Farming the Cities

Farming the Cities

By Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg

A farmer tends to a field on the outskirts of Kaili in Guizhou province, one of the poorest in China. Photo by A.J. Howard

As cities continue their rapid growth, many are beginning to grow more of their own food. But does farming belong in the city? Can we afford to do anything else?

On the surface, Accra in Ghana, Beijing in China and Vancouver in Canada seem to have little in common. They range in population from roughly 2 million in the metropolitan region of Vancouver to more than 14.5 million in Beijing. The per capita incomes are vastly different: about $700 a year in most of Ghana, about $2,200 in Beijing and more than $32,000 in Vancouver. But take a closer look, digging a little deeper into the backyard and rooftop gardens, and you’ll realize that these city folk share a preoccupation that has thrived since the first cities — raising food.

Accra has a population of 6 million, including a steady supply of migrants from rural areas and immigrants who seek work in its factories. Because food is expensive, people farm anywhere they can: in backyard plots, in empty lots, along roadsides and in abandoned dumps. These farmers grow a variety of crops for home use and sale, including exotic varieties like green peppers, spring onions and cauliflower, as well as more traditional crops like okra, hot peppers and leafy greens such as alefi and suwule.

There are more than 1,000 such farmers in Accra. Their plots vary from just a quarter of an acre to nearly 50 acres in the city outskirts. Among the biggest challenges they face is keeping their crops irrigated, since clean, affordable sources of water are not easy to find. Backyard farmers often use greywater — the waste water from bathrooms and kitchens. While sewage water can be a health hazard, farmers in Accra — and in cities all over the world — are finding that human waste can be a valuable fertilizer.

In Beijing, city planners in the 1990s decided that urban agriculture was an important way to meet the city’s food needs, preserve green spaces and conserve the region’s water and land resources more efficiently. They began offering courses and assistance for aspiring farmers, they surveyed existing land use to better understand the extent of urban farming and they tried to incorporate urban farming into longterm city planning decisions.

Today, urban and peri-urban agriculture (farming in, around and near cities) in Beijing not only provides residents with safer, healthier food, it also keeps farmers in business. Between 1995 and 2003, the income for farmers living just outside of Beijing doubled. The city includes tens of thousands of household farms and more than 1,900 agritourism gardens for Beijing residents craving some rural experience. Although the share of the city’s population involved in farming is currently very small — just about 1 percent — the municipal government plans to cultivate gardens on nearly 10 million square feet of roof space over the next 10 years.

Vancouver is known for being a popular destination for tourists. But what most visitors do not realize is that the city is a leader in encouraging its inhabitants to grow and buy fruits, vegetables and other items produced in the city. According to a recent survey, an impressive 44 percent of Vancouverites grow vegetables, fruit, berries, nuts or herbs in their yards, on their balconies or in one of the 17 community gardens located on city property. Vancouver’s mild temperatures and ice-free winters make it the ideal city to grow food nearly year-round. There, farming the city is part of a much larger movement that includes restaurants buying from local farms, buying clubs in which neighbors subscribe to weekly deliveries of produce and the heavily attended Feast of Fields harvest festival twice a year on a farm outside the city that exposes city folk to rural life.

A RICH HISTORY OF URBAN FARMING

Growing food and raising fish and livestock in Accra, Beijing and Vancouver — indeed, in cities all over the world — is nothing new. In some ways, these three cities are responding to the same challenges that urban gardeners have faced for millennia. The hanging gardens in Babylon, for instance, were an example of urban agriculture, while residents of the first cities of ancient Iran, Syria and Iraq produced vegetables in home gardens. This is partly because cities have traditionally sprung up on the best farmland — the same flat land that is good for farming is also easiest for constructing office buildings, condominiums and factories—and partly because the masses of urban dwellers create a perfect market for fresh fruits and vegetables.

