Urban farming increasingly being encouraged

by Juliet Torome

When I met Eunice Wangari at a Nairobi coffee shop recently, I was surprised to hear her on her mobile phone, insistently asking her mother about the progress of a corn field in her home village, hours away from the big city. A nurse, Wangari counts on income from farming to raise money to buy more land – for more farming.

Even though Wangari lives in Kenya's capital, she is able to reap hundreds of dollars a year in profit from cash crops grown with the help of relatives. Her initial stake – drawn from her nursing wages of about $350 a month – has long since been recovered.

Wangari is one of thousands of urban workers in Kenya – and one of hundreds of thousands, even millions, across Africa – who are increasing their incomes through absentee agriculture. With prices for basic foodstuffs at their highest levels in decades, many urbanites feel well rewarded by farming.

Absentee agriculture also bolsters national pride – and pride in traditional diets – by specialising in vegetables specific to the region. "For too long our country has been flooded with imported food and westernised foods," Wangari says. "This is our time to fight back – and grow our own."

Across Africa, political leaders, long dismissive of rural concerns, have woken up to the importance of agriculture and the role that educated people, even those living in major cities, can play in farming. In Nigeria, former president Olusegun Obasanjo has a huge diversified farm and has pushed for policies to help absentee farmers prosper. In Uganda, vice-president Gilbert Bukenya routinely travels the country, promoting higher-value farming, such as dairy production.

Perhaps the most visible political support for absentee agriculture is in Liberia, a small west African country where civil war destroyed agriculture, rendering the population dependent on food imports, even today. The president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, recognising that educated people could contribute much to an agriculture revival, has launched a "Back to the Soil" campaign in large part to encourage urban dwellers to farm.

To be sure, absentee farming by elites and educated urban workers can't solve all of Africa's urgent food needs. Moreover, absentee farmers face unexpected problems. Because they don't visit their fields often, they rely heavily on relatives and friends. When I myself decided to farm wheat for the first time this spring on leased land in my childhood village, my mother agreed to supervise ploughing, planting and harvesting. Without her help, I might not have farmed at all.

Even with mother's help, I have worries. Although I grew up around wheat fields, my knowledge of farming is thin. Fertiliser and spraying were both more expensive than I thought. While my wheat stalks are sprouting on schedule, I now fear that at harvest time – in November – prices will fall and I won't recoup my costs.

One key tool is the mobile phone. My hopes for success are buoyed by my ability to call my mother inexpensively and discuss the farm. We even decided over the phone what kind of pesticide to use and which tractor company to hire.

Because they know both the tastes of fellow city dwellers and rural conditions, many urban farmers are succeeding. In fact, some city dwellers don't even bother with acquiring land or gaining distant help. Certain crops can be grown in their own homes. James Memusi, an accountant, grows mushrooms in a spare bedroom, selling them to nearby hotels and supermarkets.

Nevertheless, most people living in Africa's cities have access to land in the countryside, which is why Liberia's government rightly highlights the potential for farm expansion. In a new advertising campaign rolled out this summer, the authorities declared: "The soil is a bank; invest in it."

In Liberia, the main push is to reduce imports of staples such as rice and tomatoes. In more prosperous countries, African elites are motivated by a complex interplay of national pride, dietary concerns and the pursuit of profit. In Zambia, for example, Sylva Banda ignited a craze for authentic traditional meals two decades ago with a chain of popular restaurants. Now, ordinary Lusakans want to cook similar meals in their own homes, driving demand for farmers who produce such delicacies as dried pumpkin, "black jack" leaves and fresh okra.

In Nairobi, Miringo Kinyanjui, another female entrepreneur, is supplying unrefined – and more nutritious – maize and wheat flour. In another move to distinguish her ingredients from western versions, Kinyanjui also sells flour flavoured with amarathan, a green vegetable that grows around Kenya.

The revival of traditional foods has attracted the attention of large multinational corporations. Last year, Unilever's Kenyan branch ran a "taste our culture" campaign in support of its line of traditional east African herbs and spices.

Such campaigns go hand in hand with expanded farming, because sellers of these foods prefer local growers – even if these growers increasingly live in the city.

The Guardian

Kenyan slum develops organic farm

Victor Matioli's organic pumpkins are plump, his coriander aromatic and his spinach "very soft, sweet, and tasty." His half-acre farm is a former rubbish dump in the heart of east Africa's biggest slum, Nairobi's Kibera.

