Document(s) 12 de 18

The urban setting offers special advantages for food and animal production, but also presents particular challenges. Urban agriculture needs to be highly innovative in competing and adapting to new situations. Urban and peri-urban agricultural systems exhibit even higher levels of complexity than rural upland systems and call for a wider range of participatory methods. This chapter discusses participatory agricultural research and its relevancy for the urban setting. A sustainable urban livelihoods framework is discussed, which enables to better understand and define the multi-sectoral, institutional and policy aspects of urban agriculture in order to identify appropriate interventions. Specific participatory methods are discussed for urban horticulture and livestock to help urban producers adapt agriculture to urban realities.

Participatory Technology Development for Sustainable Intensification of Urban Agriculture

Gordon Prain

Introduction

The production of food, feed, fuel and construction material in and around cities has almost as long a history as human settlements themselves. The earliest cities in the Fertile Crescent, in China and in South and Central America report the presence of local food production, which was an essential component of urban food security in times of conflict and military insecurity (Southall, 2001). The urban setting offers special advantages for food and animal production, but also presents particular challenges. Cities accumulate nutrients through the concentration of human population and their organic waste products, whether in solid or liquid form. These nutrients can often be acquired free or at low cost and can be converted into edible plant parts or animal products. On the other hand, as cities develop, there is increasing demand for residential and business accommodation which competes with agricultural space. Producers must adapt to these more constrained conditions, whilst still trying to maintain productivity through intensifying production techniques.

Producers' adaptation of agriculture to urban realities also occurs within a policy environment which is much more challenging than the rural context. This is partly because of the density of the population and intense competition for natural, physical and financial resources in urban settings which municipal governments try to arbitrate. It is also because of the density of competing economic and political interests present in the city, in which the local council is only one player.

The treadle pump used around Accra for irrigation of vegetables

Another feature of cities is their dynamic nature: a constant flux of growth, decay and transformation which puts a very high value on continuous technological innovation to maintain or enhance productivity and sustainability. As part of their livelihood strategies, urban producers are already engaged in innovative adaptation to new circumstances. This chapter argues that to support them, we need to employ participatory methods, for the same reasons as they have been essential for working with complex rural agriculture systems – mixed upland systems for example - the need to combine local knowledge and innovation skills with new technical opportunities.

This is the context for participatory technology development in urban agriculture systems which will be explored in the following sections.

Agricultural Technology Development

Why has agricultural research been so little concerned with urban agriculture (CGIAR 1998). The answer is related to the sectoral separation of "urban" and "rural", a separation that has its roots in the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent transfer through colonial expansion to the developing world.

In northern Europe, the industrial revolution came to be seen as an urban revolution, associated with cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham in the north and midlands of England. The workers who were employed in the new factories came from agricultural communities. Cities became part of what was seen as a movement away from an agrarian society towards industrialisation and the creation of wealth through capital investment. Rapid urban growth occurred around manufacturing and service industries and included dense, low-cost residential housing for the new industrial workforce – the future inner city slums – together with elite suburban settlements, occupied by the "captains of industry" and the professional classes who supported them (Fishman, 1987). Yet this division was more ideological than real. Because transport systems failed to keep pace with urban growth, food supply to cities remained a problem. In England and other European countries, municipal authorities were obliged to "allot" small plots to workers' families for food production (Burchardt, 1997). These allotment gardens have been reduced in size or have changed location, but they never left the cities in Europe.

Watering roof top vegetables

The colonial expansion of northern European economies, driven by the search for new sources of raw materials as well as for new consumer markets, exported the sectoral divide between "rural" and "urban" to the developing world, with efforts made to keep "rural" agricultural local populations out of the colonial urban centres, except for the provision of services to the colonists (Tibaijuka, 2004).

This divide has come also to characterise the investment by public sector agencies in technology generation. Agricultural technology development has been almost exclusively oriented towards rural needs, whereas research on manufacturing processes, product transformation, infrastructure and sanitation has been focused mainly on urban needs.

Early investments in research and development for rural agriculture were primarily associated with fertiliser development (an off-shoot of military research into munitions and one of the few examples where weapons really have been turned into ploughshares), pesticide development and more recently, especially in the second part of the 20th century, plant genetics and breeding (Simmonds, 1979). Plant breeding began to be applied to the developing world's main food security crops of rice, wheat and maize during the 1960s, seeking to increase the fertiliser responsiveness and harvest index of the crops (ratio of grains to other parts of the plant biomass) and therefore their food productivity.

The methodological background to this technology development process, which became known as the Green Revolution, was the notion of a central source of innovation (Biggs, 1990; Biggs and Farrington, 1991). This notion proposes that agricultural innovations are generated in centres of excellence by scientists, are then pushed out to national agricultural programmes which may conduct some local adaptive research before transferring the technology to extension services and thence to early-adopting farmers, who then abandon traditional practices. Although this "pipeline" or top-down approach succeeded in greatly increasing the production of rice, wheat and maize in the relatively simple farming systems in breadbasket regions of the developing world – the Indo-Gangetic plain, the irrigated lowland valleys and plains of Southeast Asia, the maize-producing valleys of central Mexico – it made little impact on ecologically, agronomically and socio-economically more complex upland farming systems. These systems have to adapt to difficult, risk-prone environments and this demands local farmer innovation in crop-livestock management in multiple micro-environments. A quite different, participatory approach to agricultural research is required to enhance the capacity of these systems to ensure year-long food and income security for households.

In these more complex situations it is necessary that researchers and agricultural producers first conduct situation analysis (Martin et al 2001) to analyse the existing strengths and weaknesses of local farming systems, regional agro-enterprise and marketing systems (Bernet et al., 2005) and the body of available indigenous and incorporated knowledge. Farmer-led experimentation can then evaluate alternative options for change, drawn from both local experience and national and international scientific resources. This is the essence of participatory technology development (PTD), an on-going process of innovation that blends new and tested principles and practices to changing local realities (Chambers et al., 1990; Haverkort et al., 1991; Douthwaite, 2002).

Participatory planning undertaken in Dar es Salaam

This brief review of the background to participatory agricultural research is relevant because urban and peri-urban agricultural systems exhibit even higher levels of complexity than rural upland systems and call for a wider range of participatory methods (Veenhuizen et al., 2001). As well as the need for situation analysis of the diverse mixed farming systems in a range of (urban) micro-ecologies, there are specific interactions with the urban environment that must be analysed. These concern the opportunities and risks of accessing and recycling accumulated urban nutrients (Dubbeling et al., 2005); the need to adapt and intensify production in space-constrained conditions (Veenhuizen, 2003); the risks of exposure to urban contaminants (Cole et al., 2004); the opportunities of agro-enterprises and accessing diverse nearby markets (Holmer, 2001; Peters et al., 2002); and the need to engage with a dense and often intrusive regulatory, policy and planning environment, which impinges on agriculture in multiple ways and makes demands on the types of technologies that can be used (Dubbeling, 2001).

Finally, agricultural production in urban areas is rarely the only or even the major livelihood activity of households. It is combined and sometimes integrated with part- or fulltime activities in other urban sectors, such as the construction, manufacturing and service industries¹. This creates intricate decision-making processes within households regarding the deployment of household resources in livelihood strategies. Gender and inter-generational relations and sustainability considerations are part of these processes and a more comprehensive framework is required for their analysis and for the design of interventions (Rakodi and Lloyd-Jones 2002).

In the next section the sustainable urban livelihoods framework will be introduced, to better characterise the multi-sectoral, institutional and policy aspects of urban agriculture and identify appropriate interventions. After that, several specific participatory methods to help urban producers adapt agriculture to urban realities will be reviewed.

Farming Systems and Livelihood Systems in the Urban Environment

The concept of "farming system" was developed during the 1970s to capture the multiple, integrated components and large-scale continuities in rural agriculture and to identify points of technology intervention for particular types of systems (Norman et al., 1995). It also has value to understand the situation of urban agriculture, which exhibits a similarly high degree of biological and agronomic diversity at one level but also the potential for identifying continuities, common features and broadly applicable interventions. Farming systems research seeks to understand the integration of agricultural production involving crops, animals and the use of natural resources, the deployment of household and hired labour and linkages with markets. Its weakness has been its agro-centrism - seeing everything through the agricultural lens and often the lens of the individual farmer – and also a difficulty to characterise adequately the feedback loops linking the farm and farm household with other local and regional systems, whether ecological systems such as watersheds or socio-political systems such as local political structures, food systems and different kinds of markets.

The more recent emergence of livelihood systems approaches has enriched action research and development work with agrarian societies, by adopting a broader perspective that analyses households dynamically, in terms of the deployment of their accumulated assets through livelihood strategies that are constrained both by external stresses and shocks and by the need to engage with local and national institutions, policies and processes (Farrington et al., 1999). Although developed to better analyse rural realities, this approach has proved to be very fruitful for understanding households in urban settings, including those engaged in different kinds of agricultural production (Radoki and Lloyd-Jones, 2002).

Increasingly in rural settings, and very much so in complex urban contexts, poor households depend on multiple income sources, credit, physical resources such as equipment and technology, access to natural resources, and a range of non-material assets such as local knowledge, formal education, health and social support structures to ensure their livelihood. Inadequate assets can leave households vulnerable to economic, environmental, health, and political stresses and shocks, which is referred to as the vulnerability context (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 Sustainable Urban Livelihood Framework

Adapted from DfID 2001. Sustainable Livelihoods Guidance Sheet. DfID, London

Household-based Assets have been Classified into Five Types or Capitals²

Natural capital involves the quantity and quality of accessible land, water and biodiversity. The basic ingredients for both crop and livestock agriculture are water and nutrients. Nutrients for crops are delivered mostly through soils, though their delivery in water in hydroponics systems is also important in urban settings (see below). Conditions and management of soils differ widely in urban settings and across different types of urban and peri-urban agriculture, though frequent, common problems include the presence of inorganic materials – especially heavy metals and trash – and a high level of compaction (Evans et al., 2000). Because small urban plots are often intensively used, soil fertility is a constant challenge as will be discussed further below, and the incorporation of urban nutrients via vegetative or co-composting is a key area for PTD in urban agriculture. Nutrients for livestock production involve access to forage and other feed sources and their efficient use in livestock nutrition. These feed sources are often scarce in urban and peri-urban areas and this leads frequently to complex nutrient exchanges along rural to urban transects, for the benefit of both animal and crop production (Njenga et al., forthcoming).