“In ancient times, the cost of transport was much greater,” explains Jac Smit, head of the Urban Agriculture Network, “so the impetus for growing food in cities was greater.” Of course, urban farmers continued to refine their craft. Centuries after the Incan residents of Machu Picchu raised food in small, intensive plots irrigated with the city’s wastewater, enterprising Parisians developed bio-intensive production with steam-heated greenhouses and glass cloches that cover individual heads of lettuce; they sold their produce as far away as London. In China’s cities, farmers developed complex cropping patterns and trellises that made use of every available space.

But like the story of all local farming, a range of forces in the modern era — the Industrial Revolution, the evolution of the mega-city, the invention of refrigeration — helped to render urban farming obsolete. In particular, when cities first combined industrial and organic wastes in one sewage stream at the end of the 19th century, they made wastewater too toxic for irrigation. And in many cities, urban agriculture became not only harder to practice but illegal as well, thanks to overzealous city officials and public health practitioners who wanted to eliminate urban livestock production.

Then during the 1970s, something changed. People working for the United Nations, the Peace Corps and other development groups noticed the spontaneous appearance of home gardens and small retail farms in major cities throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa. Rapid urbanization, inefficient and expensive transportation and a greater demand for food made raising produce and livestock in cities possible and necessary. In other words, the same needs that had given rise to urban farming in ancient times had reappeared. And although cities in industrial countries might be able to compensate for traffic congestion and lack of local food with superior transportation and packaging, those in developing countries could not. Urban farming was posed to take off again. In fact, farming is ubiquitous in cities today. The U.N. Development Programme estimates that 800 million people are involved in urban farming worldwide, with the majority in Asian cities. Of these, 200 million produce food primarily for the market, but the great majority raise food for their own families. In a survey conducted for the United Nations, cities worldwide already produce about one third of the food consumed by their residents on average, a percentage that will likely grow in coming decades given that the need for urban agriculture could be greater now than ever before.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the number of hungry people living in cities is growing. While malnutrition in rural areas is still a bigger problem in terms of actual numbers of people — of the 852 million people worldwide who are undernourished, 75 percent live in rural areas — urban residents, particularly children, also suffer from food shortages as well as micronutrient deficiencies. Urban agriculture can be one of the most important factors in improving childhood nutrition by increasing both access to food and nutritional quality. Recent studies in the Philippines and elsewhere confirm this linkage between better childhood nutrition and the production of food in urban areas.

Fortunately, urban politicians, businesses and planners are beginning to regard urban agriculture as a tool to help cities cope with a range of ecological, social and nutritional challenges — from sprawl to malnutrition to swelling landfills and the threat of attacks on the food chain. In this context, taking advantage of land in and around cities is essential and obvious. Unlike parks or other green space, which are generally financed by taxpayers, urban farming can be a functioning business that pays for itself. And for cities that use nearby farmland to filter wastewater, recycle garbage and cool down the concrete jungle, farming is rapidly becoming something they can’t do without.

REPLENISHING FOOD DESERTS

Local food takes on a very different meaning on a planet where half the people live in cities. As a greater share of the world’s population resides farther from where food is grown, produce has to be moved across countries and sometimes around the world.

In 2001, FAO officials were concerned about the capacity of large cities in Asia, Latin America and Africa to feed themselves. They found that by 2010 many of these cities will require massive increases in the number of truckloads of food coming into the area each year — increases that would overwhelm the capacity of these cities to distribute food. Bangkok will need 104,000 additional 10-ton truckloads each year, Jakarta will need 205,000, Karachi 217,000, Beijing nearly 303,000, and Shanghai just under 360,000. And while cities may never be able to meet all their food needs from local farmland, the tremendous infrastructure, energy and cost required to shuttle food into densely populated areas argues for urban centers to secure as much of their food as possible from farmland within their borders or nearby.

People living in cities demand more food and a greater range of foods than their rural counterparts, but they live farther from the centers of food production. In response, people often start farming in the city simply because they cannot find an affordable and reliable source of the foods they crave from their rural roots or because they might not have the cash to buy food at all. As opposed to in the countryside, in cities a lack of money translates more directly into lack of food.

