Urban Agriculture Policies

A growing number of cities and countries are recognising the importance of urban agriculture and are designing new policies related to urban agriculture or are reformulating existing ones.

Urban agriculture is a dynamic concept that comprises a variety of livelihood systems, ranging from subsistence production and processing at household level to fully commercialised agriculture. The roles and functions of urban agriculture towards various policy goals are manifold and relate a.o to poverty alleviation, food security, environmental and waste management, local economic development, social and community development and community adaptation to climate change.

Once national or municipal authorities understand that urban agriculture can contribute to some of their policy goals, they often seek to facilitate the development of urban agriculture by means of pro-active policies and intervention strategies that enhance the socio-economic and nutritional benefits of urban agriculture, while reducing potential associated health and environmental risks.

A policy can be described as a course of action adopted by a government to induce certain changes in the decisions and behaviour of actors in that society in order to achieve certain goals. A food policy for example can be defined as  “Any decision, program or project endorsed by a government ( business, or organization) that affects how food is produced, processed, distributed, purchased, protected or disposed” (Vancouver Food Policy Council, 2006). A well-defined policy should lead to:
1. Effective operational planning and implementation of the policy measures/instruments mentioned in the policy
2. Periodic review and adaptation of the policy based on the experiences gained during its implementation.

Governments have the power to develop various types of policy instruments that can be applied to support or regulate urban agriculture development. These include legal, economic, communicative and educative, and urban planning and design instruments. Each instrument is based on a specific hypothesis regarding how behaviour of actors in society can be influenced.

The logic underlying legal instruments is that actors (such as citizens, industries or public institutions) can be forced to adopt a certain desired behaviour through legal norms and regulations (such as laws, by-laws, ordinances, etc.) and that it is possible to control whether these actors adhere to the given rules and norms. Actors who do not adhere to the rules will be sanctioned. This policy instrument is especially useful in cases when: 1) the desired behaviour cannot be realised in another way; and 2) the rules can easily be controlled and enforced. In addition, legal instruments are used in case the other instruments (economic, educational and design) require an adequate legal basis. Examples include Governador Valadares (Brazil) and Lima (Peru) where urban agriculture programmes were formalised by law.

Application of a legal instrument is however not without some common challenges:
• An increasing number of laws, by-laws or regulations may lead to contradictions (what is allowed or promoted in one law or regulation may be prohibited or restricted in another). This situation often occurs in relation to urban agriculture due to its multi-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional character. For example, a city can have a formal policy that supports urban agriculture while at the same time, the same city’s environmental or health regulations still prohibit or severely restrict it.
• The mechanisms to enforce legal instruments are often weak due to the related costs or lack of political will, leading to a low level of control and sanctioning of undesired behaviour or to unequal treatment of the various actors. This leads to a situation in which some actors’ activities are sanctioned while others are not. Such a situation (prohibited in law, but tolerated in practice) is quite common where urban agriculture is concerned especially in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The logic behind the application of economic instruments is the assumption that community actors will adopt a certain desired behaviour if this gives them some economic gains (or losses if they continue with the undesired behaviour). Local governments, for example, may grant tax incentives or subsidies if actors adopt the desired behaviour, or levy special taxes for undesired behaviour (similar to a levy on cigarettes or alcohol). Such economic instruments also need a legal basis, but the essential element is not the law itself but the economic incentive or loss that encourages (or is supposed to encourage) a certain behaviour.

Several municipalities grant tax exemptions to land owners who allow poor urban farmers use of vacant private land. For example, the municipality of Governador Valadares (Brazil) exempts (as per the law  Nº 5.265) private landowners from progressive property taxation if their lands are put to productive use. Other cities have reduced the tariffs for irrigation water or provide incentives for composting and reuse of household wastes. Economic support can also be given through supply of irrigation water, tools, seeds and compost to urban farmers.

One example includes an instance in Vancouver, Canada in which prominent private developers issued a free three year lease to a community farming project called SOLEfood to farm a half-acre parcel of land located in Vancouver’s most disadvantaged neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside. In return, the developers property tax assessment on the site in question was reduced from approximately $50,000 annually (as a “commercial” property), to $15,000 annually (as an “agricultural” property).

The assumption behind the use of communicative/educative instruments is that people will adopt a certain desired behaviour if they are well informed about the positive effects of the desired behaviour as well as the negative effects of the undesired behaviour. Information, education and persuasion tools can include media programmes, extension visits, training courses, leaflets, and websites. These instruments are applied to make people understand the importance of the desired change and to assist them in the change process. Well-known examples include media-campaigns to refrain from smoking or to promote use of condoms to combat against HIV / AIDS.

Related to urban agriculture, a municipality may provide technical training to urban farmers, or provide education on healthy food, food growing and food preparation to school kids. Communicative/educative instruments are often used as a complementary approach to other policy instruments, since the lack of an adequate communication and education strategy may strongly reduce the effectiveness of the other policy instruments. In this context, the importance of designing and implementing a strategy to communicate municipal urban agriculture policies and policy instruments to the target group should also be emphasised.

The logic behind urban design instruments is that actors will adopt a certain desired behaviour if their physical environment has been designed in such a way that they are more easily prompted to act a certain way. For example, if public dustbins are widely available, generally people will throw less waste on the street. Examples related to urban agriculture include zoning (setting aside and protecting certain areas of the city for agriculture); combining or separating certain land uses depending on the degree of conflict or synergy;  inclusion of space for home or community gardening in social housing projects, etc. Several cities have included land designated for urban agriculture in their urban land use plan, housing or in slum upgrading projects, including Rosario (Argentina), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Vancouver amongst others.

Over the past years, the RUAF Foundation and its partners have collected relevant policy documents directly dealing with urban agriculture or more generally bearing on urban agriculture production, processing and marketing. These include:

a. Municipal or National Strategies, development plans, land use plans, by-laws, ordinances etc. that deal primarily with horticulture, livestock keeping, beekeeping, aquaculture, forestry, home and community gardening, urban food security, food processing and marketing, etc., within the municipal boundaries.
b. Other sectoral by-laws, ordinances, norms and regulations at both municipal (Public Health, Environmental Management, Housing, the City Land Use or Zoning Plan, the City Strategic Development Plan) and national level (Local Government Act, Public Health Act, Urban Planning or Land Act, Water Act, Housing Act, Agriculture Act, etc.) that contain norms and regulations that are of direct relevance for urban and peri-urban agriculture.

Next to collecting these documents, RUAF and other partners, have in several cases also critically analysed these policies and/or developed national, regional or global policy overviews.

The collection of documents and policy reviews will be made available on this website over time. You can access them below, or by through selecting a specific city on the map below, or by choosing available policy information per theme. You will also find links to selected publications dealing with policy formulation, review, lobbying and advocacy on urban agriculture.

You may search for available information on:

a) Search per theme
b) Search per city or country
c) Selected Publications
d) Search the Bibliographic Database for other literature references, abstracts and online documents on this subject.