Keywords

What can US food systems planners and scholars – and specifically those who focus on urban agriculture (UA) – learn from the Global South? Drawing from peer reviewed and grey literature, including case studies collected by the Milan Urban Policy Pact and Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security, this chapter argues that UA in the Global South takes on a much more urgent role as a life-sustaining mechanism in cities facing extreme challenges typically not experienced in the Global North. While research on UA in the Global South is too limited to make definitive claims, growing evidence suggests that a substantial number of urban residents engage in UA, especially women, because of the role it plays in food and income security. UA also appears to play an important role in enhancing the environmental sustainability of some city regions. Many Global South governments and urban planners continue to actively resist UA in spite of these potential benefits, but some local governments have long supported UA and many others have begun to actively strengthen UA. Given the severity and scale of urban poverty in the Global South, however, UA’s positive impacts even under the best scenarios cannot be considered in isolation of wider trends in urban food environments. In particular, a number of cities are encouraging the rapid growth of supermarkets and the restriction of informal food markets, which could easily undo any positive impacts of UA on urban food security and poverty. Global food policy initiatives that have emerged in recent years to intervene in urban food systems holistically, however, could help to reverse such trends and ensure that urban food systems are simultaneously equitable, health-promoting and sustainable.

The rest of this paper outlines the history and extent of UA practiced in the Global South, and the state of research on UA’s food security, economic, and environmental benefits. I also describe the extent to which UA is supported by local governments, contextualize UA within wider food systems challenges facing cities in the Global South and highlight examples of longstanding and emerging UA initiatives that offer a variety of strategies that could be emulated in the Global North. I conclude by drawing out the major lessons that UA in the Global South offers UA advocates, planners, and researchers in the Global North.

1 The History and Extent of UA in the Global South

Agriculture was part of city building in much of the Global South, sustaining ancient cities in the Middle East and Asia, integrated into the urban fabric of pre-Colombian cities built by the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca in Latin America (Smit et al. 2001), and incorporated into the founding of many of today’s cities in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2013). UA has been sustained for centuries in some of these cities, but the practice waned in most instances or was actively suppressed, as the Spanish colonizers did in Latin America (Smit et al. 2001). Whether UA has been maintained or severed from its historical roots, in many cities across the Global South, UA has expanded in recent decades (Smit et al. 2001; Hamilton et al. 2014). Rogerson (1997) estimated that only 10–25% of populations in African cities were involved in UA in the 1980s, increasing to as much as 70% by the 1990s. More recently, based on nationally representative and comparable datasets, Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) found that UA participation rates in 15 countries across four continents was on average 33%, and as high as 70% in Vietnam and Nicaragua. A spatial analysis also found that the majority of UA is located in the Global South, including 80% of the urban irrigated cropland and 56% of the urban rainfed cropland (Thebo et al. 2014).

UA has grown largely out of necessity in the Global South, particularly when food prices have risen and incomes have fallen (Bryld 2003; Zezza and Tasciotti 2010). The first recent wave of expansion was apparent during the 1970s global economic recession and again during the 1980s as a result of structural adjustment policies, as low and middle-income countries restructured their debt through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Bryld 2003; Maxwell 1999). The suite of policies and austerity measures that accompanied structural adjustment – deregulation, privatization and the devolution of national public services, the removal of many social safety nets, the devaluation of currencies and salaries, the downsizing of public sector jobs, the removal of agricultural subsidies and price controls, trade agreements that increased food imports, and other actions – in combination, increased food prices, led to unemployment and caused the devaluation of real wages, deepening poverty and food insecurity, especially in cities (Bryld 2003; Maxwell 1999).

