The next two modules are distinct but complementary. Both consider precedents and historical backgrounds as well as current trends and related future perspectives. Whereas module 9 will focus on differences in urban agriculture that are found between various places, this module concentrates on some of the commonalities that can be identified globally. Rather than claiming that urban agriculture is the same all around the world, it looks for common ground: it identifies some shared traits of urban agriculture that can be discerned between different parts of the world, and some of their mutual lineages.
We will start this session by introducing two pairs of considerations. In the first proposition, we suggest that it is important to look for both commonalities and contrasts in urban agriculture across the globe. Seeking common ground is essential to be able to place specific characteristics of urban agriculture that one is familiar with in a larger context. So while urban agriculture always has its distinct local characteristics, it also always has some characteristics that are common in other urban contexts.Â
In Module 1 and 2, we stressed the importance of not homogenizing urban agriculture and looking for local definitions; but conversely, it is also important to steer away from any tendency towards thinking that a particular place’s conditions of urban agriculture are unique. In fact, just about every specific urban environment in which urban farming takes place contains some characteristics that have some parallels somewhere else. Even unusual farming systems such as the famous and centuries-old chinampas of southern Mexico City, relying on canals and raised-earth techniques and providing fresh vegetables to the city, have some resemblance to the equally historic hortillonnages of Amiens, France. One would learn much in Mexico City from the way its French counterpart is adapting to modern times – and the challenges it is facing in doing so.
Hortillonages in Amiens                        Chinampas in Mexico City
At the same time, looking beyond one’s particular setting is as important for pointing out the specific conditions that characterize urban agriculture in its specific context. Looking elsewhere is thus relevant for understanding the contrasts in urban agriculture. One may wonder: in which ways are the chinampas today different from the hortillonnages? In fact, despite the similarities in the farming systems and the physical contexts, how much of the difference can be accounted for by the fact that the former are found in a “developing� country while the latter are in a “developing� country? Urban farming in a particular place is thus always place- and time-specific, and can be explained by the way it is anchored in its history and the way it is shaped by current trends.
This is the second proposition we make here: that seeking commonalities and contrasts in urban agriculture leads to a double reflection on the ways in which the past and the future both relate to the present – in other words, on the history and trends of urban agriculture. In this case, at the heart of the interest in the chinampas and the hortillonnages is that the long history these systems had in their particular location, combined with the recent transformations in the settlement patterns of the city neighbouring each of them, can explain both the challenges facing them (encroachment by built-up uses, abandonment of some of the plots, pollution of the canals…) and the opportunities available to them (growing tourist potential, recognition of these spaces as vital green spaces for the agglomeration, funding made available by the municipality and other governments to maintain agricultural activities and ecological functions…).
In this way, thinking of history and trends simultaneously enables an understanding of urban agriculture in its context of time, not just place. Where did a particular urban farm or garden come from and where is it going? This is the type of question that these two modules consider. Rather than start by looking back at the question of roots, we will begin by looking forward – examining some of the main directions towards which urban agriculture may be heading.
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The main part of this session consists of a consideration of global trends that are having effects on urban agriculture locally. We will thus consider here the way these trends are acting as influences on urban agriculture over time and across space.
A case to ponder
Consider the following case.
Our story starts in 1990. Prosper is an urban farmer in a major coastal city in tropical Africa. Originally working at the sugarcane processing plant in town, he was laid off due to the sharp decline in the sugar market. So recently, Prosper used his limited savings to start growing two traditional crops for the local market on a piece of land at the edge of a flood plain, just outside the city limits, but far from the leading edge of urban development. He leased his plot from an influential person who accumulated land a few years earlier (in the mid-1980s), knowing that the built-up parts of the city were expected to push much faster in that direction as a result of the planned construction of a new highway. This new route would be funded by a multilateral agency, as part of negotiations that had linked structural reforms of the economy with new availability of funds to support a range of infrastructural investments. It is at this time that Prosper leased the land knowing that marketing produce would soon become quite a bit easier: Prosper would take care of most of the farming, while his wife Florence would do the marketing, taking the produce to sell in the central market twice a week.
Ironically, Florence had lost her job in one of the ministries in that same period, as a result of these reforms. While seeking similar jobs, Florence had started to help out Prosper on the farm. As needed, Prosper’s brother Victor would help too with odd jobs on the farm, since he had never managed to get established in any line of work. He stayed in the shack they built at the farm. In the harvest season, their children and several members of Prosper’s extended family would pitch in, picking the farm crops and getting them to the central market.