So arresting is the sight of tall sunflowers growing amid the rust-coloured shacks and dirt paths of Kibera that Matioli and his fellow growers have had to put up a "No photographing" sign to allow them to work in peace. Their reputations - the farmers are all reformed criminals - mean the warning is seldom ignored.

The unlikely story of Kibera's first "organic" farm - its only farm of any scale - has its roots in the chaos that gripped Kenya at the start of the year. For weeks the sprawling, densely packed slum, home to up to a million people, was gripped by ethnic clashes and street battles between riot police and protesters demonstrating over flawed presidential elections.

Among those concerned about a looming hunger crisis was Su Kahumbu, managing director of Green Dreams, one of Kenya's pioneer organic produce companies.

Initially, she hoped to organise a mass distribution of seeds to small-scale farmers in the Rift Valley to enable them to plant before the April rains. After a lack of funding halted the plan, a friend told her about a group of young, unemployed men in Kibera who wanted to learn how to farm - inside the slum.

Photographs of their would-be vegetable patch did not inspire confidence. "There was so much garbage there I thought, 'You must be joking'," said Kahumbu. A rectangle of land bordering the railway line that cuts through Kibera, the proposed farm was being used as a refuse dump by nearby residents. Piled high were plastic cartons, cans, broken bottles, chicken and goat bones, as well as innumerable "flying toilets" - polythene bags filled with human waste, a grim reminder of the slum's lack of sewage facilities.

But when Kahumbu saw the enthusiasm among Matioli's 36-member Youth Reform Group, she agreed to help them get started. The men, mostly in their 20s, some having served jail terms, set about cleaning the site in late April.

Rather than simply dumping the rubbish elsewhere, it was compacted and tied down under tarpaulins on one side of the plot. The newly revealed soil still contained traces of refuse, mainly old strips of plastic, and Kahumbu sent samples away for analysis. Meanwhile, her brother laid down a network of drip-irrigation pipes linked to a water tank.

The soil tests revealed high, but not dangerous, levels of zinc, which could be drawn out by planting sunflowers among the vegetables. Still, Kahumbu felt that it would be wrong to teach the men conventional farming methods.

"The toxin levels in Kibera are already high and I did not think it was fair to add to them," she said. So, it was agreed that, soil quality and surroundings aside, Kibera's first modern-day farm would be organic. Fertiliser would come from vegetable scraps turned into compost, and from plant-nourishing "worm juice" produced by the earthworms kept in a half-barrel of soil. Within two months of planting, the first vegetables were successfully harvested. The farmers buy some of the produce; the rest sells swiftly within the slum.

Netting the equivalent of about 18 US cents for a cabbage and $2 for a pumpkin, Matioli's collective made a profit last month (August) - a modest sum, but one that made him confident of the farm's sustainability. "People here are really interested in learning about our organic methods," said Matioli.

The Hindu News

Much of world agriculture depends on waste water

Vegetables, rice and other cereals in at least 53 cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America may someday come with warning labels that read "this is a byproduct of raw sewage."

Against the backdrop of rising food prices and a shortage of drinking water worldwide, urban farmers are being forced to use either untreated wastewater or polluted river water both for their agricultural needs and for their economic survival.

A 53-city survey finds the practice most common in some of the world's poorer nations where wastewater use is critical both to farmer's incomes and urban food security while simultaneously raising critical health risks.

The study conducted by the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI) -- and released to coincide with World Water Week in the Swedish capital of Stockholm -- indicates that about 80 percent of the cities surveyed are using untreated or partially treated wastewater for agriculture.

In over 70 percent of the cities studied, more than half of urban agricultural land is irrigated with wastewater that is either raw or diluted in streams. The use of waste water, which usually includes sludge, industrial effluent, kitchen and bathroom waste, is a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20 million hectares across the developing world, according to the survey.

This is particularly prevalent in Asian countries, including China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in many Latin American cities, including Lima, Santiago, La Paz, Bogota and Sao Paulo.

The study says that wastewater is most commonly used to produce vegetables and cereals, especially rice, raising concerns about health risks for consumers, particularly in vegetables consumed uncooked. At the same time, wastewater agriculture contributes importantly to urban food supplies and helps provide a livelihood for the urban poor, especially women, and recent migrants from the countryside.

As a notable example, the study points out that Accra, Ghana's capital city with an urban population of nearly 2.0 million people, illustrates those tradeoffs particularly well. An estimated 200,000 of the city's inhabitants make daily purchases of vegetables produced on just 100 hectares of urban agricultural land irrigated with wastewater.