In other words, growing food is not a hobby for most people — it is a necessity. Studies from several African cities have shown that families engaged in urban agriculture eat better, as measured by caloric and protein intake or children’s growth rates. In terms of providing an essential source of food and income, urban and peri-urban agriculture is probably most important in sub-Saharan Africa. In the cities and towns in East Africa, a third of urban dwellers are engaged in agriculture. In West Africa, the number of households involved in urban agriculture varies from more than 50 percent in Dakar, Senegal, to roughly 14 percent in Accra, Ghana. In Dares Salaam, Tanzania, 60 percent of the milk sold is produced right in the city.

Farms in the city can often supply markets on a more regular basis than distant rural farms can, particularly when refrigeration is scarce or during a rainy season when roads are bad. And local food production might be the best option for feeding urbanites neglected by the long-distance food chain. In both the industrial and the developing world, poorer urban households typically spend a greater share of their income on food than wealthier urbanites do. In some cases, poor urbanites spend 60–80 percent of their income on food, making them especially vulnerable to price changes.

Beyond providing jobs and good nutrition, urban farming can have a whole range of other health benefits. Research has connected gardening to reducing risks of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and occupational injuries. For urban folks especially, working with plants and being in the outdoors can both prevent illness and help with healing. Some health professionals use plants and gardening materials to help patients cope with mental illness and improve their social skills, self-esteem and use of leisure time. Urban agriculture can also benefit public health by improving the social determinants of health, including the beauty and safety of neighborhoods and the strength of community ties and social interactions. Studies show that people at farmers’ markets have as many as 10 times more conversations, greetings and other social interactions than people in supermarkets. City planners are learning that farmers’ markets can be used to bring people together in a central location, becoming a forum for politicians, activists and other community leaders to raise awareness about local issues.

A survey of community gardens in New York found that having a garden improved residents’ attitudes toward their neighborhood, reduced littering, improved the maintenance of neighboring properties and increased neighborhood pride. They also found that the presence of gardens was four times more likely to spur other community efforts in low-income neighborhoods than in high-income ones, due to a greater number of pressing community issues and a lack of meeting places. Add to this the other well-documented effects of community gardens—including greater consumption of fresh vegetables, reduced grocery costs and the various psychological and health benefits associated with exercise in a natural setting — and it becomes clear that urban farming does a lot more than just replenish food supplies.

HEALING THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

People have kept livestock in cities for centuries to help deal with urban waste as well as provide income and food. Farm animals recycle household refuse, agricultural waste, lawn cuttings and other organic matter very efficiently, and the manure they produce can improve urban soils. Despite the common assumption that all of the world’s pigs, chickens, cows and other livestock are raised in idyllic country settings, more and more of the world’s meat and animal products are produced in or near urban areas.

Consider this: People in developing countries now consume half of the world’s meat, thanks to rising incomes and exploding urbanization. And people in cities in these countries are not just consuming more animal products, they are also becoming centers of production. In Bamako, Mali, for instance, 20,000 households keep livestock in the city. In Harare, Zimbabwe, more than one-third of households keep chickens, ducks, pigeons, rabbits and turkeys. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 74 percent of people keep livestock, while in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the figure is 80 percent. Even in industrial countries people can be found raising bees, worms, chickens and other animals.

But there can be too much of a good thing. Thanks to unregulated zoning and subsidies that encourage largescale livestock production, massive chicken and pig operations are moving closer and closer to major urban areas, including in China, Bangladesh, India and many African countries. This, says Michael Greger, a veterinarian with the Humane Society of the United States, is “bringing together the worst of both worlds — the congested inner cities of the developing world combined with the congested environment on industrial farms.”

While there needs to be a place for raising animals in cities, industrial farming within cities is an inhumane and ecologically disruptive way of producing meat. A 2005 report by the World Bank echoed this, noting that the “extraordinary proximate concentration of people and livestock poses probably one of the most serious environmental and public health challenges for the coming decades.”

