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City farming is spreading fast [[but not fast enough]] -- it was estimated in 1993 that city farms were contributing 15% to world food production and it was expected to grow to 33% by 2005. According to the UNDP, some 800 million people worldwide were involved in urban agriculture in 1996, growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs, as well as raising livestock.
Urban farming in Haiti -- AGUILA Urban Agriculture Research Network Latin America
International Development Research Centre, Canada
More than half of the poor people in developing countries now live in urban areas, up from about a third in 1988 -- only 12 years ago -- and still increasing.
Poor people in cities farm scraps of ground wherever they can grow something to provide some food and make some money -- and they save money they would have spent on food. City farming makes a hefty contribution to the fight against poverty and hunger.
It also makes a hefty contribution to environmental and public health. Every year 5.2 million people, including four million children, mostly in cities, die from diseases caused by unhygienic sewage and waste disposal,
City farming in Peru (AGUILA)
and urban waste production is growing even faster than urban populations: by the year 2025, urban waste production will have quadrupled from 2000.
City farmers play a major role in waste recycling, creating a closed system in which organic wastes -- from food, manufacturing and sewage -- are reused instead of festering in dumps and polluting waterways. Human waste is turned into compost, domestic wastewater safely irrigates many crops, and aquaculture stabilizes animal manure. In Mexico City many families keep pigs -- urban pig farmers recycle up to 4,000 tons of the city's food wastes every day.
And city farming empowers women, which benefits everyone. Women in a vegetable-growing cooperative in Bogota, Colombia, earn three times more than their husbands do.
Expansion
Cities cover only 2% of the Earth's surface, but consume 75% of its resources. Cities are black holes, they're swallowing our planet. But, more and more, they're turning green.
Jac Smit, President of the Urban Agriculture Network and co-author of "Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities", paints a vision of what the world would be like if cities were nutritionally self-reliant: "As we consider a dominantly urban Earth early in the next century, in a world with less land and water per-capita, the return of agriculture to where we live presents us with a new paradigm.
Urban farming in Haiti (AGUILA)
"What if 'waste is food' and sewage and garbage were prime inputs to food production? What if the urban landscape were edible? What if vacant, waste land in cities were productive and enhancing the environment for living? What if urban areas were increasing biodiversity rather than diminishing it?"
It's happening. Growing your own food in cities has long been the way in Asia, and it's expanding enormously in Africa, Latin America, and all over the world.
All over the world urban food production is growing more rapidly than urban population -- in spite of urban drift.
In greater Bangkok, 60% of the land is under cultivation, 72% of all urban families are engaged in raising food, mostly part-time.
In Moscow, the share of families raising food more than tripled between 1972 and 1992, from 20% to 65%.
In Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania the number of households engaged in food production grew from 20% to more than 65% between 1970 and 1990.
Urban farming in Haiti (AGUILA)In Argentina the number of participants in the community agriculture program grew from 50,000 to 550,000 between 1990 and 1994, and the number of supporting institutions grew from 100 to 1,100.
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