Beacon Mbiba

In: UA Magazine No. 11 - Availability, Access and Usability of Land for Urban Agriculture

This paper looks at under-utilisation of urban agricultural land in the London Borough of Bexley and considers the challenges that municipal officials face in making decisions about the future use of such land. Whereas the financial costs and benefits for alternative land use are clear, those for urban agriculture are not. Essentially, technical decisions on the use of land are made with an eye on local politics and pressures from competing constituencies. In the highly populated residential areas, like in Kenya, where arable land to cultivate is too scarce to facilitate meaningful farming, vegetables can be grown in space-confined gardens, like bags.

Robert J. Holmer, Merlito T. Clavejo, Stefan Dongus and Axel Drescher

In: UA Magazine No. 11 - Availability, Access and Usability of Land for Urban Agriculture

Community gardens are defined as gardens where people share the basic resources of land, water, and sunlight. This definition includes both allotment and common gardens. Since March 2002, a project is being implemented in Cagayan de Oro, Southern Philippines, to establish four pilot allotment gardens in different parts of the city with financial assistance from EuropeAid's AsiaUrbs Programme.

Alejandro R Socorro Castro

In: UA Magazine No. 11 - Availability, Access and Usability of Land for Urban Agriculture

The experience from Cienfuegos described here is one of three experiences under the project 'Optimisation of Use of Vacant Land for Urban Agriculture' promoted by the Urban Management Program for Latin America and the Caribbean (UMP- LAC). The project is simultaneously being carried out in Rosario, Argentina (the previous article) and in Governador Valadares in Brazil (included in a box).

Lillian N. Kiguli, Augustus Nuwagaba, David Mwesigwa and Juliet Kiguli

In: UA Magazine No. 11 - Availability, Access and Usability of Land for Urban Agriculture

Agriculture in Kampala is practised mainly in valley slums where the poor live in informal settlements. Although urban agriculture offers easy access to services and markets, gaining access to land to grow food and rear animals is a challenge for the urban poor.

E.A. Olofin and A.I. Tanko

In: UA Magazine No. 11 - Availability, Access and Usability of Land for Urban Agriculture

This contribution summarises the findings of a sequence of research studies in Kano, the largest city in Northern Nigeria, which show the significance of urban and periurban agriculture in the area and its contributions to improved nutrition, household food security, employment, etc. of city dwellers, and discuss the access of farmers to land.

Daniel Rodríguez, Delvey Anchieri, Alejandra Lozano, Gustavo Castro, Edgardo Vitale and Winston Lozano

In: UA Magazine 10 - Appropriate (Micro) Technologies for Urban Agriculture

The population of Uruguay is highly concentrated, with a proliferation of irregular settlements in cities. An increase in unemployment has forced many people to resort to extreme strategies for their survival and the survival of their families. Informal collection and sale of household waste is one of the more widespread, and is linked to the breeding of pigs within the household. Municipal authorities are reluctant to accept this activity because of the environmental and health risks it implies. However, in order to formulate urban agriculture policies that preserve the health of the population it is important to critically examine this phenomenon, including both its risks and benefits, trying to minimize the former and maximize the latter. Based on this reality, the Veterinary School of Montevideo (Uruguay) developed a series of experiments with the goal of assessing and commercialising technologies for the processing and collection of organic waste used to feed pigs.

Dai Peters

In: UA Magazine 10 - Appropriate (Micro) Technologies for Urban Agriculture

Dong Lieu commune in Hay Tay province lies some 20km from Hanoi. The area is traditionally agricultural but has, since the late 1960's, specialized in household-level root crop - cassava and canna - processing, due to its proximity to Hanoi and access to its growing markets. Since that time this processing capacity has increased 3-10 times. Cassava and canna are different crops, in the type of roots, properties of the starch, and different profitability of the starch. As the starch processing developed, a starch-based cluster of enterprises emerged in support or in association with starch processing.

Madhumita Mukherjee

In: UA Magazine 10 - Appropriate (Micro) Technologies for Urban Agriculture

In India, night soil and wastewater reuse in agriculture is a traditional practice followed in irrigation for centuries. West Bengal is the pioneering state. The use of municipal wastewater to fertilize ponds is now perhaps the largest wastewater fed aquaculture system in the world in Kolkata, and the periurban area, especially where wastewater fish farming is practiced, supports the livelihood of a large number of people through waste recycling and natural resource use.

Dr. K. Vijayaraghavan, Prof. Abdul Rashid Mohamed Shariff and Prof. Mohd. Amin Mohd. Soom

In: UA Magazine 10 - Appropriate (Micro) Technologies for Urban Agriculture

Anaerobic digestion is a natural process harnessed by humankind in order to treat waste derived form sewage sludge, industrial sludge and wastewater. The anaerobic digestion of feedstock's and organic wastes are still in the development stage and are yet to become commercially available. This article describes the types of anaerobic digesters, and how to tackle environmental degradation by the waste generated.

Isaac Asare, Gordana Kranjac-Berisavljevic and Olufunke. Cofie

In: UA Magazine 10 - Appropriate (Micro) Technologies for Urban Agriculture

The use of human waste as a source of fertiliser in developing countries as a whole and particularly in Ghana, has not received much recognition (Laryea, 1998). Due to poor soil fertility, and lack of financial means to buy chemical fertiliser, farmers in the drier parts of Ghana frequently resort to the use of human waste i.e. faecal sludge (FS) for agriculture. In the nineties, Owusu-Bennoah and Visker (1994) reported that 90% of collected night soil in Tamale municipality was used as fertilizer. This paper describes the ingenuity of small-scale farmers in the use of faecal sludge for crop production in Tamale Municipality.