We would like to receive your contributions or suggestions for the next issue of the UA Magazine:
NO. 24: FROM SEED TO TABLE; DEVELOPING URBAN MARKET CHAINS (JULY 2010)
Please send us your contribution before: 1 April 2010
Many urban households engage in local production of food, food processing and vending and related activities as their main, or as a complementary livelihood strategy. Urban Agriculture is a noteworthy source of income and savings and is often more profitable than rural-based production. It effectively contributes to reduce food insecurity by improving access to fresh and low priced food and raising the nutritional and health status of poor and middle income households (both of the producing families as well as of other poor families in these areas). Furthermore, the up- and downstream effects of urban agriculture in the local economy can be considerable. It is important to show that urban agriculture is not just an informal, residual, subsistence activity, but it has potential to shift from simple to enlarged production of urban food, when its proximity to urban consumers is optimised and incomes are sustained in the long run.
Several constraints limit the development of value chains for urban agriculture, such as:
- Low degree of (or inappropriate) support services;
- Limited access to productive resources and insecure land tenure;
- Low degree of organisation of urban producers;
- Low productivity and profitability;
- Low degree of business planning, marketing skills and information.
Market-, or value chains, concern the production, processing and marketing of products ‘from farm to fork’, linking producers, traders, processors, manufacturers, retailers and consumers. Value chain development is a key concept in strategies to reduce rural (and increasingly also urban) poverty in developing countries. There is an increase in attention to regional and international commodity chain development. We are focusing in this magazine on local value chains; connecting urban and peri-urban producers with urban centres through sustainable food systems. One of the challenges encountered in value chain development is to include the most vulnerable groups.
In this issue of the UA Magazine we will discuss and highlight experiences how urban farmers can develop safe and sustainable production, processing and marketing systems.
The RUAF From Seed to Table programme (FStT) is building upon earlier work of the RUAF partners, enhanced integration of urban agriculture in urban policies and planning and stronger participation of urban farmers and other stakeholders in the planning process, by supporting farmers and their organisations in 17 partner cities to develop safe and sustainable production, processing and marketing systems. Experiences gained so far will be shared in this issue of the UA Magazine, regarding the process of FStT, participatory market analysis, the selection of the Most Promising Options for the selected farmers and their organisation, access to financing and organisational strengthening, and will be illustrated by some cases.
We are interested in receiving your articles and well-documented experiences.
Topics and attention points could include:
- Conceptualising urban value chains and developing these in local context (oriented at local markets);
- Data on income generation in, and economic importance of, value chain addition in urban agriculture;
- Experiences with the organisation of urban producers to improve their processing and marketing: process, opportunities and bottlenecks;
- Tools and methods in (participatory) market analysis by and with urban farmers;
- Different forms of local marketing: opportunities, constraints and preconditions (eg. farmers markets, box schemes, sales to restaurants and supermarkets etc)
- Business planning for urban agriculture value chains;
- Access and organisation of support services (for example: extension services, access to credit, infrastructure development);
- Ecological production and certification of urban agriculture: a pre-condition for local marketing?
- Risk of exclusion, of farmers and other actors (middlemen), and how to deal with this.
Please clarify in your article the concepts used, the specific situation and role of urban and peri-urban agriculture, where your experiences were gained, the main actors, impacts, related costs, problems/challenges encountered and solutions found, and highlight the major lessons learned and recommendations for both practitioners and planners or policy makers.
Articles
Articles should consist of no more than 2000 words (three pages), 1300 words (two pages) or 600 words (one page), preferably accompanied by an abstract, a maximum of 5 references, and 2-3 digital images or photographs of good quality (more than 300 dpi or in jpg format more than 1 Mb preferably). The articles should be written in a manner that is readily understood by a wide variety of stakeholders all over the world.
Other information on the subject
We also invite you to submit information on recent publications, journals, videos, photographs, cartoons, letters, technology descriptions and assessments, workshops, training courses, conferences, networks, web-links, etc., especially those relating to this theme.
The UA Magazine in 2010
In addition to issue no. 24 we are currently working on UA Magazine no. 25 to celebrate the fact that RUAF is working on urban agriculture for more than 10 years. Please regularly visit our website for more information on issue no. 25.
All other suggestions and comments on UA Magazine are also welcome. Please take a moment to voice your opinion by sending an e-mail to the editor at ruaf@etcnl.nl, or write a letter to:
The Editor UA Magazine
RUAF, ETC Foundation
PO Box 64
3830 AB Leusden
The Netherlands
The Urban Agriculture Magazine
The Urban Agriculture Magazine (UA Magazine) facilitates sharing of information on the impacts of urban agriculture, promotes analysis and debate on critical issues for development of the sector, and publishes "good" practices in urban agriculture. The UA Magazine is produced under the RUAF programme From Seed to Table (FStT), funded by DGIS (Netherlands) and IDRC (Canada).
The main aim of the RUAF-FStT programme is to contribute to urban poverty reduction, urban food security, improved urban environmental management, empowerment of urban producers and participatory city governance. It does this by developing capacities of local stakeholders and urban producers in urban agriculture, facilitating participatory and multi-stakeholder policy formulation and action planning on urban agriculture, and stimulating market chain development and organisation of urban producers.
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The UA Magazine is published two times a year on the RUAF website (www.ruaf.org) and in hardcopy version. This English version is translated into Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese and Portuguese.
The UA Magazine welcomes contributions on new initiatives at individual, neighbourhood, city and national levels. Attention is given to technical, socio-economic, institutional and policy aspects of sustainable urban food production, marketing, processing and distribution systems. Although articles on any related issue are welcome and considered for publication, each UA Magazine focuses on a selected theme (for previous issues, visit: www.ruaf.org).
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