Drawing own plots in participatory diagnosis in Montevideo

Water is also often a scarce natural resource in urban areas, and there is frequently intense competition between agriculture and domestic and industrial uses. "Resource recognition" is important in this context (Furedy 1992; Smit and Nasr, 2001). "Hidden" natural resources can be accessed, such as unused water surfaces and nutrient-rich wastewater (see Chapter 9, this volume). The notion of resource recognition is also important for accessing land, through use of vacant lots, unused public lands, and the composting potential of urban solid wastes (see Chapter 8, this volume).

Biodiversity is a key natural resource that supports agriculture. Population pressure, presence of contaminants and the fragmentation of green spaces in urban areas can severely reduce the resilience of plant and animal populations and their capacity for survival and for symbiotic interactions in ecological systems. PTD involves not only the identification of native species and varieties of plants and animals that are well adapted to urban soils and other conditions, but also the application of practices that enhance species resilience and symbiosis, for example, through biological pest control.

It is not always easy to differentiate natural and physical capital in the urban environment. Water, for example, is usually considered part of natural capital. Yet when it is cleaned and piped to the homes of urbanites, it becomes "adequate water supply and sanitation, which is part of physical capital according to DfID's literature on livelihoods. Organic wastes can also be considered part of the natural capital of the urban environment which is available for composting, yet when chemical fertilizer is packaged and purchased by households; it is usually considered part of physical capital. The important point here is not about trying to create watertight boundaries, but about the access of poor households to these different types of capital.

Physical capital includes the buildings, equipment, tools and physical inputs to agriculture and other activities, such as seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, animals, a small kiosk for trading, a sowing machine etc. PTD can have a direct impact on physical capital through improving the quality and fit of assets such as seed and equipment with the urban environment.

Financial capital refers primarily to the income available to the household from different sources, but also to loans and credit. (see Chapters 4 and 7) As already mentioned, households in urban and peri-urban areas are rarely dependent on a single income source. Different household members access different sources of income, and the same individual may also manage different occupations simultaneously. A common example would be a woman who is responsible for household food preparation and child-rearing, contributes to raising crops and animals and engages in petty trading (Arce et al., 2004).

Human capital includes labour, knowledge and the health status of family members and the ways these are deployed – or impaired – in livelihoods strategies. The local technical knowledge which household members utilise in agricultural activities is an important example of human capital. The depth of this knowledge, which is so critical in the management of complex rural farming systems, may be less obvious among migrants from totally different agricultural environments, or among non-agricultural households seeking ways to better secure family food security. Evidence from research with horticulturalists in Hanoi, Vietnam, indicates a reduction of use of toxic pesticides with greater time spent farming in a given environment, suggesting a growth in local knowledge of how to manage horticultural pests (de Bon et al., 2004).

Applied drip irrigation in allotment gardens in Cagayan de Oro

Human health is another key aspect of human capital that needs special attention in urban areas. Conditions in low-income areas of developing world cities often create health risks for the urban poor (Hardoy et al., 1990). Participation in agriculture can intensify negative health impacts on human health, through human and food exposure to contaminants and other illness-producing hazards in water, soils and animals (Birley and Lock, 1999). Health impacts can also be positive through nutritional and other health benefits of farming and farming products (Armar-Klemesu, 2000).

Social capital includes the access to and membership in social networks, groups and associations of different kinds, through which households gain access to other assets, such as knowledge, financial loans, labour and different kinds of support and security. Social capital also involves the trust that exists with others, which facilitates access to resources and enhances the sense of well-being and psycho-social health. Social capital is strongly gendered, in that social networks, trust, sharing and social support tend to be forged within the sexes rather than between, though important exceptions to this generalisation exist, including religious organisations. Relatively little work has been done so far on social capital in relation to urban agriculture, but there are examples of its contribution to community building, especially in the USA and Europe, and to improvements for HIV/AIDS affected communities (see Chapter 6, this volume). Research findings in both Latin America and Africa suggest that women play a major part in harnessing and maintaining social capital in support of crop and animal production (Maldonado, 2005; Maxwell, 1992; Chapter 5 this volume). The deployment of assets in household strategies, the influences and impediments which household members experience when they deal with urban institutions such as municipal regulations and policies or local marketing practices, and the livelihood outcomes which they achieve, are all part of urban livelihood processes. These processes in turn exert positive and/or negative ecosystem feedback on the livelihood assets and on the vulnerability context (see Figure 10.1). This means that efforts to develop physical and human capital through PTD need to take into consideration the effects of the technology on other household assets. For example, a technology involving high financial investment, such as drip irrigation, would reduce household financial assets that may be needed for other investments such as education or health care. PTD also needs to monitor the implications of alternative technologies for urban institutions and processes. For example, technologies for improving feed efficiency and thus profitability of pig-raising in locations where the municipal authority prohibits keeping animals (see the Hanoi case, Peters et al., 2002).

Whereas PTD in rural contexts has typically involved farmers and technicians jointly evaluating technology options in terms of their fit with the local farming and food system, the addition of an urban livelihoods systems framework locates the assessment of technologies in a more cross-sectoral, policy-sensitive setting. The rest of this chapter will explore a range of experiences evaluating technologies for urban use and highlight the way they have tried to adapt to different dimensions of livelihoods in the city

Participatory Technology Development: intensification and livelihoods

The wide range of farming systems found in urban areas can be differentiated in terms of types of intensification and their potential for positive and negative impacts on livelihoods. The urban setting encourages intensification and evidence suggests that the productivity of these systems is systematically higher than in rural areas (Yeung, 1987). Technology development needs to be focused on ensuring that intensification of both crop and animal production and processing offers maximum benefits to urban livelihoods and minimum negative impacts on the health of producer and consumer families, their neighbours and on the urban environment.

Agricultural intensification has usually been associated with the increase of output per unit of land area, through technical changes in crop management, especially the use of modern varieties and animal races, increased use of fertilisers and pesticides for crops, prepared feed, antibiotics and vaccines in livestock production, and improved water efficiency, especially via irrigation (Matson et al., 1997). Intensification in urban and peri-urban settings can be described as maximising output from minimal space. This also involves input technologies such as crop varieties and their combinations, seed management, animal nutrition, soil nutrition and water management. Pest and disease management is of major importance in some urban systems and almost ignored in others. Two aspects of intensification in the urban context which are less common or non-existent in rural agriculture (which will be considered later) involve the manipulation of vertical space³ and the recycling of domestic and commercial organic wastes as sources of soil or animal nutrition. This concerns technologies of composting or co-composting and the large-scale collection and preparation of restaurant and other food residues for animal feed, sometimes in combination with available forage. Although use of small quantities of domestic food residues is very commonly fed to animals also in rural areas, this urban feed system is unique in its scale and contribution to total feed input.

There are enormous differences in the way urban agriculture systems are classified, as is demonstrated in this volume (see Chapter 7, 11 and 12 for example). Classifications differ based on space (intra-urban/peri-urban), based on production objectives (subsistence/semi-commercial/entrepreneurial) and on predominance of crops or livestock and based on size of holdings. Most classifications capture a part of the reality but suffer from overlapping boundaries and geographical variability. In thinking about methods for technology development, it is important to think about the ways that different types of urban agriculture impinge on household livelihoods.

It is helpful to group together systems which mainly contribute in a positive way to household human resources through subsistence and enhanced nutrition, which also contribute in a limited way to the income of the family through small sales, or indirectly, through savings on purchased food. This contrasts with intensive semi-commercial or entrepreneurial systems which contribute an important, though not necessarily the major, part of household income, but because of the urban setting and the intensive methods can have negative health impacts on producer families and on neighbours and consumers. This is also an imperfect division, but it helps to organise thinking about key PTD issues in the urban context. In particular, it focuses attention on substantive differences in the manipulation of space and inputs.

Because of the somewhat different methodological experiences between crop and livestock production, these will be considered separately, even though mixed crop-livestock systems in cities are common and important for maximising recycling opportunities of crop and livestock wastes as fodder or manure.

The extent to which the policy and planning environment interacts with technology development also tends to vary between crop and livestock systems and between these two types of production system. Livestock-raising is subject to greater regulation and policy issues than crop production, and income-focused systems tend to be more policy sensitive than small-scale, "health and income support" systems. Policy factors are considered in a separate section.

Intensification and Sustainability of Urban Horticulture

A key technology development issue for urban horticultural production systems, especially on larger urban or peri-urban plots, concerns the sustainability of intensification strategies that farmers adopt, especially the extent to which these strategies impact on urban environmental health. Intensification of larger-scale urban horticultural systems occurs in at least three different ways with different associated health and environmental risks (see also Chapter 11):

1. Through cultivating high value crops during the off-season, to capture higher prices, through a combination of adapted varieties, increased use of pesticides and/or the use of physical barriers to control or avoid higher pest pressure. Risk factors are pesticide contamination and high cash investment.
   
   
2. Through productivity increases on the same land area in the same time period through modern varieties and/or increased use of agro-chemicals. Risk factors are pesticide contamination and nitrate leaching.
   
   
3. By maximising the use of available natural resources where these had not previously been used for agriculture, including use of wastewater, as a source of water but also as a source of nutrients (Cornish and Lawrence, 2001; Chapter 9), composted urban organic solid wastes and the use of abandoned or marginal lands, such as old factory or workshop areas, riverbanks or wetlands. Risk factors in this strategy are exposure to pathogens, parasites and heavy metals.

