Final Year Project: Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is agriculture landscape involving food growing and keeping animal in urban or built-up areas.

Urban agriculture in addition can also involve animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry and horticulture. These activities also occur in peri-urban areas as well.

Urban agriculture provides a complementary strategy to reduce urban poverty and food insecurity and enhance urban environmental management. Urban agriculture plays an important role in enhancing urban food security since the costs of supplying and distributing food to urban areas based on rural production and imports continue to increase, and do not satisfy the demand, especially of the poorer sectors of the population. Next to food security, urban agriculture contributes to local economic development, poverty alleviation and social inclusion of the urban poor and women in particular, as well as to the greening of the city and the productive reuse of urban wastes (see below for further explanations and examples).

The importance of urban agriculture

1. Food security and nutrition

The contribution of urban agriculture to food security and healthy nutrition is probably its most important asset. Food production in the city is in many cases a response of the urban poor to inadequate, unreliable and irregular access to food, and the lack of purchasing power.

2. Economic impacts

Growing your own food saves household expenditures on food; poor people in poor countries generally spend a substantial part of their income (50 – 70%) on food. Growing the relatively expensive vegetables therefore saves money as well as on bartering of produce. Selling produce (fresh or processed) brings in cash.

3. Social impacts

Urban agriculture may function as an important strategy for poverty alleviation and social integration.

4. Contributions to urban ecology

Urban agriculture is part of the urban ecological system and can play an important role in the urban environmental management system.

Firstly, a growing city will produce more and more wastewater and organic wastes. For most cities the disposal of wastes has become a serious problem. Urban agriculture can help to solve such problems by turning urban wastes into a productive resource.

Benefits of urban agriculture and given some examples of these benefits and real cities around the country.

Socially it

Helps bring families and communities together by working toward a common goal that will be beneficial for all
Gives direct links to food production
Creates better living environment by greening up the city and making it more productive
Makes people stronger by putting their food security into their own hands, making them more independent and empowered
Teaches people life skills such as how to be more self sufficient
Creates jobs, income, and food
Helps combat hunger
Educate people, who have been increasingly removed from food production, to participate in, and respect, its generation

Environmentally it

Greens up the city
Can help to clean air and rain water
Helps to stop erosion and topsoil removal
increases the amount of food grown and bought locally, decreasing carbon footprint
Facilitates reuse of wastes for food production
Has direct impacts on urban ecology

Economically it

Creates jobs and income from otherwise completely unproductive space
Can be beneficial to people of any income
Creates a better local economy that does not rely on food from far away
Makes use of valuable resources, such as compost, that would otherwise go to waste in a city

Potential problems with urban agriculture.