Consumers across the 53 cities said they would prefer to avoid wastewater produce. But most of the time, they have no way of knowing the origin of the products they buy. Farmers too are aware that irrigating with wastewater may pose health risks both for themselves and the consumers of their produce, but they simply have little choice, since safe groundwater is seldom an accessible alternative, according to the IWMI report.

Liqa Raschid-Sally of IWMI-West Africa and lead author of the study, told IPS there are no comprehensive studies on benefits versus risks. "But it is abundantly clear that if you put an immediate stop to this, you will certainly cut off supplies of some types of vegetables to cities, as almost 75 percent of the cities source at least some of their vegetables from urban and peri-urban agriculture which uses wastewater." Simple economics, she argued, will indicate that this would cause a rise in vegetable prices in cities.

The health risks can be managed because there are various interventions on farms, markets and households which can effectively reduce the health risks. In Indonesia, Nepal, Ghana and Vietnam, for example, farmers store wastewater in ponds to allow suspended solids to be eliminated. And inadvertently, this practice also permits worm eggs to settle out, possibly reducing bacteria in the water.

In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, farmers using water from a brewery build storage basins for wastewater and fill them only when they judge the quality of the wastewater to be acceptable (that is, not acidic), based on its appearance, odor and even taste.

So the message to the poorest nations is that they can apply these methods to reduce the risks and it just needs to be incorporated within agriculture extension services, Raschid-Sally said. "This is not an encouragement to use wastewater but a push to improve practices," she added.

To maintain the urban supply with these vegetables, the WHO is recommending multiple barriers which can easily reduce the pathogen level on the crop.

An officiall said there is a significant water quality dimension which is interlinked: "On the one hand, where wastewater is not or only partially treated it is polluting and further diminishing our clean water resources. On the other hand, where we are able to make an asset out of wastewater, we are gaining a valuable resource back."

IPS

Cuba's urban farming success story

For Miladis Bouza, the global food crisis arrived two decades ago. Now, her efforts to climb out of it could serve as a model for people around the world struggling to feed their families.

Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union _ and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba _ effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.

So she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.

Neighbors are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in between $100 to $250 a month _ many times the average government salary of $19.

"All that money is mine," she said. "The only thing I have to buy is protein" _ meat.

Cuba's urban farming program has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza's, now supply much of Cuba's vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe.

From 1989-93, Cubans went from eating an average of 3,004 calories a day to only 2,323, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, as shelves emptied of the Soviet goods that made up two-thirds of Cuba's food. Today, they eat 3,547 calories a day _ more than what the U.S. government recommends for American citizens.

"It's a really interesting model looking at what's possible in a nation that's 80 percent urban," said Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. "It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits."

Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy.

As it is, productivity is low at Cuba's large, state-run farms where workers lack incentives. Government-supplied rations _ mostly imported from the U.S. _ provide such staples as rice, beans and cooking oil, but not fresh produce. Importers bring in only what central planners want, so the market doesn't correct for gaps. And since most land is owned by the state, developers are not competing for the vacant lots that can become plots for vegetables.

Still, experts say the basic idea behind urban farming has a lot of promise.

"It's land that otherwise would be sitting idle. It requires little or no transportation to get (produce) to market," said Bill Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's good anyway you look at it."

And with fuel prices and food shortages causing unrest and hunger across the world, many say the Cuban model should spread.

"There are certain issues where we think Cuba has a lot to teach the world. Urban agriculture is one of them," said Beat Schmid, coordinator of Cuba programs for the charity Oxfam International.

Other countries have experimented with urban farming _ Cuba's initial steps were modeled after a green belt surrounding Shanghai. But nowhere has urban farming been used so widely to transform the way a country feeds itself.

"As the global food crisis receives attention, this is something that we need to be looking at," Murphy said. "Havana is an unlikely, really successful model where no one would expect one to come from."

Now that Raul Castro is president, many expect him to expand the program he began as an experiment in the early 1990s.

One of the first plots he opened was the "organoponico" on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street in the ritzy Havana neighborhood of Miramar. The half-block farm _ owned by a government agency _ is surrounded by apartment buildings and houses, but also offices of foreign companies, a Spanish bank and the South African Embassy.

Long troughs brim with arugula, spinach, radishes and basil, and few of the 20,000 square feet are wasted.