Technology innovation in these kinds of systems needs to adopt a broader urban systems approach to ensure that intensification contributes positively to individual household livelihoods – does not, for example, undermine human capital through pesticide poisoning – and also contributes to a more sustainable urban environment.

Intensified use of limited space

Some of the highest urban population densities are in developing world cities. For example, Manila City, part of Metro Manila, capital of the Philippines, has a population density of 41,000 people per square kilometre, almost ten times that of London. Very often the poorest families live in the most congested neighbourhoods and experience associated problems, such as health and difficulties in securing adequate food and nutrition for the household, because of high food costs. The poorest urban households spend as much as 80 percent of their income on food, up to 30 percent more than is spent by rural families (Argenti, 2000). With urban income frequently based on uncertain, intermittent employment, the possibility of utilising even the smallest spaces for intensive production of vegetables or small livestock can make a major contribution to the overall food security of these households.

Options and methods to maximise the agricultural productivity of minimal space vary along the urban-rural transect, with the greatest challenge existing in the most crowded intra-urban areas of cities where earth itself is lacking. In this situation, evaluation and innovation surrounds the conversion of under-utilised surfaces of the dwelling into mini-gardens.

This is the basis of container gardening, also referred to in the Philippines as "receptacle farming" (Undan et al., 2002). Rooftop gardening, as practised in many parts of the world from Manila to Russia to Senegal incorporates container gardening. This production method can provide an accessible and dependable source of leaves, stems, fruits, flowers and occasionally roots to supplement purchased food and to add micro-nutrients to starch-based diets. It takes advantage of patios, window sills, crevices and rooftops to locate any of a wide range of recycled domestic and industrial containers as recipients for soil and plants. Old tyres, tin cans, plastic bottles with the tops cut off, old water buckets, basins, baths, refrigerators and air-conditioning casings, biscuit boxes, fruit crates, bamboo poles, jute or plastic sacks with holes in the sides - the list goes on. As always with urban food production, human health risks need to be monitored in this method. Metal containers or paint cans can be a source of heavy metal contamination affecting humans and in some cases such as zinc, also plants. Metal containers can also absorb too much heat preventing good root growth. Two key technologies influence successful container gardening and need to be carefully evaluated: the type and quality of the planting materials and the quality of the planting medium. The economic benefits of container gardens are usually derived from the saved income from not purchasing vegetables in the market rather than from direct sales (Villamayor, 1991).

For these very low cost systems, accessing low- or zero-cost planting material is of major importance. A key strategy in PTD for facilitating access to planting material is through local seed networks, involving neighbouring households, schools, civil society organisations, agricultural extension services, city health centres and/or other local and national government offices. Social networks, especially linking women neighbours, do exist in urban settings (Arce et al., 2004) and seed transactions, if they don't exist already, can relatively easily become absorbed as a type of exchange in these informal networks⁴. In some cities, such as Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Manila and Baguio in the Philippines and Havana in Cuba, formal community or local government seed systems exist which supply seedlings at low prices to container and other types of urban gardeners (Jacobi et al., 2000; Gayao et al., 1997; Hellen Keller International, 1994; Cruz and Medina, 2003).

Indigenous species can more easily be replanted than exotic species, since the saved seed is mostly viable. Among African traditional leafy vegetables (TLVs), Amaranthus, Corchorus and Vernonia spp produce easily harvestable seeds which can be stored and reused, though the period of viability may be limited to as little as six months, and storage practices are sometimes problematic (Poubom, 1999). The production of seed of exotic, temperate vegetables is mostly a specialised activity in limited agro-ecosystems in tropical and sub-tropical regions, and seed must be purchased. Because seed of these species is usually sold in volumes much larger than is needed to plant containers in a small area, these are less commonly found in container gardens and usually linked to a community or local government seed system. Although there is much evidence about informal, reciprocal seed exchanges taking place between small rural households in the literature (eg. Tripp, 2001) there is limited information about exchanges among container and other kinds of urban producer. An early study in Kenya found that this type of exchange exists among different types of urban producers, but more commonly in the larger towns and cities (Lee-Smith and Memon, 1994). A recent study in Lima among small producers growing mainly for the market found that only about1 percent of producers obtain their seed this way, 18 percent reproduce their own seeds, primarily for local species, whilst the main seed source – especially for exotic and/or commercial species and varieties - is the commercial seed sector. Participatory technology development has been actively applied to the field of local seed systems (Scheidegger and Prain, 2000) and could contribute to enhancing access to and management of seeds in urban container gardening and other kinds of urban production systems.

The main factors of concern in managing container media are fertility, moisture control and aeration. A variety of techniques are available, and some examples are described in Table 10.1.

Although container gardens are adapted to densely populated spaces lacking plots of cultivable land, those same spaces are dense in usable nutrients: those deriving from the organic wastes and residues of the local population. Urine was identified as the most effective nutrient in Mexico, and it also emerged as the winner in participatory evaluations in the slums of Tacloban in central Philippines (Villamayor, 1991). Other sources of nutrients include food wastes, leaves collected from city trees and animal wastes from urban livestock keepers who sometimes find problems with disposal of these wastes (Njenga and Karanja., 2005). Evaluations of different nutrient options depend on local availability of organic residues of different types and the interest and resources of the container owner. Often there is either no space or no time for composting of household wastes, so urine is an attractive alternative. Where manure is easily available, as in Addis Ababa, maintenance of a stock of manure tea may be quite feasible.

Whether for container gardens or in less dense settlements where people have access to small backyard gardens or to off-site plots such as roadsides, riversides, wetland margins or unused public lands such as railway embankments and under power lines, opportunities exist for intensifying production. Intensification is dependent, as has been mentioned, on the interest and resources of the producer family, but it is also dependent on the regulatory environment. Even with sufficient resources, large investments in hydroponic or organoponic technologies is likely to occur only if there is security of tenure and supportive local policies (chapter 3, this volume). These issues are discussed in more detail in the final section of the chapter. In this section, alternative methods are briefly introduced which offer minimalist, low-cost solutions to intensification under constrained space conditions and often in an uncertain regulatory climate and informal social organisation.

BIG in Ethiopia, just outside Addis

Bio-intensive gardening seeks to intensify and diversify production through low-cost improvements in crop, seed and variety selection and sequencing, plant nutrition, soil management and pest management (Getachew, 2002; Chapter 11 this volume). The approach has a long history as a strategy for rural food and nutrition security (IIRR, 1991), but more recently it is being applied to the urban context. Bio-intensive urban gardens, in addition to the emphasis on enhanced nutritional quality of the food produced, adds a concern with food safety, given the increasing commercialisation of vegetables from high input peri-urban and truck farming systems. There is a strong emphasis on crop management and especially soil management, through simple techniques such as "basket gardens" and more labour intensive "double digging" of the garden bed with a mixture of 50 – 100 percent compost, for enhanced productivity (See the Case of "The Living Garden", Chapter 11, this volume).

The "pyramid" gardens introduced in Kampala and other cities are examples of the importance of manipulating vertical as well as horizontal space as a means of bio-intensification of small urban plots (cf. Niñez, 1984). Through collaboration between the Kampala City Agriculture Office and local women gardeners, pyramid-shaped structures have been constructed, using compost-enriched earth held in place by chicken wire and sacking. Holes are made in the sacking both horizontally, around the structure, and vertically, with the top part left open for additional planting. Such an arrangement allows the growth of many more plants than could be grown in a flat bed.

These practices are simple adaptations of two livelihoods realities present in many poor households in Addis, Kampala and in other cities in the developing world. On the one hand it is the common practice of planting horticultural crops in any available planting space, to supplement household food supplies and reduce cash expenditures on food, however modest. On the other, it is the existence of "hidden" household physical or natural capital – vegetative and animal organic wastes – which instead of being perceived as a nuisance and a burden, can be co-composted for use as soil nutrients to improve horticultural productivity. In Ethiopia, this simple connection has been made through hands-on practical training courses in bio-intensive gardening and through incorporating this and other types of bio-intensive technologies into NGO activities in and around Addis. In the case of intensive gardening in Kampala, although their introduction and use has been a result of close cooperation between the City Agriculture Office and women gardeners, the ambiguous status of cultivation in the city, with several by-laws prohibiting aspects of agriculture still in existence into the 21st century, the large-scale diffusion of these approaches has been inhibited, at least until a recent participatory review of the by-laws and ordinances and their revision by the City Council (DFID, 2006).

Urban horticulture as an income source and health risk: intensification and sustainability

A second, broad category of crop production systems in urban and peri-urban areas are those that seek to take advantage of close by, diverse markets through shorter growing seasons, higher yields and the production of the most profitable commodities. In this commercial intensification, these systems can interact in a number of negative ways with the urban environment, creating health risks to both producers and consumers and therefore becoming unsustainable. Risks include pesticide contamination, nitrate leaching, exposure to pathogens and parasites and contamination from heavy metals.

An integrated hydroponics system at Growing Power, Milwaukee

Technology innovation in these kinds of systems needs to adopt a broader urban systems approach to ensure that intensification contributes positively to individual household livelihoods – does not, for example, undermine human capital through pesticide poisoning – and also contributes to a more sustainable urban environment.

Farmer Field Schools, an approach which was developed for rural agriculture, has attempted to focus on eco-system learning and sustainable production systems, especially through integrated crop management.. It seems very appropriate for adaptation for use in urban conditions.

The Farmer Field School (FFS) method applies adult education thinking and experience to agricultural learning and change. Adult education has grown in importance as educators have recognised that the accelerating pace of technological change means that the tools one acquires in formal pedagogic education ⁽⁶⁾ become quickly obsolete in adult life (Minnick, 1989). FFS was developed initially to facilitate farmer understanding and application of integrated pest management principles in rice farming, for which conventional technology transfer training approaches were found to be inadequate (Röling and van de Fliert, 1998) and it was successfully introduced into rice farming in Indonesia and other Asian countries (ibid).