Other, more regionally focused forms of economic and political crises have also led to spikes in UA, like the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s that forced many rural communities to migrate to Freetown in search of protection while also cutting off rural food sources (Lynch et al. 2013). Cuba is another example, where Hamilton et al. (2014) argue that there was little other option but to encourage UA, because of US embargoes and the loss of trade from the USSR post 1991. As they describe, “In retrospect, urban agriculture was the obvious answer—no fuel for tractors, trucks, or refrigeration: bring agriculture closer to/into the cities; no pesticides or fertilizers: switch to chemical-free and labor-intensive production that the populous cities could support; no export market for large mono-cultural cash crops such as sugar and limited ability to import food: produce food rather than money to buy food” (p. 54). Most recently, scholars point to another wave of UA activity associated with the 2008 global food crisis, when agricultural commodity prices rose sharply, as much as 255% for rice and 80–90% for wheat and maize between 2004 and 2008, with effects that can still be felt today (Headey and Fan 2008).

2 UA’s Impact in the Global South

Although no single study or meta-analysis exists to provide definitive conclusions about the variety of impacts UA is having across the globe, sufficient evidence suggests that UA has considerable food security, economic, and environmental impacts in a number of places.

2.1 Impacts on Food Security

One consistent finding across studies in the Global South is that urban residents are primarily driven to engage in UA to ameliorate food insecurity (Warren et al. 2015; Poulsen et al. 2015). Of the 805 million people who are chronically undernourished globally, 98% are located in low-income countries (FAO 2014). Increasingly, the percentage of populations in low and middle income countries that are food insecure in cities is the same or higher than rural areas (Ahmed et al. 2007). Such wide spread food insecurity explains why UA has tended to expand around economic crises, particularly because food price increases – especially when accompanied by falling incomes – are debilitating for households in cities where people are more dependent on a cash economy and food purchases (Bryld 2003). In one study of 18 countries, households in low income countries on average spent 62% of their income on food, 42% in upper middle-income countries, and even higher proportions among poor households (Miller et al. 2016). In stark contrast, the study found that households in the three high income countries (Sweden, Canada and United Arab Emirates) spent an average of 13% on food (Miller et al. 2016). In the United States, households on average spend 6.8–9.9% of income on food (US Census Bureau 2012; USDA 2018). High sensitivity to price increases explains why hunger riots broke out across cities in the Global South during the 2008 food price crisis (Patel and McMichael 2014), in 14 cities in Africa alone (Berazneva and Lee 2013).

In this context, UA has been found to supply significant portions of urban household diets in the Global South. While UA farmers produce everything from fish to all manner of livestock, fruit, and staple foods, the greatest proportion of UA-supplied foods tend to be highly perishable, like vegetables, because of the need for shorter food chains in places that lack of refrigerated and reliable food distribution infrastructure (Moustier and Danso 2006). Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) found that UA in Accra and Kumasi (Ghana) produce 90% of the vegetables consumed in the city. Across nine cities in Africa and Asia, Moustier and Danser (2006) also found that 70–100% of the leafy vegetables consumed in the cities were produced on urban farms, and 90% of all vegetables in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). During the 1990s, Shanghai (China) was also entirely self-sufficient in urban milk production while 90% of eggs consumed came from urban farmers (Yi-Zhong and Zhangen 2000).

Even if UA provides a considerable proportion of some urban diets at a city-wide level, evidence explaining the relationship between UA and food and nutrition security at the household level is still inconclusive, largely due to the low quality and quantity of available research (Warren et al. 2015; Poulsen et al. 2015). Among some of the research that does exist, urban farmers themselves often perceive that UA is essential to their food security. In one study, for instance, over 40% of UA producers in Nairobi (Kenya) believed their families would starve without the food that came from their gardens and urban farms (Memon and Lee-Smith 1993). Another survey of over 6000 households in 11 cities across 8 countries in southern Africa found that 77% of food insecure households engaged in UA, compared to less than 25% of the food secure households, suggesting that UA is a survival mechanism for households without enough, steady income to purchase food (Crush et al. 2011). Research has also shown lower rates of child malnutrition in UA households compared to non-UA households, but the causal mechanism is often unclear (Poulsen et al. 2015). Engaging in UA, for instance, may have a direct effect, increasing access to healthy diets, or an indirect effect if families supplement their income by selling what they grow to purchase healthier diets (Hamilton et al. 2014). Other research has also shown that UA increases diet diversity (Zezza and Tasciotti 2010; Badami and Ramankutty 2015), but few of these studies additionally consider whether fruit and vegetable intake was adequate to improve health outcomes (Poulsen et al. 2015).

