Agriculture &Nutrition &Urban Bill Brieger | 02 Jan 2009 05:39 pm
urban hunger –> urban agriculture –> urban malaria
The growing problem of urban hunger and urban food insecurity was featured in the Wall Street Journal today. In Monrovia, Liberia, “The cost of a cup of rice has risen to nearly 50 cents from 20 cents, a huge leap for many families who live on less than $1 per day.” The result: “Escalating hunger in African cities is forcing aid agencies accustomed to tackling food shortages in rural areas to scramble for strategies to address the more complex hunger problems in sprawling slums.”
One of these strategies, according to IDRC is urban agriculture:
Urban agriculture (UA) is wrongly considered an oxymoron. Despite its critical role in producing food for city dwellers around the world, urban food production has largely been ignored by scholars and agricultural planners; government officials and policymakers at best dismiss the activity as peripheral and at worst burn crops and evict farmers, claiming that urban farms are not only unsightly but also promote pollution and illness. Contradicting this image, recent studies document the commercial value of food produced in the urban area while underscoring the importance of urban farming as a survival strategy among the urban poor, especially women heads of households.
Urban farming requires water. The International Water Management Institute reports that, “Manual water fetching with watering cans is most common.” They often get water from “polluted streams or they do farming along storm water drains and gutters.” This sometimes leads to “wastewater irrigation.”
Of course malaria vectors need water. In urban Accra, Ghana, Klinkenberg and collaegues found that Anopheles and Culex “outdoor biting rates were respectively three and four times higher in areas around agricultural sites (UA) than in areas far from agriculture.”
The solution to the problem of urban malaria is not to stop urban agriculture, but to intensify integrated vector management interventions. We certainly don’t want to protect people from malaria and then have then suffer from food insecurity.