FFS has been applied to a broader range of crops, such as vegetables and has become less specifically focused on IPM, especially in cases where it is applied to crops with less stable demand and less clear agronomic constraints, such as sweetpotatoes in Indonesia (Braun et al 1997). This has led to considerable adaptation of the original production-side, crop constraint focus, with more attention to soils, markets, local learning and organization and farmer empowerment (Röling, 2003; Züger, 2005). In particular, it is possible to see how FFS is becoming more closely aligned with a livelihoods perspective, and less strongly tied to crop protection. In the words of Niels Röling, FFS is "a form of agricultural education that develops 'human and social capital' while conserving 'natural capital'" (ibid). This evolution of FFS seemed to align it very well with the livelihoods framework which is being increasingly used in urban agriculture research (Urban Harvest, 2004). The basic principles of the Farmer Field School, distilled from 10 years of Asian and other experience are listed in box 10.3 (adapted from Pretty, 1995)

FFSs provid

FFSs provide the setting and the materials for farmers to explore and discover for themselves new knowledge about agricultural production on the presumption that knowledge actively and repeatedly obtained in this way will be more easily internalised, retained and applied after completion of the training. Repetition is important for retention, which is one reason why FFSs are repeated, usually on a weekly or fortnightly basis, with the same structure, throughout the growing season.

Though some of these elements are as relevant and important for urban agriculture as they are for agriculture in rural conditions, some have special resonance in urban conditions. The approach requires a major time commitment by FFS participants which can be problematic in urban conditions where agriculture may be only one of several livelihoods activities.

Until recently the application of this method to urban conditions was largely untested (Prain, 2001). Yet it appears to offer the possibility of mitigating the negative consequences of intensification referred to above through safely and sustainably increasing the use of organic wastes for soil conditioning and plant nutrition and improving the management of pests and diseases through integrated approaches, leading to improved crop quality and food safety which are increasingly contentious issues in urban agriculture. It also offers the means to relate crop production to the broader socio-economic, institutional and policy arenas.

Case 1 of this chapter provides an example of the adaptation of FFS to urban horticulture in Lima, Peru. It shows that time is more of a constraint in urban settings and commitment is perhaps more closely linked to commercial opportunities offered by participation in the school. FFS also places strong emphasis on social interaction and learning, involving group activities. This can present difficulties in urban contexts where limited trust and social capital exist among urban cultivators (Arce et al., 2004). Yet as this case makes clear, though weak social linkages and other, urban-specific factors necessitate special attention at the beginning of the FFS process, the process itself provides a positive means to establish and strengthen social and communal ties within cities.

The case describes a project which was launched in 2004 by Urban Harvest and involved multilateral, national public sector, NGO's and community participation to mitigate urban poverty in the low-income eastern shanty towns of Lima through agriculture. Lima. The general objective of the project is to contribute to reduced urban poverty, improved food and nutrition security and a more sustainable urban environment through participatory, urban-adapted innovation in crop and livestock technologies and capacity building of the local population in sustainable and healthy urban food production. The experience of Farmer Field Schools within the CGIAR and especially within the International Potato Center, which convenes Urban Harvest, offered a model to address both urban-adapted innovation and farmer capacity building.

Urban and Peri-urban Livestock Raising: methods for addressing needs and mitigating risks

Throughout the developing world, and especially in Africa, animals are an important physical and financial capital for many urban and peri-urban households. They may be a regular or periodic source of income through sale of milk, eggs or off-spring, and they represent a form of savings which can be cashed-in if a crisis occurs. Animals also generate additional physical capital in the form of manure, either for sale or for improving the household's crop production system. Livestock are thus key components of livelihoods for many families and improvements in growth rate, health status and meat quality and/or reduction in costs of production through alternative diets using locally available ingredients can contribute directly and significantly to livelihoods (ILRI, 2005). On the other hand, keeping animals in the often cramped conditions faced by many peri-urban and especially urban producers is a potential health risk, not only to the producer's family, but also to neighbours and consumers (Birley and Lock, 1999) and chapter 12).

Goat keeping in Kampala

Yet in both rural and urban contexts, PTD for livestock has a much shorter history than for crops. A search on the internet for PTD in relation to crops and crop varieties, seed, soils, pests and diseases returns 5.5 million pages as opposed to 94,000 for PTD and animals, livestock and/or specific types of animals. Although situation diagnosis and analysis often includes livestock-raising and crop-livestock interactions, and looks at economic risks of the business, it less commonly incorporates environmental or health risk assessment associated with integrated systems. There are also far fewer cases of participatory experimentation for technology development. This is partly due to the fact that livestock research is still very much scientist-led and experiment-station based (DfID, 2005; Conroy, 2004), more so than crops research. Conroy also comments on another tendency within livestock research – to address the problems of, and work with, large-scale, commercial animal production and product enterprises, rather than addressing the often very different problems and needs of small-scale livestock keepers.

However, there are also methodological difficulties with participatory research with animals. Situation analysis may require different kinds of sampling, to capture different sizes of enterprises involving different kinds of animals and the variability of herd size over time, as well as including non-livestock keepers (See Case 2). This tends to favour the use of modelling, which allows the possibility of including these multiple variables, at lower cost. Where health risks are part of the diagnosis, minimal data on exposure to risk may require diverse sampling of animal substances and products. Although these difficulties also apply to situation analysis involving health risks in crop production, these are far fewer, and the more limited physical contact between human and crop reduces the exposure risk. The importance of exposure risk in livestock keeping suggests that there is more of a need for complementarity between participatory and non-participatory methods. In many cases, laboratory assessments, for example, need to be considered a component of the PTD process. Some of these issues are listed below.

• Experimental comparison of different technology options, such as animal cohorts undergoing alternative feed regimes, is complicated by several factors not present in the case of crops;
  
  
• Space constraints on-farm, limiting number of technology options or number of animals per option, which weakens the conclusions that can be drawn;
  
  
• Livestock management limitations, such as ensuring that "technology options" do not walk into each other's pens, thus confusing the conclusions that farmers and researchers can draw;
  
  
• High value to households of individual animals, leading sometimes to sales ahead of the completion of the trial;
  
  
• Practical difficulties and costs of periodic weighing on farm;
  
  
• Negative attitudes of local authorities or neighbours to the participant in research;
  

Many of these methodological problems are even more severe for urban livestock-keepers, where space is often more limited and the separation of technology options or treatments more complicated and where potential health risks from close animal-human interactions and the difficulties of disposing of animal wastes are greater. This tends to place greater importance on the use of statistical techniques to overcome these constraints.

The policy and regulatory context is often more difficult in urban settings, with controls or prohibitions frequently applied to livestock raising, leading to insecurity. Nevertheless, there have been some recent developments in introducing PTD into smallholder livestock research and at the same time reviewing the policy context in which technical improvement is taking place ⁷. The rest of the section illustrates these developments in Vietnam, Uganda and Lima.

Participatory experimentation: pig nutrition in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Feed is the main direct expense for pig-raising households in Hanoi, after the cost of piglets. Thus farmers seek ways to reduce their costs whilst maintaining or improving the health and growth rates of their animals. Situation diagnosis in a rural-urban transect linking Hanoi with its rural hinterland found three distinct pig production systems: mostly rural production of piglets, with sows fed on available agricultural residues, especially sweet potato vines; commercial fattening of pigs over about 30 kilos, mostly in the urban and peri-urban areas, and increasingly dependent on use of restaurant and other food residues from the city; in between these two systems, there is the specialised raising of young pigs (got) from about 7 kilos to about 30 kilos. This is the most entrepreneurial system, in that it carries higher risks from disease, but also higher potential profits. Profitability is related to growth rate, as well as the healthy, chubby appearance of the animals at sale, and these factors are highly influenced by diet. The original diet was based on purchased rice, rice bran, concentrates and a small amount of forage, mainly sweet potato tops. These inputs, most of which are enmeshed in a complex credit system, suffer significant price fluctuations, making the pig-raising family vulnerable to losses.

Furthermore, the rice needs to be cooked, thus increasing the costs and the labour investment. The PTD intervention in this context consisted in evaluating alternative, local feed sources, both for energy and for protein. In a series of three rounds of trials, two or three options or treatments, discussed and developed with the farmers, were compared with the current feed combination. Once again, as occurred in the example of Kampala, there is need to help construct a strong social network among farmer participants to establish a trusting environment within which to pool existing knowledge and experience and to ensure continued interest in participation. This was achieved through orientation and consultation meetings, sensitisation workshops, group evaluations of interim results and the encouragement of regular interactions among those involved in the trials. In Vietnam, there is a very strong local government system which supports to some extent the organisation of this kind of intervention, but there is also a need to create legitimacy for the intervention among the local cadres. An effective means to achieve this is through regular presentation of results to the local authorities and involvement of local authority representatives in knowledge exchange visits to other sites. This is important in any PTD intervention, but in political contexts where the local authorities control outsider access to households, it is essential. (Peters et al., 2002; Tinh, 2004).

Building capacity, institutional dialogue and policy support: Livestock groups in Lima and Nairobi

Within an urban livelihood framework, participatory technology development cannot be separated from PID: participatory institutional development. This is especially important for livestock-related PTD which is the target of much local regulatory attention. PID includes the need for capacity building, both to enhance efficiencies and to build awareness about safety and health issues. In Lima, a key component of capacity building for livestock production involves familiarisation with key indicators of animal health, development and feed needs and the maintenance of livestock registers, using the indicators to monitor growth and improve performance. This monitoring process is also being used by the R&D team to identify tendencies, in terms of feed use, health status or growth rate to propose technology intervention options. At the same time, this hands-on capacity building provides the basis for group formation around particular livestock and eventually formation of legal associations. This is part of a strategy to strengthen the capacity of local livestock keepers to link to new markets. Group formation can be a new process, working with independent households, or can build on existing structures, for example schools, churches or, as in the case of Lima, community kitchen-based women's groups. This group formation is closely linked in turn with institutional analysis, learning and change at the level of the local government, involving elected and appointed officials and representatives of other sectors (Arce, 2006).

