Urban Agriculture – A
Promising Approach
for Food Security
T
he global demand for food is projected to double by 2050. According to a report published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), India has the highest number of malnourished people in the world at about 190 million. The nation will thus have to find ways to produce more food to ensure the food and nutrition security of not only the 190 million that are currently malnourished but also the millions that are getting added to the population every year.This is not an easy challenge to meet, at least not if we
adhere to the traditional approaches to food production. In the context of
rapid urbanisation taking place in the country, the land available for
agriculture is shrinking by the day and many farmers are abandoning
agriculture. This means that more food will have to come from lesser area of
farmland and efforts of fewer farmers. While improved agricultural
technologies can lead to increase in productivity, this approach alone will
not be adequate to meet our food production targets.
What is required is to re-imagine agriculture itself and find new farms and new farmers! Why should the rural areas bear the sole responsibility of food production? Why should food not be grown in cities? Why does food production have to be tied to the availability of land? Why cannot food be produced without soil? Why should only the farmer in the village grow our food? Why cannot you and me grow our own food? These questions would appear to be inane a decade back, but with the advent of innovative technologies such as aquaponics
1 and vertical gardening2, a whole new world of opportunities for reclaiming urban spaces for food production have opened up.Urban agriculture may be understood as the growing of food in urban areas. It employs a diversity of innovative technologies to deal with inherent resource constraints of cities such as the scarcity of land and water. With techniques such as vertical farming, rooftop and window-sill gardening; the requirement of land is reduced drastically or even done away with completely. The technique of hydroponics
3 does away with the requirement of soil and aquaponics goes a step further and introduces the production of fish. People are experimenting with and coming up with new ideas everyday with everything from used soda bottles to road dividers being reclaimed for growing food. An interesting development is the adoption of the guerrilla gardening approach for growing food i.e. growing plants on land that is not owned by anyone such as abandoned or unused patches of land.Besides its obvious role in meeting the challenge of food and nutrition security, the other advantages of urban farming are many with an even wider array of co-benefits. It enables farm fresh produce to be made available to the urban consumer. Since the need for transportation from the village to the city is done away with, not only is much wastage in transit avoided but the carbon footprint of the food also reduces drastically. The urban growers soon learn to recycle their organic wastes into fertiliser for their food farms leading to localised waste management and reduction in the amount of waste being sent to landfills. This also leads to a growing market for organic produce that in turn encourages farming to shift to more environment friendly practices helping undo the ravages inflicted on the soil by the rampant use of chemical fertilisers.
More importantly, it has been observed that as people in the cities see and engage in the process of food production, they reconnect with nature and take greater interest in the protection of urban biodiversity and ecological systems. The creation of new ecological niches with suitable micro-climates in these urban farming spaces heralds the return of the birds and the bees that seem to be disappearing from our cities at an alarming pace.
Urban farming is catching on in hundreds of cities across the world. In India too, cities like Hyderabad have been early adopters and thousands of families in the outskirts of the city are growing their own supply of vegetables. While it may have started off as a fad in many places, urban farming is slated to soon become a necessity for meeting the challenge of food and nutrition security. The opportunities are immense and it is for the citizens of the city to take a lead. q
Parul Bansal
and Mayukh Hajra
parul1591@gmail.com
mhajra@devalt.org
Endnotes
2 Cultivation of plants on a vertically inclined surface in a stacked manner
3 The growing of plants in nutrient enriched water in the absence of soil