2.2 Benefits to Income Security

Second to providing food for their families, the other common motivation that Global South households cite for engaging in UA is for a source of income (Poulsen et al. 2015), however, the contribution of UA to household income varies widely depending on the context. Across the 15 countries Zezza and Tasciotti (2010) studied, agricultural production supplied as little as 3% of households incomes for UA households in Panama but as much as 71% in Nigeria. The share of income UA provides is also greater for lower income populations, explaining why UA tends to be more common among the poor (Zezza and Tasciotti 2010; Wagner and Tasciotti 2018). Women also make up the majority of UA farmers, often turning to UA out of desperation because of their marginalization from more secure employment options (Smit et al. 2001; Bryld 2003; Hovorka 2006; Poulsen et al. 2015). In Kampala (Uganda), for instance, 80% of UA was carried out by women who saw their gardens as a critical source of food for their family and a mechanism to gain more autonomy over household expenses and food purchases (Maxwell 1995; Hovorka 2006). In some places, however, no difference can be found in the socio-economic status of households who engage in UA, nor between long-term residents and recent migrants (Dossa et al. 2011; Mackay 2018). These incongruent findings suggest that in some cases, households with more resources and stability may engage in UA to lower expenses since even middle class families spend so much of their income on food in the Global South (Warren et al. 2015). Also in some situations, the poorest households and recent migrants may not always have access to land and other resources or may lack the stability to participate in UA at higher rates (Mackay 2018). Lack of access to secure land, loans and farm equipment are often challenges for women who desire to scale up their UA operations into a viable business (FAO 2012).

2.3 Environmental Impacts

The limited research on UA’s environmental effects suggests that it may pose serious health concerns for producers and consumers, but may also have substantial benefits for urban region waterways and waste systems (Hamilton et al. 2014; Khalid et al. 2018). On the one hand, the greenbelts that farms create at the edges of many cities play an important role in reducing the urban heat island effect and in storing and draining water, controlling flooding in nearby, denser urban areas (Dubbeling et al. 2016; Kuusaana and Eledi 2015). On the other hand, government authorities have raised concerns about the role that UA may play in increasing breeding sites for malaria carrying mosquitoes (Hamilton et al. 2014). A considerable amount of literature on UA also focuses on whether environmental contaminants and UA practices themselves pose health risks, such as the contamination of plants from air pollution in rapidly growing cities or the overuse of highly toxic agrochemicals on urban farms located near dense housing and sources of drinking water (De Bon et al. 2010; Hamilton et al. 2014; Khalid et al. 2018). One particularly widespread practice in the Global South that potentially poses both environmental benefits and risks is the use of industrial and domestic wastewater for irrigation and the application of fecal sludge and compost from urban waste, as the following describes in more detail.

The use of fecal sludge and compost from urban waste has been a part of UA livestock and produce operations for decades in many places, if not centuries. In Kano (Nigeria), for instance, peri-urban vegetable farmers have long applied and still prefer “taki” over conventional fertilizer, a mix of manure, organic waste from household trash, ash and street sweepings (Maconachie and Binns 2006). A similar system has been used for many years in Hubli-Dharwad, India, where farmers apply municipal solid waste, once bought at municipal auctions but now primarily secured through informal markets (Nunan 2000). In Cairo, two ethnic groups tied by kinship, the zarraba and wahija, referred collectively as the zabbaleen, have been working together since the 1930s in an intricate system of household waste collection, trash sorting and repurposing into a variety of businesses, including the raising of pigs off the organic waste (Nunan 2000).

