UN promotes the benefits of micro-gardens in Africa

In an effort to promote horticulture and trade the UN is advocating urban gardens in Africa.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) is among several international and local institutions promoting the message that micro-gardening and other forms of urban horticulture can go a long way to boosting city dwellers' food security and improving their living conditions.

"It is urgent to mainstream urban and peri-urban horticulture, and to recognize its role as a motor in food security and nutrition strategies," said Modibo Traoré, UNFAO Assistant Director-General, speaking to an international symposium in Dakar, which was organised by the UNFAO and the Senegalese government.

Two hundred people from 39 countries met from 6th-9th December 2010 to discuss building an international network to promote and implement urban horticulture, incorporating the practice into urban planning, and developing alternatives to pesticides.

Urban and peri-urban horticulture is the cultivation of a wide range of crops – including fruits, vegetables, roots, tubers and ornamental plants – in cities and towns and the surrounding areas. UNFAO says an estimated 130 million urban residents in Africa and 230 million in Latin America engage in agriculture, mainly horticulture, to provide food for their families and/or earn an income.

In Dakar, the Senegalese capital, one such example of urban horticulture sits in a traffic island, where potted lettuce, mint and potato plants are grown to the sounds of car horns and city bus engines. The plots create jobs and allow people to feed their families.

Elsewhere, people often farm idle urban land, yet with no legal standing they can be evicted from the land when it is required for development. UNFAO wants policies to acknowledge the role of urban and peri-urban agriculture in development.

"While the urban poor, particularly those arriving from rural areas, have long practised horticulture as a livelihood and survival strategy, in many countries the sector is still largely informal, usually precarious, and sometimes illegal," Integrated Regional Integrated Networks (IRIN) credits an unnamed UNFAO source as saying.

Neveen Metwally, a researcher at the Central Laboratory for Agriculture Climate in Cairo, Egypt, says city inhabitants have to be convinced of the benefits of urban horticulture, if the practice is to be implemented by the wider population.

"I can say to someone, 'A rooftop garden will help the environment', and they'll say, 'No, thank you – I just want to feed my family'. So I must identify and communicate benefits that are of interest to that person," said Metwally to IRIN.

In Egypt the numerous benefits of rooftop gardens are well-documented – they can decrease air pollution; absorb heat and act as insulators, reducing the energy needed for cooling or heating, and provide low-cost food and often also a source of revenue, Metwally reportedly told IRIN.

Jacky Ganry, of the French agricultural research organization, Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement, says that health should be the entry point for promoting urban and peri-urban horticulture.

"We know that non-communicable disease is a more alarming problem in urban areas than rural ones. An unbalanced diet is much more common in urban areas because of the price of fruits and vegetables, and the consumption of imported and processed products," he told IRIN.

Participants at the symposium in Dakar said urban farming should be advocated as a strategy to combat malnutrition, disease and poverty, and urban infrastructure should favour the development of horticulture, for example, through land-use planning and better irrigation and drainage systems.

According to the UNFAO website, one billion people live in chronic hunger. Urban gardens are helping to form part of a strategy to reduce hunger through agriculture.

Author: Leroy Robinson | Climate Action

Image: Sustainable sanitation | Flickr