Southern and East Africa (Bishwapriya, 1985; Rakodi, 1985, 1988; Freeman, 1991; Briggs, 1991; Sawio, 1993; Mbiba, 1995). The case study evidence seemed to suggest that it had become a major livelihood strategy for poor households and the newly urbanized across the region (Rogerson, 1992).

In Zambia and Zimbabwe, for example, increased household food production was seen as a response by poor urban households to growing economic hardship and resultant food insecurity (Drakakis-Smith and Kivell, 1990; Drakakis-Smith, 1994; Drakakis-Smith et al., 1995; Mbiba, 1995; Mudimu, 1997). In war-ravaged Mozambique, the peri-urban areas of Maputo

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