Container roof garden in Manila, Philippines

In Nairobi, where urban and peri-urban livestock keepers make a major contribution to satisfying the city's demand for milk (Staal et al., 2002), they are also rather isolated from government services and vulnerable to regulation and harassment. In 2004, the Nairobi and Environs Food Security, Agriculture and Livestock Forum (NEFSALF) was established to:

• "drive the sectoral mix and interactions" among producer communities, government agencies, local government, the agricultural research community and the market, thereby improving institutional recognition and supporting commercial opportunities;
  
  
• acquire and target relevant knowledge;
  
  
• monitor process and monitor outcomes.

NEFSALF provides a platform to facilitate access by the community to provincial and municipal services and to open a dialogue with the City Council. It also provides the space for capacity building in key technical, health and policy areas, provided by public sector specialists. Currently the forum brings together 15 community groups mostly involved in mixed crop-livestock farming, government ministries, NGOs and local government representation (NEFSALF, 2005).

Integrated urban management of local agricultural development

In the urban setting, agriculture is one strand in a complicated web of activities in which households are engaged in pursuit of their livelihoods. Participatory technology development needs to assess the direct impact of innovations on household capitals and potential feedbacks to the urban ecosystem, affecting the capitals of other families. As the livelihoods framework makes clear, these innovations are also filtered through local institutions and policies which are more pervasive and invasive in urban areas than in the countryside. Urban PTD has a better chance of success if agriculture forms part of an integrated approach to urban development, with a supportive and enabling institutional and policy environment.

A useful example to consider, in which PTD has proceeded within an enabling policy environment, is Cuba. As Case 3 discusses in more detail, the growth of urban agriculture in Cuba and the uptake of innovative technologies have been dramatic and impressive. In just over ten years, between 1989 and 2000, it moved from a marginal component in urban food systems to a major category of land use in Havana and other cities, a major employer of urban labour and an important source of micro-nutrients for the urban population. It has also greatly reduced the accumulation of organic wastes in urban dumpsites.

Among the many instances of technical innovation which have accompanied this agricultural transformation, "organoponics" – the large-scale construction of raised beds for vegetable production using an enriched substrate of soil and organic matter – is a particularly important illustration of how institutional and policy integration facilitates technical change. Organoponics involves spatial intensification through the utilization vacant lots – frequently the concrete surfaces of demolished buildings. Facilitating this intensification are a series of policy changes about access to land, marketing of products and the structuring of the employment market. Bio-intensification, through an adaptation of the raised bed and double-digging techniques and the application of high levels of organic matter is again supported through institutional and policy mechanisms involving access to waste building materials to construct the beds and the provision of transport services to bring the large quantities of organic matter from the rural to urban areas.

Technologies do not stand alone. They need to be adapted not only to local ecological and socio-economic realities, they also need to be compatible with and supported by the local institutions and policies.

Concluding Remarks

Two important lessons emerge from the cases and experiences discussed in this chapter. For urban agriculture to be viable and sustainable, innovation needs to occur in the context of urban livelihoods, in which agriculture usually complements other employment and where agriculture contributes to and draws on the diverse set of capitals making up the household asset base.

Innovation also needs to occur at technical, institutional and at policy levels and to involve households, communal organisations and city authorities. It is this need for multiple innovation which seems to be more essential for urban than for rural agriculture. Cuba exemplifies not only the contribution of the city authorities to technical innovation in the organoponic gardens, but also the provision of a facilitating policy environment, in the form of relaxed restrictions on private access to and exploitation of land, new marketing systems and support for establishment of local level organisations (see the thrrd case).

Less successful aspects of the Cuban experience highlight other key elements of urban agriculture that need to be fostered. Technical, institutional and policy innovation need to result from participatory dialogue and negotiation, rather than being imposed by a single actor in the process. For instance, in Cuba there has been a tendency to impose a uniform use of high-yielding varieties, through a centrally-organised seed production system, even though experimentation with local land races or mixed varietal plantings could lead to benefits in some systems. Furthermore, there are indications that though urban agriculture has successfully produced food for several cities, it has not always become a well-integrated part of those cities. In the words of two Cuban writers, there is a lack of "harmony between the productive space and the constructed space" (Cruz and Medina, 2003). These observations raise an increasingly important theme in the urban agriculture discourse in both the North and the South. This concerns the multi-functionality of urban space and the opportunity for agriculture in the urban setting to fulfil multiple roles for the urban community (Chapter 1 and 7, this volume). The environmental contribution of agriculture has been widely documented. Already there is evidence that the psycho-social space which agriculture provides to poor households and communities in the city, and especially to women, can sometimes be as important as its food security or income role (Slater, 2001). Experiences cited in this chapter suggest that through the medium of field schools, urban agriculture can be a means for social organisation. There are also opportunities for agriculture to function as a source of child and youth education about natural processes and resources, as a locus for family recreation, and a major contributor to the sustainability of cities.

Notes

¹ This is not to imply that rural livelihoods are exclusively bound to farming. There is also diversity in rural livelihoods, but agriculture is still by far the dominant activity and often the only one (cf Ellis, 2000).

² In chapter 6 the authors identify seven capitals to illustrate Community Building Urban Agriculture (CBUA).

³ Tropical slash and burn or swidden agriculture is an important system that also manipulates vertical space (Conklin, 1975).

⁴ Nevertheless, social networks and other types of social capital may be less common in urban settings compared to rural communities (Stren et al., 2003)). This is discussed further in section below.

⁵ Manure dissolved in water.

⁶ Pedagogy literally means "to teach children".

⁷ The work of DFID's Livestock Production Programme (LPP) has made an important contribution to bringing participatory research into the mainstream of livestock programs in the developing world. See DfID 2005. The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), through its Small Dairy Development Program, has also tried to incorporate a participatory approach and to work with the small, informal sector where most dairy production takes place in Africa (Staal, 2002), and there are other examples.

8 This can be resolved through drawing a statistically random sub-sample from the survey sample.

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The Farmer Field School (FFS) method in an urban setting: a case study in Lima, Peru

Blanca Arce
César Valencia
Maarten Warnaars
Gordon Prain
Ricardo Valle

Background

In 2004, a project to mitigate urban poverty through agriculture was launched in the low-income eastern shanty towns of Lima and used the Farmer Field School (FFS) methodology adapted to an urban situation. Lima is located in the coastal desert of Peru and has one of the lowest rainfalls in the world. Water for domestic, industrial and agricultural uses is mainly supplied from the three rivers which flow from the Andes Mountains to the northern, eastern and southern zones of the city. The Rìmac river in the eastern zone irrigates about 4500 hectares within metropolitan Lima, from the Andean foothills to the central parts of the city. Small plots are used by urban producers primarily to grow leafy, root and fruit vegetables, maize and aromatic herbs and to raise small animals, including pigs and dairy cattle. Back-yard crop production and livestock raising are also undertaken on a much smaller scale by shanty-town dwellers with no access to irrigation water.

Farmer Field School in the eastern cone of Lima, Peru

Field School Implementation

Participatory workshops, consultations with producers and a baseline survey indicated widespread use of highly toxic pesticides and limited knowledge about integrated crop management practices. There were also widespread marketing problems. Based on these findings, the broad goals of the Lima FFS were:

1. To build the capacity of producers to better analyse the local agro-ecosystems so as to manage vegetable crops more sustainably;
   
   
2. To undertake participatory evaluation of crop management innovations; and,
   
   
3. To strengthen producer capacity for social organisation for improved marketing and other objectives.

Previous livelihoods assessments (Maldonad, 2004) clearly showed low levels of social capital among the producer families. There was limited participation in associations and low levels of communal action – less among men than among women. This meant that more time had to be invested in preliminary group sensitisation meetings and in group dynamics than is necessary in rural contexts where field schools are often embedded in existing social structures.

To address this situation, a "pre-school" phase was implemented, involving joint meetings during which the principles and ideas of the FFS were explained and discussed with a large group of both female and male producers. From this group a smaller number of producers who demonstrated a willingness to participate in the weekly half-day meetings throughout the growing season, which the method calls for, was identified. Another meeting was held with these FFS members to agree on commitments, norms and rules for the implementation of the FFS and to define the thematic programme.

This preparation period took nearly three months, much longer than anticipated and certainly longer than is usual for FFS implementation in rural areas. This was partly due to the complexity of the vegetable farming systems in the area, but also due to the diversity of interests of the group, the novelty of the approach for them, the diversity of non-agricultural activities in which they are involved and the need to build consensus and agreement on the curriculum. The process involved many different types of sensitisation meetings, workshops and cross-visits.

Based on these discussions, the FFS programme and curriculum was established. The programme consisted of the seven stages, which are slightly different from the "classical" FFS structure, and reflects a perceived need by the facilitators to emphasize review and continuity in each session, to ensure commitment over time and to reinforce learning (Table 10.2).

With this overall structure for each session, the curriculum encompassed several learning points for the different sessions. These learning points linked to and drew on experiences in the project's activities such as market chain analysis, water quality studies and small animal keeping.

Learning points

• So far, two FFSs have been completed in two localities of the eastern zone of Lima, one using beetroot and lettuce as the target crops, the other focused on lettuce. A total of 23 producers have completed the schools.
  
  
• Whereas in rural areas the location of the communal activities of the FFS on an individual's private land has not been problematic, this has been an issue in the urban field schools. Participant producers expressed interest in accessing a neutral space for continued experimentation and learning. Municipal land was assigned for use as a "School for Urban Farmers". This "school without walls" provides a stable location for on-going evaluations of alternative technologies by the FFS graduates themselves. It also demonstrates alternative production practices to other producers and is a visible recognition of the necessary integration of agriculture within municipal policy and practice.
  