One technician tends compost that serves as natural fertilizer, while another handles natural protection from pests, surrounding delicate spinach shoots with strong-smelling celery to ward off insects. Such measures have ecological benefits but were born of necessity: Neither commercial fertilizer nor herbicide is reliably available.

Three workers tend the crops and another three sell them from a brightly painted stall.

Key to the operation is something once unheard of in Cuba: 80 percent of the profits go straight to the workers' pockets, providing them an average of $71 a month.

"Those salaries are higher than doctors, than lawyers," said Roberto Perez, the 58-year-old agronomist who runs the farm. "The more they produce, the more they make. That's fundamental to get high productivity."

Customers say the farm has given them not only access to affordable food, but also a radical change in their cuisine.

"Nobody used to eat vegetables," said David Leon, 50, buying two pounds of Swiss chard. "People's nutrition has improved a lot. It's a lot healthier. And it tastes good."

Huffington Post

Cuba's innovative organic urban agriculture

Below the high ceilings of the Telegraph hotel in Bayamo, south-east Cuba, the barman is mixing a perfect mojito. Rum, sugarcane juice, lime, carbonated water, and a whole sprig of mint.

But the key ingredient isn't any old mint. This is mint, as the Cubans say, "from the patio." Or at least, from the hotel's own rooftop garden.

"It's not very big," says the barman, "just two boxes." But it's where the hotel grows all its mint for its mojitos. And if there's a run on mojitos, what then? "El organiponico," he replies. An organic vegetable garden on the outskirts of Bayamo has all the mint you could wish for, he explains.

Organiponicos are the most visible part of Cuba's unique answer to a very serious problem – how to feed its people. But with Fidel Castro's resignation last month, could this unique system of organic urban agriculture – the world's largest example - be under threat?

Before the revolution nearly half the agricultural land in Cuba was owned by 1% of the people. After it, agriculture was nationalised and mechanised along Soviet lines. Trade with the once great superpower meant swapping sugarcane, which Cuba produced in industrial abundance, for cheap food and materials like machinery and petrochemical fertilisers.

But when the USSR collapsed in 1990/91, Cuba's ability to feed itself collapsed with it. "Within a year the country had lost 80% of its trade," explains the Cuba Organic Support Group (COSG). Over 1.3m tonnes of chemical fertilisers a year were lost. Fuel for transporting produce from the fields to the towns dried up. People started to go hungry. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) estimated that calorie intake plunged from 2,600 a head in the late 1980s to between 1,000 and 1,500 by 1993.

Radical action was needed, and quickly. "Cuba had to produce twice as much food, with less than half the chemical inputs," according to the COSG. Land was switched from export crops to food production, and tractors were switched for oxen. People were encouraged to move from the city to the land and organic farming methods were introduced.

"Integrated pest management, crop rotation, composting and soil conservation were implemented," says the COSG. The country had to become expert in techniques like worm composting and biopesticides. "Worms and worm farm technology is now a Cuban export," says Dr Stephen Wilkinson, assistant director of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba.

Thus, the unique system of organoponicos, or urban organic farming, was started. "Organoponicos are really gardens," explains Wilkinson, "they use organic methods and meet local needs."

"Almost overnight," says the COSG, the ministry of agriculture established an urban gardening culture. By 1995 Havana had 25,000 huertos – allotments, farmed by families or small groups – and dozens of larger-scale organoponicos, or market gardens. The immediate crisis of hunger was over.

Now, gardens for food take up 3.4% of urban land countrywide, and 8% of land in Havana. Cuba produced 3.2m tonnes of organic food in urban farms in 2002 and, UNFAO says, food intake is back at 2,600 calories a day.

A visit to Havana's largest organoponico, the three-hectare Organoponico Plaza, which lies a stone's throw from the city's Plaza de la Revolución and the desk of Raul Castro, confirms that the scheme is doing well. Rows of strikingly neat irrigated raised beds are home to seasonal crops of lettuces, spring onions, chives, garlic and parsley.

Guava and noni fruit trees provide shade around the perimeter, while on the far side compost piles sit next to plastic tunnels used to raise seedlings. Outside in the shop, signs extol the virtues of eating your greens.

The shop is open only on Mondays. Produce is sold by the people who work the garden (they keep 50% of sales, so are motivated to produce a lot) to the people who live nearby.

A success then? "In terms of improving the diet of the population it has had a beneficial effect," says Wilkinson. "And it has been a success in terms of meeting some of the food security needs," he says, "but it has not resolved the problem since the island still imports a great deal of food."