The use of untreated industrial and domestic wastewater for irrigation has also been a longtime practice in some places, but it is a more recent phenomena in many peri-urban areas where expanding urban populations and industry competes for water (Hofmann 2013). Today it is the only option in areas where there are water shortages (Khalid et al. 2018). Only 8% of water in low-income countries is treated, and even in upper middle income countries, only 38% is treated, making clean water for irrigation purposes a nonstarter in most low and middle income countries (Sato et al. 2013). UA, however, often acts as a mechanism to filter this untreated water. One notable example has been operating in Kolkata (India) for more than a century, where fishponds covering nearly 4000 hectares of peri-urban land in the East Kolkata Wetlands filter 30–50% of the city’s sewage; the process works through a complex system of canal networks that are connected to the city’s waste disposal site and fishponds filled with water hyacinths, which then discharges the filtered water into vegetable and rice fields (Bunting et al. 2010). This system supplies a significant portion of the city’s fish and vegetables, sold at prices affordable to the urban poor, while also employing several thousand people (Bunting et al. 2010).

Especially for poor farmers, fecal sludge, composted urban waste, and untreated domestic wastewater offers a low-cost source of organic matter and nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (Khalid et al. 2018). Operations that sort through urban waste to reuse organic matter also provide a public service, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, saving waste treatment costs and energy (Hofmann 2013); one researcher estimates that organic waste makes up 50–90% of municipal waste systems, offering an opportunity to significantly reduce the amount of waste going into landfills if composted (Cofie et al. 2006). Incorporating fecal sludge and wastewater into UA fields also helps to recycle organic waste, filters water before it re-enters surface water sources, and lowers competition for freshwater supplies (Dubbeling et al. 2016).

The use of untreated wastewater, urban compost and fecal sludge is being threatened, however, and carries risks that appear to be increasing as urban areas become more populated. Studies have documented unsafe levels of fecal contamination or heavy metals in wastewater irrigation, raising concerns about the health effects for farm workers and UA consumers (Binns et al. 2003; Hamilton et al. 2014; Khalid et al. 2018). Other research has found that the high salt content in wastewater can cause soil hardening and that heavy metals can affect germination or generally reduce plant health (Khalid et al. 2018). Rapid urban development – which is displacing peri-urban farmers further afield onto less productive land and increasing the distance between them and the sources of urban waste they have come to rely on (Kuusaana and Eledi 2015) – is also changing the composition of urban waste, introducing more plastics and chemical pollutants, and causing sedimentation in streams that transport untreated wastewater (Nunan 2000). In some places, compost from urban waste is being commercialized, reducing access as the higher quality compost is often exported, raising the costs for poor farmers, even as chemical fertilizers are subsidized, rendering them more affordable (Nunan 2000; Hofmann 2013). Attempts to ban or entirely formalize some of these informal waste recycling systems have also been attempted, though usually unsuccessfully (Drechsel et al. 2010); in the case of Cairo and the zabbaleen, for instance, after a long period of resistance and negotiation, a partnership eventually was forged between the informal and city-managed waste collection systems.

3 The Role of Urban Planners and Policymakers in UA’s Expansion

In most places, local officials have turned a blind eye towards UA (Drechsel et al. 2010), but in many cities, particularly in Africa, public authorities have actively attempted to prohibit UA through fines, destruction of crops and evictions (Simatele and Binns 2008; Battersby 2013; Gore 2018). The reasons for this hostile attitude towards UA is often unfounded, but nonetheless ranges from perceptions that UA poses a food safety risk for consumers (Gore 2018), pollutes watersheds (Drakakis-Smith et al. 1995), creates hiding grounds for criminals (Ayaga et al. 2005), and competes with the existing produce market and commercial agriculture (Battersby 2019; Maxwell 1999). In most cases, public officials who oppose UA see it as a temporary, rural activity that does not belong in the city – a symbol of the failure to modernize and develop (D’Alessandro et al. 2018; Smit 2016). Despite the hostile or indifferent political environment that UA sometimes operates in, a number of cities and national governments have long been leaders in actively supporting and incentivizing UA, while more recent, government-led actions indicate that UA is gaining a foothold as a legitimate part of many urban landscapes (D’Alessandro et al. 2018; Gore 2018).