  
• The School for Urban Farmers has the potential to offer multi-functional services to the local population. These can include income, food security and therapeutic options for vulnerable groups such as unemployed youth, pensioners and the sick. It is also an excellent site to provide environmental education for local schools.
  
  
• As part of the sensitisation process and the group dynamics of different sessions, a wide range of innovative learning tools and approaches were adapted to the urban characteristics of the FFS group. Tools such as "social drama", which enacted the relationship between "the farmer and the soil", helped to strengthen links to urban natural resources and their conservation and to strengthen the resolve of local producers to maintain their land for agricultural production rather than selling it for conversion to residential or industrial use.
  
  
• Field data obtained from trials undertaken as part of the FFS suggest that integrated practices, especially double-digging, resulted in yield increases of 15 percent for lettuce and 22 percent for beetroot.
  
  
• Applications of chemical insecticides were reduced from 2-3 applications per crop in the "farmer practice" treatment to zero applications in the integrated crop management (ICM) treatments, although herbicides continued to be applied in the latter.
  
  
• Preliminary results demonstrated the potential to reduce reliance on chemical insecticides while increasing yield
  
  
• A complementary study which compared the perception of time and other variables among participants in rural and urban FFSs (Warnaars and Pradel forthcoming) yielded the following main findings:
  
  • Urban participants were found to be more "time constrained" than their rural counterparts, mainly because of a larger number of demands on their attention and commitment. This confirms the need for a more elaborate sensitisation and consultation period in preparing the FFS and agreeing on the ground rules.
    
  • Rural participants valued the FFS more highly than their urban counterparts. This seems to reflect the much greater involvement of rural participants in agriculture as their major – and often only – livelihood activity.
    
  • Both urban and rural participants highly appreciated the FFS as an organisational tool and a means to secure social cohesion, though this may be more marked among the urban participants.
    
    
  • Both sets of participants wanted their children to pursue an education and did not see their children staying on in agriculture. This clearly reflects both the cultural devaluation of agriculture as an occupation in Peru, and the economic constraints faced by most agricultural producers under present technical capacities and marketing conditions. It highlights the need for re-valuing agriculture as a complementary livelihood activity and seeking increased profitability from technical innovation, alternative crops or animal products and the identification of new market opportunities.
    
    
• The positive impact of the FFS was demonstrated by the significantly increased knowledge of ICM principles demonstrated by participants and the adoption of ICM practices on their own farms
  
  
• The positive impact of the FFS was also demonstrated in the increased social capital of participants and their empowerment to seek institutional change. Both FFS groups have formed themselves into agro-enterprise associations to market ecological products.

References

Braun, A., Fliert, E. van de, Wheatley, C., Prain, G., Widodo, Y., 1995. Improving profits from sweetpotato by linking IPM with diversification of markets./ Mejorando la rentabilidad de la batata al unir MIP con la diversificacion de mercados. AP CIP Circular - International Potato Center (Peru). ISSN 0256-8632. 21(3):8-15.

Maldonado, Luis, 2005. La agricultura urbana en Lima: estrategia familiar y polìtica de gestión municipal. AGROPOLIS AWARD Report. CIP, Lima

Prain, Gordon, 2001. Farmer Field Schools: an ideal method for urban agriculture? Urban Agriculture Magazine, Number 5. RUAF, Leusden, Netherlands

Pretty, Jules, 1995. Regenerating Agriculture: Policies and Practices for Sustainability and Self-reliance. Earthscan, London.

Röling, Niels G. and Elske V. de Fliert. 1998. Introducing integrated pest management in rice in Indonesia: a.pioneering attempt to facilitate large-scale change. In Roling N.G. and M.A.E. Wagemakers (eds), Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture: Participatory learning and adaptive management in times of environmental uncertainty. Cambridge University Press, UK.

Röling, Niels G, 2003. Issues and Challenges for FFS: an introductory overview. In CIP-UPWARD, Farmer Field Schools: Emerging Issues and Challenges. International Potato Center – Users' Perspectives with Agricultural Research and Development, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines, 434 pages.

Warnaars, Maarten and Willie Pradel, forthcoming. A Comparative Study of the Perceptions of Urban and Rural Farmer Field School Participants in Peru. Urban Harvest Working Paper, CIP, Lima, Peru.

Züger, Regula, 2005. Participatory development projects in the Andes - Looking for empowerment with Q-Methodology. Paper presented at PRGA Impact Assessment Workshop, October 19-21, 2005, CIMMYT Headquarters, Mexico. http://www.prgaprogram.org/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=65

Situation Analysis and Health Risk Assessment: Cattle and poultry raising in Kampala

Gordon Prain

The Study

Livestock production within urban and peri-urban agriculture offers a wide variety of potential benefits (see also chapter 12). However, these benefits must be weighed against the potential negative effects of urban livestock production. The findings of a study in Kampala that examined the economic and health consequences of raising animals in the city are summarised here. The study was conducted among livestock keepers and included a sample of urban households that did not keep livestock (referred to as non-livestock keepers) as a control.

Pyramid garden and container gardening in central Kampala

Sampling of the three groups (cattle keepers, poultry keepers and non-livestock keepers) required preliminary and extensive key informant interactions, and helped to establish representative focus groups. Local knowledge and the residents' lists managed by the parish officials were used. In contrast to relatively homogenous rural communities, urban households tend to be more heterogeneous, having extremely varied livelihood activities. In this context it was essential to tap into local knowledge and the local social capital.

The information gathered through the focus group discussions was used to prepare a formal survey. Trade offs had to be made between statistically adequate sampling for the formal survey and the financial and organisational limitations on sample size for the health impacts assessment, which required taking a range of bio-physical samples (blood, milk, eggs). The collection and laboratory analysis of samples was necessary to verify health risks and to suggest participatory technology development (PTD) options. This underlines the interdependence in certain cases between participatory and non-participatory methodologies.

Cattle

The preliminary qualitative assessment identified cattle as the second-most important species for livestock activities in all areas of Kampala, after chickens. The benefits were ranked by focus group participants as follows: milk for cash income and home consumption; cattle sales (often for payment of dowry); manure for sale or use; employment creation. Milk production was clearly the most important benefit and this held true for both urban and peri-urban areas. Selling cattle, including for bride price payments, was considered almost equally important, especially in the urban areas and in some but not all peri-urban areas. Producing manure to sell or use in their fields was considered quite important by farmers as a secondary benefit in the peri-urban areas, but less so in the urban areas. Just over half (51 percent) of the households said they obtained more than a quarter of their household income from keeping cattle, particularly from the sale of milk.

Among the risks associated with cattle-rearing, the focus groups cited environmental pollution, accidents caused by cattle, straying of cattle in the neighbourhood leading to conflicts, low returns compared to farm inputs, flies being a nuisance, and zoonotic diseases. The zoonotic diseases specifically mentioned were tuberculosis (akafuba), brucellosis (okusowola) and tetanus. When the risks were ranked according to their perceived public health and economic importance, tuberculosis and brucellosis were ranked the highest.

These focus group findings were well-supported by the separate, in-depth qualitative studies of livestock keeping households using transect walks and in-depth interviews in two urban and two peri-urban parishes, and also by the formal survey. In all four areas, cattle were mostly kept in stalls or sometimes tethered, allowing women to supervise them while performing other domestic activities. Herds of cattle only occurred in the peri-urban areas. In the most rural of the peri-urban areas, cattle grazing on roadsides were being managed collectively by hired herders, while in a more densely settled peri-urban area herds grazed on open land at a community centre.

A farmer in Kampala who supplies a big supermarket in Kampala with green vegetables

Most respondents from both cattle-rearing and non-livestock keeping households were aware that consumption of raw cow's milk is risky, though they were not aware of the specific zoonotic diseases or drug residue hazards associated with raw milk. Despite this common awareness, consumption of raw milk was significantly higher among non-livestock households than in cattle-rearing households, suggesting that in the case of the non-livestock households awareness of risk did not necessarily lead to abstention. On the other hand, cases of household members diagnosed with brucellosis, which were reported in three of the cattle-keeping study households and the fact that 21 percent of the livestock households reported abortions in cattle, which can be a symptom of brucellosis, may represent sufficiently strong evidence of risk to lead to higher levels of abstention in these livestock households. Furthermore, only two out of 150 cattle-rearing households reported having vaccinated against brucellosis.

The situation analysis indicated that consumers of milk produced within Kampala District are at risk of exposure to both anti-microbial drug residues (â-Lactams) and zoonotic pathogens. Whereas some awareness exists that milk may be associated with health risks, the majority of those concerned knew little about the specifics of the various disease hazards, especially from anti-microbials. General ignorance of the latter and lack of effective control measures can be expected to contribute to cases of anti-microbial drug resistance (especially of â-Lactams) and allergies associated with such residues in foods (milk) in the city. With respect to zoonoses, this prospective study found a relatively high prevalence of brucellosis in cattle and the presence of E. coli in milk, indicating the need for more in-depth risk analyses and impact studies of these public health hazards, to guide the design of PTD, educational and/or policy interventions.

Chickens

Qualitative assessment of chicken-rearing activities indicated three categories: keeping layers for egg production; providing feed inputs to raise improved breeds as broilers for sale of live birds; and raising small flocks of local breeds using feed or scavenging. The third category also includes the sale of live birds. The focus groups identified benefits derived from rearing chickens and then ranked them using the pair-wise ranking technique. The general pattern that emerged across the different focus groups found the principal benefits, in decreasing order, to be: income generation; supplementary food for the household; and a source of manure.