And change is on the horizon, which might be good for living standards, but not so good for Cuba's commitment to pesticide-free food.

The US trade embargo is losing its "symbolic meaning", says Julie M Bunck, assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville and author of Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba, and as that happens, "Cuba will evolve, embrace the market in some way, begin to produce and buy and sell normally."

General farming will "most likely" move away from organic methods says Wilkinson. Farming on a large scale after all, he says, has seen a reduction in pesticide and fertiliser use mainly due to "financial constraints, not choice."

But, he notes: "Organoponicos fulfil a local and specific need and are unlikely to disappear."

He adds: "The commitment to organics in agriculture may not be 100% because of climate and the need to boost production. But policies that encourage environmental protection will continue so long as the present government remains."

When that changes, Cuba's unique experiment with organic farming will change too.

The Guardian

Urban garden project in Johannesburg expands

by Millicent Kgowedi

The second stage of the Siyakhana Food Garden in Johannesburg's Bezuidenhout Park on Thursday, 31 January. The food garden project was started in 2005 by the health promotion unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, in collaboration with several non-governmental organisations.

Among the guests was Khabisi Mosunkutu, the Gauteng MEC for agriculture, conservation and environment; and Wits's Professor Michael Rudolph, the director of the Siyakhana project.

Rudolf said, "The aim of the Siyakhana Food Garden project is to establish a model permaculture food garden system for food production, education, research and empowerment of the community (particularly women) through training, employment and income-generation opportunities.

"This will ensure and nurture the development of a sustainable and productive environment necessary for the improvement of the health, social and economic status of the inner city community," he said.

Thembeka Mwale, the chairperson of the project, also spoke at the unveiling, saying the project was a blessing to those who benefited from it.

"This garden is from God. It all started as an empty piece of land, hardly fertile. Me and a number of women started digging with our own hands and we never thought it would eventually look like this. God sent Prof Rudolph, who has helped us to make the garden what it is today."

He was proud of the project, saying that his department was always willing to partner with originations that enhanced agricultural activities. "What I've learned since I took this portfolio, is that women are incredibly focused when it comes to food gardening and providing food for the family," he said.

Explaining the project, Rudolph said that the second phase of the garden expanded on the success of phase one, in that it resulted in a dump site being transformed into a garden that produced vegetables, grains, herbs and fruit.

A pond to harvest, conserve and purify water was also established and a range of organic foods, which have the best nutritional value, were planted. About 15 people from the inner city were employed at the project, and a further 25 were formally trained.

City of Johannesburg

Roadside cultivation - a heavy metal health hazard?

Nearly three-quarters of Ugandan vehicles are found in Kampala. Most run on leaded petrol and at peak times the city's main arteries bear a steady stream of traffic. In such an environment, when Kampala City Council took the decision in 2003 to legalise urban agriculture, they faced a hostile media reaction. How could crops grown in such polluted air be safe to eat?

Research in other cities has found that urban soils often contain high concentrations of heavy metals, including lead, cadmium and zinc. Lead is particularly dangerous, since even small concentrations in the blood can seriously affect children's mental development. A variety of sources can contribute to lead contamination but fuel exhausts are the most serious source. A
direct link has been proven between distance from roads and heavy metal concentrations in soil.

A study conducted in Kampala revealed that media concerns were not misplaced. Soil, plants and flat surfaces at 11 roadside sites around the city were tested. In three sites - those with heaviest traffic flows - heavy metal concentration in the soil was found to exceed safe limits for agriculture. In addition, leafy vegetables grown near the road at all sites exhibited dangerously high concentrations of lead.

Tests across a range of plants revealed heavy metal concentrations to be highest in the plant leaves, followed by roots, fruit, and finally the seed. The research team established that in leafy vegetables, such as Amaranthus, contamination was primarily via atmospheric deposition, rather than uptake through plant roots. Some of the contamination was in the form of a surface film which could be washed off, but most of the contaminants were found in the leaf tissue.

The research findings have helped to develop new ordinances for urban agriculture in Kampala. Crop choice and site selection have been key issues for discussion. Maize, for example, is recommended as safe for roadside cultivation. The grain is protected from exhaust fumes by the outer leaves, and only insignificant amounts of heavy metals reach the grain via the plant roots. Legume crops such as peas and beans are also recommended, although the outer pods should not be eaten. Similarly, tubers such as cassava and sweet potato should be peeled prior to cooking if they are grown on roadside land.