Let’s move five years ahead, to 1995. Florence has had difficulty in securing a stable job; she compensated for this by starting up a small poultry business at the farm, working with a local women’s group. She was able to initiate this by using some newly available microcredit, a system that had been recently introduced to the country to complement the traditional women’s group savings schemes. It was promoted by a large overseas foundation as a strategy to help in recovery from civil strife combined with new thinking about gender empowerment. Florence was successful in paying back the first small loan by selling eggs and some chickens, and took out a second one to try processing fruit from trees on the farmland to make local sauces and jams, which she was able to sell to friends and neighbours.Â
It was a struggling business in these first years, especially given the limited purchasing power available for anything beyond the most basic food needs. Still, this bit of extra income enabled the family to avoid the severe hardships that befell many of the neighbours who suffered from the reforms, the rioting that resulted from them in 1991, and the brief but devastating two-year civil war that followed the coup which some army officers attempted out of fear of being decommissioned as political reforms were expected to accompany the economic ones. The start of the highway project was delayed of course as a result of these problems, maintaining the isolation of Prosper’s farm and making it difficult for getting crops to market – one reason he did not even consider diversifying beyond staple crops which would not spoil by the time they would reach urban customers.
Jumping further in time to the year 2000. The bad years may seem like a distant memory now, as the economy has rebounded and the reforms were partly modified to soften their harshest impacts and mollify the opposition. But Prosper and Florence are not about to forget those lean and uncertain years.
Of course things are better now, as Florence’s fruit-processing business is starting to get established, and Prosper is diversifying his range of crops somewhat beyond staples and experimenting with other crops including fresh vegetables for the urban market. But different concerns have replaced the old ones that threatened their livelihood during their country’s “lost decade�. The land speculation had indeed paid off for their landlord, as the land became much more easily accessed once the highway opened two years ago, with microbuses now connecting the new residents along the new road to jobs in the city. However, although the landlord had tolerated the shack, he would not let them build a permanent house on the rented farmland. However, freshly created subdivisions were springing up in the area, and Prosper and Florence were among these new residents at the edge of town, as they had recently moved to a tiny rented house with a small yard not too far from Prosper’s farm. Florence also began to sell produce right along the road.
At first, things went quite smoothly, but with time, a number of challenges emerged.
- The availability of Prosper’s extended family for helping out on the farm had been greatly curtailed, as relatives have had to compensate for the fast-rising cost of living relative to the stagnant earnings by seeking any work opportunities available. This shortage was however made up by the creation of the nearby camp housing refugees from the country to the north (where, unlike here, a savage war persists); this camp served as a source of inexpensive labourers at the peak of harvest season. This asset was increasingly counterbalanced though by a number of negatives associated with the camp. For one, there were also frictions with the refugees, especially since they belonged to a different ethnic group and religion. The camp is located upstream from the farm, so the river water, the main source that Prosper used for irrigation, had become increasingly polluted from the untreated wastewater outflow from the camp. This was a mixed blessing as the biological nutrients from the waste increase crop yields, but there are health risks as well, and the water contains some chemicals from toilets brought by an aid agency.
- Water was becoming a more significant factor for other reasons as well. With the farm being situated at the edge of a floodplain, it was strongly related to the status of the river. Unfortunately, desertification is getting worse every year in the hinterland – including across the northern border, where this has been in fact a major contributing factor to the civil war, as dwindling resources cause greater pressures on land and exacerbate tensions between contentious groups. The desertification has meant that the river has increasing problems of water quantity, in addition to the water quality issues deriving from the camp and expanding built-up areas. So the canal that branches out from the river, which Prosper used directly to irrigate his plants, was becoming unreliable as a water source. To make matters worse, the disturbances in the microclimate for this particular region are causing severe storms to become a much more common occurrence, resulting in flash flooding that reaches the edge of the floodplain where Prosper’s field was located. Finally, the unsettled watering conditions drove Prosper to join with two of his neighbours to dig a well to balance out his water supply. However, he knew that the wells that are now scattered in this region are causing problems of their own, by dropping the level of the water table and allowing saltwater from the nearby sea to seep in increasingly.Â
- With the built-up areas edging increasingly close to the farm site, the landlord was starting to think that the land may finally become viable for sale as construction land, or at least for one of the uses that are common in periurban areas; he almost turned it into a car junkyard, but that deal fell through. In any case, with the rising value of the land, he had been gradually reducing the duration of the lease of the land to the farmers on it. Since last year in fact, he preferred not to sign any lease, allowing the farmers to continue to cultivate the land and raise animals without the commitment that a lease represents. Prosper and Florence were therefore very much insecure in the tenure of the land they hold. They simply could not know when they would lose it; therefore, they were no longer investing in it.