Generally, Kampala households prefer eating the local free-range chickens and selling the improved breeds. The contribution of chicken production activities to household income varied between 19 and 76 percent, with a median of 38 percent. A pathway analysis of the production and marketing chain indicated perceptions such as the contradictory role of the municipal authorities (Kampala City Council) and the poor service provided by the veterinary drug sellers, including the high costs of the drugs. Also, marketing of chickens and eggs is sometimes performed by middlemen, which generates employment but also increases opportunities for contamination and human exposure to health risks.

The separate in-depth study on livestock production also confirmed the focus group findings for poultry keeping. Chickens were the most common form of livestock in all four areas, with all households keeping free-range local chickens for home consumption and more households raising exotic or "improved" breeds for sale of eggs or broilers. All households noted that the exotic breeds were more prone to disease although higher in productivity, and that the production of poultry for sale of eggs and live birds was on the increase in their area. Households rearing chickens in the two urban parishes appeared more conscious and concerned about diseases transmitted by livestock to humans than in the two peri-urban areas, with farmers in the central urban area even concerned about disease transmission from humans to chickens. They noted that keepers with flu could infect birds making them sick and unlikely to breed well and avoided contact with their chickens when they were ill.

Cowshed in Kampala

Women are the main caretakers of chickens in the household, (65 percent of the survey sample) and for 47 percent of respondents it is their main activity. For more than 80 percent it is a year-round activity with high rates of investments in vaccination.

Hygiene practices suggest that potential exposure to disease may be substantial. One in ten chicken-rearing households keep the chickens in their living quarters, and a slightly higher proportion allow the chickens to mix with other livestock. Less than a third wear protective clothing when working with their flocks.

Unfortunately, loss of the egg samples collected from the households due to spoilage prevented exploration of the correlation between the risk factors and the prevalence of one of the most common disease factors, salmonella. As a proxy for observations of the pathogen, the study documented reported incidence of enteric illness in the household in the two weeks preceding the interview. Although the use of the proxy suggested that keeping chickens does not contribute to significantly higher risk of enteric disease in Kampala, caution should be exercised in interpreting this result, given the poor quality of the proxy measure used and the small sample size.

In Summary

The central role of women in managing chicken enterprises may imply their higher exposure to potential zoonoses carried by the birds. Although observations suggested that such risk may be exacerbated by poor hygiene practices in many households, this was not confirmed by statistical analysis. The exception was when chickens were allowed to mix with other livestock; in this case statistical analysis confirmed that the practice contributes to higher incidence of enteric illness. The results of the analysis suggest that food practices in the household play at least as important a role as household chicken production in the risk of enteric disease. Specifically, eating raw eggs is associated with enteric disease, while eating meat-derived protein – including local chickens - and not eating leftovers are associated with lower levels of enteric disease. Finally, the linked study of livestock production systems suggested there might be higher awareness of health risks due to potential transmission of zoonotic diseases among the urban than among the peri-urban chicken farmers. These findings suggest the importance of PTD and educational interventions in poultry management and in household hygiene.

Note

¹ Based on Nasinyama et al 2004; Randolph et al., Forthcoming and Dimoulas and Walner-Toews, Forthcoming.

References

Dimoulas, Popy and David Waltner-Toews, Forthcoming. Household risk factors associated with rearing chickens in urban and peri-urban areas of Kampala. In Cole, Donald and Diana Lee Smith (eds) Urban Food Production and Public Health: What should towns and cities do?

Nasinyama, George William and Thomas F. Randolph, 2004. Characterizing and assessing the benefits and risks of urban and peri-urban (UPA) livestock production in Kampala City, Uganda. Final Technical Report to Urban Harvest and IDRC. Lima, Peru

Randolph, Tom F, Frank Mwiine, Delia Grace, Erastus Kang'ethe and George Nasinyama, Forthcoming. Characterization and assessment of the benefits and risks associated with urban and peri-urban cattle and milk production in Kampala. In Cole, Donald and Diana Lee Smith (eds) Urban Food Production and Public Health: What should towns and cities do?

Integrated Urban Management of Local Agricultural Development: The policy arena in Cuba¹

Gordon Prain

In the urban setting, agriculture is one strand in a complicated web of activities undertaken by households in pursuit of their livelihoods. As was argued in chapter 10, participatory technology development (PTD) needs to assess the direct impact of innovations on household capitals and potential feedbacks to the urban ecosystem, affecting the capitals of other families. As the livelihoods framework makes clear, these innovations are also filtered through local institutions and policies which are more pervasive and invasive in urban areas than in the countryside. Urban PTD has a better chance of success if agriculture forms part of an integrated approach to urban development, with a supportive and enabling institutional and policy environment.

A useful example to consider, in which PTD has proceeded within an enabling policy environment, is Cuba. The growth of urban agriculture in Cuba and the uptake of related and innovative technologies have been dramatic and impressive. In just over ten years, between 1989 and 2000, it has moved from a marginal component in urban food systems to an activity covering 12 percent of the land area of the city of Havana, involving a network of more than 22,000 urban and peri-urban producers, providing between 150 to 300 grams of fresh vegetables and culinary herbs daily and has resulted in the near elimination of local refuse dumps for household waste (Cruz and Medina, 2003)². Havana's agriculture involves a range of different systems and technical innovations (Novo and Murphy, 2000), but one of the most interesting from an institutional and policy point of view is "organoponics", an example of institutionalised spatial intensification and bio-intensification in urban areas, supported by the local authority.

Natural methods for fighting pests are very common in agricultural production in the city of Havana.

The development of organoponics and other organic and urban agricultural technologies are linked to what is known locally as "the special period" which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resultant implosion of the Soviet-dependent Cuban economy (Rosset 2002). At the time of this collapse the Cuban agrarian economy was dominated by large-scale state farms producing sugar cane and other raw materials for export. In 1989, there was three times as much land under sugar cane as food crops and almost 60 percent of the calories consumed by Cubans were from imported food. Production of export crops involved conventional, high input agriculture in which 48 percent of fertilisers and 82 percent of pesticides were imported. The impact of the Soviet collapse was severely aggravated by the continuing blockade which the United States imposed at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties. This "vulnerability context" to use the terminology of the livelihoods framework had a direct negative effect on livelihoods. Between 1985 and 1993, calorie intake per person/per day dropped by more than 30 percent to 1863 calories, well below basic nutritional needs. There was also a worsening of new born birth weight, nutritional status of pregnant women and other health repercussions, such as deteriorating public health due to failures in refuse collection.

Innovative livelihoods responses to the crisis occurred at both the level of households and within the political structures. "Patio agriculture" (see chapter 6), household aquaculture, vermiculture and crop-livestock production systems began to flourish and were assisted by local social organisations (eg. Federation of Cuban women and Committees for the Defence of the Revolution) and the emergence of farmers' groups. Institutional changes introduced by the government allowed citizens to become registered as self-employed and to register their businesses. This also involved the hand-over of 2.6 million hectares of land to cooperatives and allowed households and farmer groups to utilise idle land in Havana and other cities for productive purposes. Agricultural markets without price controls were also established. But the apparent key to the fast pace of innovation and transformation of urban agriculture from a marginal occupation to an important component of the national food system was the effort to ensure joint development of innovations by grassroots agencies and the government (Cruz and Medina 2003). An important institutional change to strengthen collaboration was the establishment of People's Councils as a new kind of grassroots government aimed at facilitating the participation of local households in solving problems (Cruz and Medin, a ibid). In terms of livelihoods (see Figure 10.1), the "policies, institutions and processes" which households must engage and negotiate with in pursuit of livelihoods strategies were considerably revised to facilitate urban agriculture as a viable livelihoods strategy. This is not to say that reforms of institutions and processes have been perfect. Empowerment of People's Councils to engage in economic relations and develop horizontal linkages with other entities is still incomplete (ibid) and the discourse of urban agriculture, especially in relation to smaller domestic spaces, is by no means fully embraced by Havana urban planners (Premat, 2005).

Organoponic gardens are particular examples of government-community collaboration in technology development and in management. Organoponics involves the construction of raised beds, which are then filled with a nutritious mix of around 50 percent organic matter and 50 percent soil, brought in from other locations, supported by local government (Novo and Murphy, ibid). Both "popular" and "high yield" organoponic gardens have become established, with different types of structures and management arrangements. The technology aims to bring inner city vacant areas which are either paved or have extremely compacted, poor quality soils into productive use. The popular organoponic gardens (POG) involve areas of between 2000 and 5000 square meters with lower investment in raised beds with simpler constructions of holding walls made of tiles, stones or recycled urban materials and filled with a mix of soil and organic matter. The high yield organoponic gardens (HYOG) in contrast involve higher investment in purpose-built structures of asbestos cement on areas generally around 1 hectare, with higher demand for water and requiring larger quantities of organic materials. Establishment and management of the POGs have been based on collaboration between municipal authorities and local neighbourhood groups or groups of workers. The former has supported the supply of inputs and the regularisation of output markets, which are often in the POG itself. The HYOGs involve collaboration between the city government, a state company and local organisations of workers in each individual HYOG. Local HYOGs maintain their own administration and pay a base salary to the members. This is supplemented depending on productivity, which is a strong incentive to innovate. The HYOGs also depend on the city and the state company to organise the supply of financing and material inputs and to support marketing.

Organoponics are all over the city of Havana

On-going technology innovation in these systems has been strongly associated with crop management practices, especially improvements in fertilisation using micro-organisms and biological control methods in integrated pest management (Rosset and Benjamin, 1994; Rosset, 2002). Cuba is a world leader in the production and use of entomopathogens, which are produced in different specialised, low-cost centres (CREEs), distributed through "corner shop" agricultural advice and service centres and widely utilised in the HYOGs, POGs and other types of production systems.

On the other hand, there is notably less innovation in the area of mixed planting and variety experimentation in the HYOGs (Cruz and Medina, 2003). The strong focus of both HYOGs and POGs on vegetable production leads to minimal or zero mixing of different groups of crops (leafy vegetables and root crops, fruit vegetables and aromatic herbs etc). In addition, the existence of specialised seed production facilities (Casas de Posturas) which formalise commercial seed production for the organoponic gardens, may tend to reduce the intra-specific diversity of varieties being grown (Rios personal comm.)