The new ordinances, which include a provision that crops should not be grown along busy highways, have now been formally adopted by the City Council. The research team has made a number of other recommendations to further reduce risks. These include a zoning exercise to delineate areas suitable for cultivation, roadside planting of hedges and trees to minimise the spread of airborne pollution, and that leafy vegetables should not be grown within 30 metres of a road. However, such steps will require considerable planning, research and funding to become a reality.

New Agriculturalist

Wastewater irrigation empowers Kenya's urban farmers

Walking through the backstreets of Nairobi after sunset, when the city council law enforcers have gone home to rest, you might think you are in a large greengrocer's shop. There are meticulously arranged tomatoes, oranges, leafy vegetables and potatoes. This is the market organized and dominated by poor women from the informal settlements of Nairobi.

Florence comes from Maili Saba, an informal settlement 12km from the city centre. With her one year old grandchild strapped on her back, she not only sells indigenous vegetables and arrowroot but also rears pigs, local chicken and a calf at her home. She belongs to a street-mothers self- help group and supports women in situations similar to her own.

Another seller, Mary, has a plot next to Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, which she has farmed for the last 20 years. She has supported and educated her family by selling amaranthus, black nightshade, kale and spinach to the 750,000 slum dwellers next door, employing up to 11 casual labourers during peak periods.

Mary, Florence and other farmers in Maili Saba and Kibera use untreated sewage water to irrigate their vegetable crops, a practice they continue without the use of protective clothing. In this way they are able to maintain production throughout the year, except when there is a shortage of water in Nairobi and the middle income households do not flush their toilets or throw away waste water.

Indigenous African leafy vegetables are currently experiencing a boom in popularity in Kenya's urban areas, with over 600 tonnes valued at $107,000 per month selling in Nairobi markets alone. In the formal produce markets vegetables are sourced from rural districts; negative attitudes towards waste water irrigation prevent urban growers from selling there. Instead they sell to brokers, who take their produce to informal street or neighbourhood markets.

This, combined with the perishability of indigenous leafy vegetables, ensures that the prices fetched for waste water produce are low, with brokers sometimes forced to sell at giveaway prices. Thus, while the use of waste water for irrigation provides a valuable source of food and fodder for urban households, and an affordable source of fresh vegetables to slum dwellers, they are currently operating without recognition or support from Kenya's policy-makers.

This appears to be changing. Studies on market opportunities have revealed positive changes in attitude towards African indigenous vegetables among farmers and consumers in urban and peri-urban situations. And the Kenyan government has recognized the reality of urban agriculture by setting up agriculture and livestock offices in the city of Nairobi.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 47 per cent of all unemployed people globally are young women. Yet it has also been shown that 60-70% of low-income women in urban areas are involved in urban agriculture and livestock keeping. Furthermore, 70-80% of African indigenous vegetable producers and traders in Nairobi comprise of women. For them, access to the free resource of sewage water for crop and fodder production has brought about renewed hope, dignity and empowerment.

There are many urban dwellers in Kenya who would like to benefit by harvesting closer to their kitchens, but are not sure how to go about it and fear legal prosecution. Stakeholders involved in urban agriculture, marketing and waste water treatment acknowledge that a policy framework covering urban agriculture, market opportunities, value addition, livelihoods, and mitigation of health risks is important not only for the waste water sector, but also for the future viability and competitiveness of urban agriculture and livestock keeping.

New Agriculturalist

FAO launches urban agriculture campaign

The Food and Agricultural Organization is launching a programme to promote urban farming across the developing world. Projections show that the number of city dwellers in those countries will continue to surge. In sub-Saharan Africa, slum residents account for as much as three-quarters of the entire population of some cities. Globally, for the first time in history the
world's urban population exceeds the number living in rural areas.

Nine African countries are participating in FAO's "Food for the Cities" programme, where thousands of hectares of urban land are being transformed into allotment gardens to grow fresh vegetables. Although urban agriculture has been an important income and food security source for African urbanites for decades, the FAO campaign aims to introduce the extra element of ensuring that all the food is being grown according to quality agricultural practices to provide produce that is fresh, safe and healthy. The gardens, especially those in slum districts, will also serve as valuable green spaces in often congested and polluted cities.

Some of the farmers chosen to participate in the scheme have already signed contracts with local supermarkets to sell their produce or set up kiosks to market surplus products to their neighbourhoods.

The participating countries in the FAO project are the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Senegal, Gabon, Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Egypt and Mali.