Vegetable Gardens in the City, Zimbabwe

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Introduction

To some people, urban farming might sound like a contradiction in terms. Farming is often seen as a rural occupation, and cities as consumers of rural foodstuffs. But the truth can be rather different. Many cities simply could not feed themselves without the produce of their backyards, roadside verges, riverbanks, parks and allotments. Hectare for hectare, urban farming is often among the most efficient and intensive forms of agriculture anywhere. And it can be a vital source of vegetables for many poor and even middle-income households.

"The stereotype is that when people move to urban areas they abandon agriculture. In fact our findings show that the majority carry on in some form," says Adrienne Martin, a social scientist from the NRI. And yet urban agriculture often exists in a legal no-man's land. It often takes place on illegally occupied land, and may even be formally banned. It gets by with little or no financial help, and farmers are at constant risk of being evicted even as their crops grow.

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Setting the Scene

The land in and around Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, has a cool, wet climate and there are large green spaces. This makes it fertile ground for urban farmers. River floods in the long wet season deter developers from low-lying land, but provide free irrigation for farmers, often allowing two harvests.

Tomatoes, green leafy vegetables such as rugare, and maize are the major crops. "We grow to eat and to sell at market," says Angeline Mbabvu in Dombashava, some 20 kilometres from the centre of Harare. Mrs Mokokota, secretary of a school in the suburb of Epworth -- one of the poorest but fastest growing urban areas in Harare -- says she grows vegetables "to make our family happy", and to bring in cash to buy meat. It is a vital part of their livelihood.

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Taking action

Adrienne Martin and Nicolienne Oudwater from the NRI have investigated how poor urban farmers - who are mostly women - can help to feed their families and earn cash on urban plots in three areas around Harare. They have found that in some parts of the city more than two-thirds of households carry out some farming, either around their homes or on public land such as roadside verges. Aerial surveys suggest that the area of the city under cultivation has doubled in the past decade.

Adrienne says many urban households farm to diversify their income and reduce their vulnerability to unemployment, droughts and other calamities. In Epworth, family members take unskilled jobs with wages when they can, while others sell craftwork or run shops and stalls, and still others farm maize, sweet potatoes and cabbages in their back yards and on boggy common land.

The official view remains that urban farming is bad for the environment and dangerous to health because standing water and damp vegetation attract mosquitoes and rodents. Government land policies prefer to stress the rights of the poor to return to white-owned rural farming areas through land reforms. But the team found that in the fractured state of land tenure in the countryside, urban agriculture can be a vital means of survival.

Porta Farm, a community of some 4000 people on the city's western outskirts, is officially a temporary holding camp, inhabited by many people moved during the clearance of squatter settlements in central Harare before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 1991. "We were supposed to stay for three months," says Mrs Chikonhi. But a decade on they still await their promised housing plots, subsisting meanwhile on growing crops and fishing near the camps. Alois Guta was moved the same year from a squatter settlement near Harare airport, and took up farm work to get money to send children to school.

But there is another aspect, too, says Adrienne: enjoyment. Many rural families are drawn to cities by the need to find work. But they retain their rural links, and urban farming "makes them feel complete as a human being". Town planners, she says, must end their hostility to urban farming. "The process of planning and decision-making about urban space has to take into account peoples' needs for areas in which they can grow crops."

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The cast

"The stereotype is that when people move to urban areas they abandon agriculture. In fact our findings show that the majority carry on in some form," - Adrienne Martin, social scientist at the Natural Resources Institute.

• Angeline Mbabvu of Dombashava
• Mrs Chikonhi of Porta Farm
• Alois Guta, of Porta Farm
• Mrs Mokokota of Epworth.

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Global Relevance

Urban farming is a worldwide phenomenon. According to the UN development Programme, one in three of the world's urban residents grows some food, and urban areas provide around 15% of global food production. In the cities of England, thousands of people grow food on allotments set aside by local authorities. In Bangkok, 60% of the land is devoted to farming. In Moscow, two-thirds of families grow some food.

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Thinking points

• Urban farming is an integral, but often unacknowledged, part of the economic activity of most of the world's urban areas.
• Planners and politicians must plan for successful farming in and around urban areas, and ensure that the poor and vulnerable in the community can use it to improve their livelihoods.

Research on peri-urban livelihood activities in Harare was funded by the European Union

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In the Field is a collaboration between the BBC World Service and the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, supported by the Rural Livelihoods Department of the UK Government Department for International Development (DFID)