Document(s) 4 de 18

Five years after the publication of "Growing Cities, Growing Food; Urban Agriculture at the Policy Agenda" (DSE 2000, edited by ETC-RUAF), this new book by RUAF looks at the situation of urban agriculture as it is today.

"Cities Farming for the Future" integrates results of recent research on the potentials, risks and dynamics of urban agriculture and presents early experiences with the development of policies and action programmes on urban agriculture.

The book provides new insights and interesting examples for senior and mid-level officers in municipal departments, governmental organisations, NGOs, farmer organisations and community-based organisations and is of high value for those that are to influence policies and programme development.

The book opens with a general introduction on agriculture in an urban context with the growing attention of policymakers and international organisations for urban agriculture as a backdrop. Chapter 2 presents the multi-stakeholder policy making and action planning (MPAP) approach as well as some lessons learned by the RUAF partners in the past years.

In chapter 3, the authors discuss urban planning and traditional and new approaches and tools to enhance access of urban producers to land and other resources. Chapter 4 reviews lessons learnt from urban studies on access to credit and investment. Chapters 5 to 9 deal with the various social, economic and ecological dimensions of urban agriculture. Chapter 10 to 14 discuss the main urban agriculture production systems and how these can be made safe and sustainable. Each chapter also presents a selected bibliography and a compilation of the main websites of relevant resources. Together these chapters give a comprehensive overview of the actual "state of the art" in the development of sustainable urban agriculture.

The RUAF network

This book is a collaborative effort of the partners in the International Network of Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF), including seven regional centres in developing countries and one international resource centre (see the authors page for contact information), and many other organisations with which RUAF is closely cooperating.

The initiative to establish the RUAF network was taken during a meeting in 1996 of the international Support Group on Urban Agriculture (SGUA), consisting at the time of nearly 40 international organisations. In 2004 the RUAF Foundation was established to create an independent and legal basis for the network.

The central aim of the RUAF Foundation is to contribute to urban poverty reduction, urban food security, improved urban environmental management, empowerment of urban farmers and participatory city governance by enhancing policy awareness on benefits and risks of urban agriculture, capacity development, facilitating local policy formulation and action planning on urban agriculture, and promoting networking and exchange of experiences.

During the first few years of its existence the RUAF partners focused their activities mainly on facilitation of networking and exchange of experiences, organisation of debates on key issues in urban agriculture, improving access of local stakeholders to information through establishment of databases, websites and production of the Urban Agriculture Magazine and other publications, and awareness raising in international, national and local organisations.

Cities Farming for the Future

In 2005 the RUAF partners started the Cities Farming for the Future programme (RUAFCFF) focusing their activities on 20 pilot cities (3-4 per region). Core funding for the RUAFCFF programme is provided by DGIS (the Netherlands) and IDRC (Canada), while various other organisations are supporting specific activities (case studies, workshops, publications and pilot projects).

In the pilot cities, the partners are implementing the following main strategies:

• Local capacity development: the creation of regional training capacity (training of trainers) and the training of staff of over 80 local organisations in the pilot cities on urban agriculture and multi-stakeholder policy formulation, action planning and implementation.
  
  
• Facilitation of multi-stakeholder policy development and action planning: the establishment of local multi-stakeholder platforms on urban agriculture and facilitation of gender sensitive and participatory formulation of local policies and action plans and co-funding of pilot projects.
  
  
• Knowledge management and networking: systematisation and dissemination of the experiences gained in the pilot cities; production of guidelines and other materials for specific stakeholder categories; maintenance of databases and websites, and the publication of Urban Agriculture Magazine.
  
  
• Establishment of monitoring systems on urban agriculture in the participating local organisations in order to ensure learning-from-action and provision of feedback to policymakers and urban planners on the socio-economic and ecological impacts of their urban agriculture policies and projects
  
  
• Gender mainstreaming ensuring the integration of gender in all RUAF supported training and planning and monitoring activities, and promoting the integration of gender in the policies and programmes of the participating institutes

More information on the RUAF Foundation, its programme and the ongoing activities in the pilot cities can be found on the website www.ruaf.org. This website also contains all RUAF publications, back issues of the Urban Agriculture Magazine and on-line bibliographic and contacts databases.

The Way Forward

The authors of the chapters and the cases presented in this volume indicate a number of challenges ahead, including:

The capacity development regarding urban agriculture and urban food security in municipal departments and governmental and civic organisations has to be extended to a larger number of cities and countries. Next to training courses at national and city levels also distance learning (internet, radio) and city-to-city exchanges and study visits can play an important role here.

The support to local initiatives regarding design of effective and efficient policies on urban agriculture and urban food security has to be continued and broadened. This requires amongst others that national governments start giving more attention to urban agriculture and build it into their poverty alleviation strategies, agricultural policies etc. Although much progress has been made at city level, the number of countries that have explicitly integrated urban agriculture into their policies is still rather limited. This restricts the support that city governments and other local stakeholders receive from government organisations.

The monitoring of benefits and risks associated with urban agriculture and the impacts of innovative policies and programmes on urban agriculture needs more attention in order to facilitate further improvement of such policies and programmes. Since perceived health risks are en important reason why city governments sometimes are hesitant to facilitate urban agriculture, the implementation of more health impact assessments is recommended as well as the design of adequate accompanying measures that enhance the food safety of urban agricultural products.

Too often policies and action plans regarding urban agriculture do not differentiate sufficiently between the various categories of urban farmers, especially between 1) home and community gardening, 2) small scale semi-commercial urban farmers and 3) larger scale full commercial farmers, which differ strongly in their purpose, support needs and impacts.

More attention is needed for the strengthening of urban farmers organisations both to enhance their participation in local policy making and action planning as well as to foster farmer education and innovation in urban farming systems to make these safe and more productive.

More (participatory) training and action research with urban farmer groups is needed in order to develop safe and viable urban farming systems (farmer field schools, participatory technology development)

These farmer groups also need more support in micro-enterprise development (eg. home based processing) and marketing (quality control, own label, farmers' markets) and strengthening linkages between various farmer groups and other stakeholders (value chain approach). This also requires stronger involvement of the private sector (banks, credit institutions) in order to finance investments in farm and enterprise development.

Also development of creative ways to improve farmers access to vacant urban land and enhance their security of usufruct needs further attention. In that especially strengthening the position of female farmers regarding land titles and usufruct rights is of importance.

Recent developments in Europe, USA and Canada as well as in larger metropoles in Southern countries indicate that the promotion of multi-functional land use, combining food production functions of urban agriculture with other functions such as provision of recreational services, maintaining green open spaces in the city, landscape and biodiversity management, creation of better urban micro-climate etcetera, may prove to be an important condition for the sustainability of urban agriculture. Fostering multi-functional land use would require that urban planners include agriculture as part of green belts, city parks and other vacant open spaces creating mutually beneficial results for farmers (access to land that is legally protected from construction activities) and the city (urban greening, maintenance of the green open spaces).

The RUAF partners are planning to produce another major publication on urban agriculture in five years from now. We hope to be able that we can report on many more achievements than has been possible in this book "Cities Farming for the Future" and its predecessor "Growing Cities, Growing Food" five years ago.

Henk de Zeeuw
Director
RUAF Foundation

Document(s) 4 de 18