- Finally, there were health concerns that bore down on the family. Prosper’s brother Victor, who had been living with HIV-AIDS for several years already, was no longer able to help out with the farm as he used to in better years. More and more of Prosper and Florence’s time has been taken up by caring for Victor – whereas in better days in the past, it was Victor who helped them a lot with the farm, especially during harvest time. In addition, Prosper’s eldest son Kwame has developed diabetes – a disease that is starting to reach epidemic levels in the big city where they live, probably in association with the spread of fast food and changes in the diet, especially among youth. As a result, expenditures on doctors’ fees and medicines have caused an additional financial burden. So it is in terms of both time and money that they have been weighed down by these health issues. Fortunately, they have their small yard next to the house, which Florence has started to plant more and more intensively, with an increasing variety of medicinal herbs and vegetables that are intended to help Victor and Kwame improve their health, while saving some money from the tight house finances. Victor helps a little with the gardening, but he is too weak to be able to contribute much, and Kwame is a typical urban youth, wanting to just spend time with his friends. With less help in the farm, Prosper cannot help much in the home garden either, leaving both of them exhausted on most days from their multiple burdens.Â
So with this multitude of challenges, the thought did cross the mind of Prosper and Florence every now and then that perhaps they should get out of this business of producing and processing food at the edge of town and marketing it in the city. But that thought quickly passed, when they looked at alternatives available to them at the time – and besides, they felt that they are good at what they are doing, and there are some positive prospects for their activities, as the comparative advantages of farming and processing so close to town was starting to make their product more profitable, despite all the constraints. They believe in the future of urban production – if needed, they will simply seek other sites, a bit further out.
Finally, let’s jump to today. Things have come a long way from the dark years of the 1990s, and even from the recovery period of around 2000. The hard work of Florence and Prosper is finally paying off. Their old farm is now used for stocking gravel. Prosper has used a new lending program targeted at innovative farmers to obtain a long-term lease on some productive land that was reassembled as part of land reform a few years ago, a few kilometres further out of town, upstream from his old farm, part of what had been the sugar plantation decades earlier. His farm has become a serious medium-sized business; with the municipality seeing periurban farms as key components of a strategy for food security and local economic development, it has partnered with the national government to provide a variety of supports to the development of such farms, from new forms of credit to specialized extension services developed jointly with the university. This allowed Prosper to reinvent his practices, adopting among others integrated pest management techniques that have allowed him to gain organic certification – opening up for him that market both for export and for the nascent demand in quality products.
The changes were not limited there. The refugee camp is still there and its inhabitants are starting to develop their own informal economy, particularly through the multitude of NGOs and small businesses that now operate there after receiving much support and training; in fact, for Florence, the camp has become a reliable destination for their fresh farm products as well as the bottled goods. This is only one among several new or maturing urban markets which she and Prosper are nowadays accessing through years of nurturing relationships with restaurants – even direct sale to consumers who come to the new farm stand along the main road is starting to pick up.Â
With their business flourishing, Prosper and Florence are now exploring new potentials – the latest idea being agro-tourism, an idea that has become commonplace in Europe but is just starting to be attempted in Africa, helping reconnect the African middle-class urbanites to the soil and providing yet another source of revenue for Prosper and Florence – a really marginal one for now, but they have hopes for it. Meanwhile, next to their new farmhouse (the old gatekeeper’s house when this was part of the sugar plantation), the main home gardener has become Kwame’s younger sister Martina – who became passionate about growing things since her teacher introduced her to playing with worms and soil in the schoolchildren’s garden. This combines with her mother’s new learning about the right nutrition for diabetic youth - which she is introducing in her new business: growing and processing mushrooms.
A text to read
The fictional story above is meant to encapsulate many of the trends that are commonly found across the globe – trends that are having very real consequences in the local context of urban agriculture practice. There may be significant variations across these trends, but they are common enough with enough commonalities across them that they can be considered global trends.
Please read chapter 10 in Jac Smit et al., Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities (unpublished second edition)
Making the connections: Global trends and local realities
What connections can you make here between the general statement of trends that you just read in that chapter, and the specific consequences as borne by Prosper and Florence in their daily circumstances? Try to make a list of the trends that you could identify in the book chapter and the way these are reflected in the story you read and you saw illustrated in the sketches. In this way, you would be making connections between the global trends and their local realities. Reread the trends and consider the fact that this chapter was first written in 2000 – several years ago already. Have some new, significant trends emerged since then which are worth noting, or which bear a more significant place than indicated in this chapter? Finally, where are these trends likely to be heading in the future? If you were to write a postscript five years later to the story of Prosper and Florence, what would you add it – where would they be heading with their farm and related activities? |
The discussion of current changes in urban agriculture took place in relation to present trends in urbanization, poverty, employment, climate change, water shortages, land pressures, and more. These trends are not of interest in themselves here, but rather in the way they impact urban agriculture. Through the readings above, we could examine how urban agriculture in a particular context, by a particular farming household in a specific site with its own history, adapts to these influences.