One way to prevent the problems that plague industrial livestock production is to discourage factory farming in or near cities. A recent FAO report suggests a combination of zoning and land use regulations, along with taxes, incentives and infrastructure development that can encourage producers to raise animals closer to croplands, where manure can be used as fertilizer and where there is less risk of disease. According to FAO, figuring out where the best places are to produce livestock can help control land and livestock nutrient imbalances — in other words, raising livestock in areas that have enough land to handle waste. Thailand, for example, puts high taxes on largescale poultry production within 62 miles of Bangkok, while giving farmers outside that zone tax-free status. Thanks to this, the concentration of poultry farms right outside of Bangkok has dropped significantly over the last decade.

FARMING AS A WAY OF CITY LIFE

Despite all that farming can do for the city landscape and the urban soul, politicians, businesses and planners continue to regard food as a rural issue that does not demand the same attention as housing, crime or transportation. This stubborn mindset partly explains the “piecemeal approach” to planning for city food systems, according to a study from the Department of Geography and Urban Planning at Wayne State University in Michigan. Urban planners around the world viewed gardens and farmland within city limits as an anachronism, not to be found in a “modern city.” In many cities, farming has been outlawed. Policymakers would be wise to realize the nutritional, social, ecological and economic benefits of reversing this mindset and putting programs in place to encourage cities to feed themselves.

Planners interested in making room for farming in cities must look beyond farmers’ markets and community gardens to much deeper issues of a city’s design. An extensive light rail system that reduces the need for highways, or a municipal composting site that generates high-quality fertilizer, or city schools that serve local produce for lunch all represent important determinants of just how much a city can support the surrounding country.

In Rosario, Argentina, where farming in the city was initially a response to the nation’s financial crisis, officials are trying to establish it as an integral part of urban life. They created the Programa de Agricultura Urbana (PAU), a cooperative venture that unites urban farmers, municipal officials, agricultural experts and representatives of nongovernmental organizations. The PAU helped urban farmers secure and protect agricultural spaces, take advantage of value-added agricultural products, and establish new markets and market systems. Soon, seven farmers’ markets and more than 800 community gardens — supporting some 10,000 farmers and their families —  had sprouted up throughout the city. The cooperative also involved residents of Molino Blanco, a low-income housing project, in the design and construction of a large garden park that includes walking paths, soccer fields and large designated areas where people can raise food.

“Urban farmers tell me that they are not only pleased to have the opportunity to generate income and feed their families,” said Raul Terille with the Centro de Estudios de Producciones Agroecologicas in Rosario and a member of the PAU. “But also, after years of feeling marginalized, they are making a genuine contribution to their city and are finally being recognized for it.”

From Piura in Peru to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, city officials are also taking inventories of available vacant land. In a few cases, officials are marking off certain areas to be permanently used for farming, which gives farmers the incentive to make long-term investments in the land.

If the goal is to be more self-sufficient when it comes to food, city officials need to think creatively. Perhaps the most cutting-edge design innovation for bringing food back into cities is also the most sublime — rooftop gardens. Rooftop gardens are springing up everywhere. City Hall in Chicago sports a green roof; in Tokyo, a new ordinance requires all new building plans with more than 3,280 square feet of floor space to cover 20 percent of their roofs with vegetation as a way to reduce energy costs and urban temperatures. In Mexico, the Institute for Simplified Hydroponics has developed low-cost roof garden technologies that will help many more landless peasants in the world’s expanding cities feed themselves and earn a living from urban farming. And in Morocco, students and community groups have built garden beds from old tires filled with compost and vermiculite on rooftops and achieved yields dramatically greater than conventional gardening. They collected and recycled water that drained through the bottom of the beds, reducing water use by 90 percent over standard gardening techniques — a critical factor for countries susceptible to drought.

One way to make it easier for cities to feed themselves is to slow the flow of people into them from the countryside. Policymakers in rural areas have to make living there a healthy, viable option for the world’s poor, so that they are not forced to move to cities. A low cost option for growing food in cities might be even more important than ever before. The migrations of the past are minuscule compared with the changes under way in the Third World today. “On the longer term, urban agriculture will be sustainable especially if its potential for multifunctional land use is recognized and fully developed,” noted René van Veenhuizen, editor of Cities Farming for the Future. "The sustainability of urban agriculture is strongly related to its contributions to the development of a sustainable city: an inclusive, food-secure, productive and environmentally healthy city.”