Local Economic Development and Marketing of Urban Produced Food
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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State of debates
The report stresses that in the light of high land costs in urban areas and the fact that there is still not enough land to cater for housing and infrastructure needs,
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it would seem legitimate to let agriculture move towards rural areas whilst improving the transport infrastructure at the same time, as has been the case in Europe. Moreover, urban agriculture is subjected to many types of pollution and is itself a pollutant.
In fact, urban agriculture takes advantage of market distortions and can be only transient. But most to the point, the authors looked at the lack of rigorous quantitative data to assess the social, economic and environmental impact of urban agriculture, and compare it with alternative sources of incomes in the city, alternative uses of land, and alternative sources of food.
In her analysis of the case studies prepared for the ETC Reader on urban agriculture in 2000, Rachel Nugent also points out the informal, small-scale character of UA, and its little impact in terms of income injection into the economy: "agriculture is a residual activity within imperfect markets.
As such, it is conducted opportunistically and with relatively little investment. Farmers are more induced in self-subsistence rather than looking at income opportunities" (Nugent, 2000) The survival strategies of urban farmers has also been brought to the fore by Lipton (1977) as part of his famous "urban bias" theory in which he describes urban producers as "fringe villagers, waiting until penury forces them back to the land and meanwhile living on casual work or on their rural relatives".
In fact, UA is often presented with the characteristics found typical of the informal sector, which have been summarised by Cole and Fayissa (1991) as small size, family management, labour intensiveness and extra-legal nature. These characteristics generate what economists call the simple reproduction of the enterprise, i.e. the impossibility to generate more than the income necessary for the enterprise to pay for the inputs and means of production involved, and hence the impossibility for the enterprise to accumulate savings and invest in its development.
This process has been particularly well described by a series of studies on UA in Zambia (Rakodi, 1988; Jaeger and Huckabay, 1984): poor gardeners are caught up in a vicious circle when they plant a garden because their jobs do not provide them with enough cash income to feed their family, and they cannot grow more food and thus save money because they do not have cash to buy agricultural inputs, eg., manure, wastes or fertilisers...a typical poverty trap.