This is a series of 5 Policy Briefs produced under the EU funded PAPUSSA (Production in Aquatic Peri-urban Systems in Southeast Asia) project, a collaborative reserach project of European organisations and Asian partners in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and Bangkok in Thailand (www.papussa.org). Elaboration: Marielle Dubbeling, ETC Urban Agriculture (m.dubbeling@etcnl.nl); language editing: William Lesschen; Graphic design: Zonacuario, Quito, Ecuador.

Since the start of the first RUAF programme until now, many RUAF Publications have been published. On this page, you will find links to the the RUAF Publications available online, subdivided per type of publication. If you are looking for non-RUAF publications, you should search our bibliographic database. If you are looking for a certain Urban Agriculture Magazine article, please go to the Urban Agriculture Magazine section of this website.

Linus Dagerskog, Simeon Kenfack and Håkan Jönsson

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, pp. 41-43

Robert Gensch

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, pp. 38-40

Currently some estimated 854 million people worldwide are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty; and about 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty (FAO 2006). Despite the great efforts and promising attempts being made to decrease the number of people suffering from food insecurity, this numer still remains high worldwide and will most likely intensify in the coming decades, due to the growing world population. A great deal of this population growth will take place in cities, causing a substantial increase in the volume of urban waste products, the over-exploitation of rural resources and a significant increase in urban food demand. Developing countries are particularly affected by the rampant urbanisation tendencies and face great difficulties in coping with this development.

Sara Finley

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, p. 37

Urban food production is quickly gaining popularity in Canadian cities, where community gardens are thriving and backyard or balcony cultivation is widespread. However, the desire to produce local food must be compensated by responsible water us if the practice is to be sustainable. Garden watering can account for more than 40 percent of household water use during the summer months, and wasteful irrigation practices are often the norm in Canadian cities.

Priyanie Amerasinghe, Charles Devenish, KB Sulemani

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, pp. 34-36

Agriculture in and around Indian cities is under pressure due to rapid urbanisation and associated land use change, and couples with pressure on already scarce water resources. The major beneficiaries of UA in the larger cities are low-income communiies that make use of the available resources - vacant land, river banks and wastewater - to supplement their meagre incomes. Rainwater is a valuable potential resource, and government attention to rainwater harvesting is growing, but its potential for UA is still poorly understood and documented.

Lesley Hope

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, pp. 29-30

Owing to the importance of irrigated urban vegetable farming in Ghana, a number of research and development activities have been recently initiated to improve the safety of vegetables. The positive and negative impacts of these initiatives have already been widely documented (UA Magazine no. 8 and the article in no. 19 on this issue). This paper describes a number of low-cost risk-reduction interventions developed together with key stakeholders in the "farm to fork" continuum.

Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, pp. 27-28

As safe water sources become scarcer and more polluted, the use of wastewater in urban agriculture may produce many benefits but may also lead to crop and soil contamination and endanger farmers and consumers. To effectively manage wastewater use in agriculture, it is important to understand how stakeholders feel impacted by the practice.

Olufunke Cofie & René van Veenhuizen

In: UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture, pp. 3-6

The number of people in the world who live in and around cities is increasing steadily. The “State of the World Cities” report by UN- Habitat (2004) predicted that by 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, while the threshold of 50 percent of the world’s inhabitants living in cities was reached in 2007. Most often, this rapid urbanisation is only demographic as it is not accompanied by a similar rate of infrastructural transformation, but rather puts pressure on limited urban resources. Coincidentally, the areas of the world with the fastest-growing population already have severe water problems, and the shortages will get much worse.