The importance given in Cuba to sustainable crop management practices came from recognition of the country's unsustainable dependence on export-oriented mono-cropping using largely imported inputs. The collapse of these imports in the early 90s – a 60 percent drop in pesticides, a 77 percent drop in fertilisers, petroleum for agriculture down by 50 percent (Altieri et al., 1997) – injected a dramatic urgency into the existing research efforts to develop alternative crop management options, leading to the successful outcomes briefly described above. (see also Chapter 11, this volume). However, the environmental and health benefits of biological and other forms of non-pesticide based pest control for the urban location are becoming recognised more slowly, as is the need for a more holistic view of agriculture within urban space. As Cruz and Medina observe:

"The existing design (of urban agriculture) does not favour harmony between the productive space and the constructed space, not only aesthetically..., but also in relation to other components of the urban environment, be they natural, economic or social... Furthermore, the interests of producers and those of the rest of the citizens, not directly associated with the results and impacts of the production activities, should be considered..." (Cruz and Medina, 2003).

These comments lead us towards the missing element in the Cuban experiment, but an increasingly important component in both North and South thinking about urban planning and the role of agriculture: namely multi-functionality (see Chapter 1 and 7 in this volume). This refers to the opportunity for agriculture in the urban setting to play multiple roles for the urban community, contributing to food security, nutritional well-being, income supplements for low-income families, child and youth education about natural processes and resources and the role of science, family recreation, and to the sustainability of cities.

Notes

¹ Synthesis based on findings of especially Cruz and Medina, 2003 and Novo and Murphy 2000, in addition to the other mentioned sources.

² The existence of a recently established alternative agricultural research agenda involving ecological principles, biological control mechanisms etc and linked to government import substitution strategy was also an important factor favouring rapid innovation (Rosset, 2002).

References

Altieri, M., P. Rosset and C. Nicholls. 1997. Biological control and agriculture modernization: Towards resolution of some contradictions. In Agriculture and Human Values. 14:303-310.

Cruz, Marìa Caridad and Roberto Sánchez Medina, 2003. Agricultura in the City. A Key to Sustainability in Havana, Cuba. Ian Randell, IDRC, Kingston, Jamaica.

Novo, Mario Gonzalez and Catherine Murphy, 2000. Urban agriculture in the City of Havana: a popular response to a crisis. In de Zeeuw, H. N. Bakker, M. Dubbeling, S. Gundel & U. SabelKoschella, eds. Growing cities, growing food. p. 329-347. Feldafing, German Foundation for International Development (DSE).

Premat, Adriana. 2005. Moving between the Plan and the Ground: Shifting Perspectives on Urban Agriculture in Havana, Cuba. In Mougeot, Luc J.A. (ed.), AGROPOLIS: The Social, Political, and Environmental Dimensions of Urban Agriculture. IDRC and Earthscan, Ottawa and London.

Rosset, Peter M., 2002. Posted: May 7, 2002Agricultura Alternativa Durante La Crisis Cubana. Food First, Berkely. http://www.foodfirst.org/cuba/agalternativa.html Last viewed 1 December 2005

Resources

Regenerating Agriculture: Policies and Practice for Sustainability and Self-Reliance.
Jules Pretty, 1995. Earthscan, London.
This book presents a compelling vision of an agriculture that is productive, environmentally sensitive and socially cohesive, and includes a wide range of examples of successful applications of innovative and sustainable practices developed by local communities partnered by research and development organisations. It also describes the kinds of policy environments which can support sustainable agriculture. There are discussions of integrated pest and soil nutrition management, soil conservation techniques and water management which are highly relevant for the urban setting, as is the extended discussion on farmer organisation.

Urban Livelihoods: A people-centred approach to reducing poverty
Edited by Carole Rakodi with Tony Lloyd-Jones, 2002. Earthscan, London.
This is a useful guide to the sustainable livelihoods framework as it can be applied to addressing urban poverty. It does not deal extensively with urban agriculture but includes an important chapter on rural-urban linkages and differences and the role of agriculture along the rural to urban continuum. Important contributions on human and social capital in relation to poverty reduction and on the role of municipalities are included.

Information and Communications Technology: Technology as Potential Catalyst for Sustainable Urban Development - Experiences in Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Marseilles and The Hague
L van den Berg and W van Winden (eds). 2002. EURICUR Series. Ashgate, UK: European Institute for Comparative Urban Research. 140 pages. ISBN 0 7546 1880 3.
By examining and comparing five European cities, this book sheds light on the impact of ICT on urban development and considers the consequences for urban management. The case studies show how cities use these new technologies to improve the delivery of municipal services, to increase civil participation and local democracy, to help their citizens and businesses make the shift to the information society, but also to fight the potential digital divide.

Environmental problems in an urbanizing world.
Jorge E Hardoy, Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite. 2001. London: Earthscan Publications, Ltd. 464 pages. ISBN 1853837 199 (paperback). www.earthscan.co.uk.
This updated and much expanded edition of the classic Environmental problems in Third World Cities describes environmental problems and their effect on human health, local ecosystems and global cycles. It points to the political causes that underpin many of these problems – including ineffective, unaccountable governments, and aid agencies' reluctance to work with the urban poor. It also highlights innovative solutions such as high quality, low-cost homes, neighbourhoods developed by poor groups working with NGOs and Local Agenda 21s developed by municipal governments in partnership with community organisations.

Participatory Research and Development for Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management: A Sourcebook. Three-volume Set
Edited by Julian Gonsalves, Thomas Becker, Ann Braun, Dindo Campilan, Hidelisa de Chavez, Elizabeth Fajber, Monica Kapiriri, Joy Rivaca-Caminade, and Ronnie Vernooy.. CIP-UPWARD/IDRC, Los Baños, Philippines.
Research and development can no longer be the exclusive domain of scientists. To find sustainable solutions to development problems, a wider range of actors must be involved. It is crucial, for example, that local stakeholders provide input to the process. Participatory research and development (PR&D) offers such an inclusive model. This three-volume sourcebook provides easy access to field-tested PR&D concepts and practices for practitioners, researchers and academics. It also presents a comprehensive overview of PR&D and will serve as a general reference for trainers, policymakers, donors, and development professionals. The sourcebook captures and examines PR&D experiences from more than 30 countries.

Feeding Cities in Anglophone Africa with Urban Agriculture: Concepts, Tools, and Case Studies for Practitioners, Planners, and Policy Makers
Edited by Marielle Dubbeling, Gordon Prain, Maarten Warnaars and Thomas Zschocke. CD-ROM, Urban Harvest-CIP, Lima, Peru.
Also web-based course at http://etraining.cip.cgiar.org.
This CD-ROM presents in interactive and accessible form the contents of an urban agriculture training course for Anglophone African countries conducted in 2004. The content includes a section on the history and concepts of urban agriculture and six modules on: Health Impacts; Crop production systems; Livestock production; Solid waste management; Wastewater use; and Integrating urban agriculture into urban planning and development. The modules can be entered directly, or via their relationship to key "Issues" in urban development, or via actor scenarios or through cities.

Sustainable Communities in Europe
William M Lafferty (ed.). 2001. London (UK): Earthscan Publications Ltd.
This book presents detailed research into the participation and involvement of local communities in 11 European countries. Overviews of implementation in each country are accompanied by comparative analyses of positive and negative changes to date. Useful examples of best practice case studies are provided, and crucial barriers to achieving sustainability are highlighted.

Sustainable agriculture, training of trainers: a resource book
International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), 2002. 351 p. ISBN 1 930261 055 US$ 20 (inclusive CDRom). Available from: IIRR, Y.C. James Yen Center, Biga, Silang, Cavite, Philippines and ETC EcoCulture, PO Box 64, 3830 AB Leusden, The Netherlands. Email: Bookstore@iirr.org; www.iirr.org
This resource book is designed for trainers in sustainable agriculture. It has been developed as a response to the need to increase the capacity of training institutions in sustainable agriculture to impart and share the concepts, principles and experiences of sustainable agriculture. It brings together IIRR's 40 years of training experience and the results of a five-year Training of Trainers project on sustainable agriculture.

www.cipotato.org/urbanharvest/home.htm

Website of the CGIAR System-wide Initiative Urban Harvest on Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture, with updates on technical and policy work in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and links to CGIAR Centres and other urban agriculture websites.

www.prolinnova.net/circular.php
Prolinnova is a NGO-led global programme to promote local innovation in managing natural resources for sustainable agriculture. The site carries information on recent publications, reports, training experiences and materials related to PTD. All issues of the PTD Circular can be found at this site.

www.iirr.org
IIRR is an international NGO, headquartered in the Philippines, which specialises in running training courses on participatory methods, monitoring and evaluation approaches, policy issues etc.

www.livelihoods.org/index.html
Livelihoods Connect is a very useful resource centre for information on different uses of the livelihoods approach, with frequent updates on urban livelihoods issues

www.metrofarm.com
Metrofarm, the on-line magazine of metropolitan agriculture, is mainly focused on the US, with interesting discussions on health risks of commercial fruits and vegetables, profitable agriculture from small urban spaces etc.

www.ids.ac.uk/ids/particip
The Participation, Power and Social Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK, serves as a global centre for research, innovation and learning in citizen participation and participatory approaches to development. The website provides an extensive collection of material on issues related to participation such as theory and practice, citizenship and governance, policy, and organisational learning and change.

www.fao.org/participation/default.htm
This is the website of the Informal Working Group on Participatory Approaches and Methods to Support Sustainable Livelihoods & Food Security (IWG-PA) of FAO. The "Resources" part of the website has three sections: library, field tools and lessons learned. The website also supports French, Spanish and Arabic versions.

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