This increased attention and support for UA may in part be due to numerous declarations that have increased interest in UA specifically, or urban food systems more broadly. One of the first declarations that inspired others was supported by government representatives from nine cities in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2000 who signed the Quito Declaration: Urban Agriculture in Twenty-First Century Cities. The Quito Declaration called for more cities to support UA as a means to address issues of urban poverty, food insecurity and environmental impacts (Dubbeling et al. 2016). Since then, other declarations signed in Hyderabad, India (2002), Nyanga, Zimbabwe (2002), Lima, Peru (2002), Harare, Zimbabwe (2003) and La Paz, Bolivia (2007) have also called on cities, countries and/or regions to create more enabling policy environments, increase participatory UA planning, offer trainings, increase access to land and loans, and ensure the right to use and improve wastewater for irrigation (Cabannes 2012). Most recently, 108 cities in 2015 (and 2015 by October of 2019) signed on to the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP), agreeing to strive towards healthy and affordable food access, minimize food waste, use food systems to mitigate the impacts of climate change, and encourage cross-sector coordination and policies that ensure “equitable, resilient and sustainable food systems” (MUFPP 2019). MUFPP organizers note that food systems planning is still a relatively new concept for many cities signing on to the Pact, but the activities they are reporting through the annual MUFPP award competition and at the yearly summits suggest that more cities are integrating issues of food and nutrition security with other urgent urban issues, such as climate change, migration, public engagement and economic development (Giordano et al. 2018). Some of the longstanding and more recent examples of the way that UA can expand rapidly and be leveraged to support wider city goals when governments proactively support the practice include Havana (Cuba), Seoul (South Korea), Rosario (Argentina), Curitiba (Brazil), and Quito (Ecuador). These five examples are described below.

Vegetable and herb production in Havana (Cuba) increased from 1994 to 2005 “a thousand fold” so that by the mid-2000s, 26,000 gardens were operating in Havana, producing the daily vegetable requirements of the city’s population (Koont 2011, p. 8). In addition to the political urgency that left Cuba with no other option but to produce the country’s food internally (Koont 2011), Cuba’s success with UA is attributed in part to the large amount of state-owned land that is devoted to UA (Koont 2011).

Havana also has a vast network of UA extension agents who work through the Department of Urban Agriculture and state-run “Casas de Semilla” where growers can purchase seeds, tools and other inputs (Chaplowe 1998).

In Seoul (South Korea), UA was already beginning to take hold among non-governmental organizations in the early 2000s (Son 2013) and was further encouraged by the national Act on Development and Support of Urban Agriculture passed in 2011 (Oh and Kim 2017). Seoul also passed its own UA ordinance in 2011 and dedicated a budget and staff to UA activities. Within a few years, government staff had distributed supplies (e.g., over 43,000 vegetable pots, seeds, tools), reserved over 100 hectares of urban and suburban land for UA and launched training centers (Oh and Kim 2017). In that same time period, UA participation rates rose from 150,000 in 2010 to 770,000 people in 2013 (Son 2013). More recently in 2017, the Seoul Food Master Plan 2030 aims to increase healthy food access and address food insecurity in the city while also creating markets for farmers in municipalities neighboring Seoul through local food procurement in public institutions (e.g., schools, daycare centers and public office cafeterias) (Seulgi Son, personal communication).

In Rosario (Argentina), UA has become part of a larger strategy to address urban food insecurity, poverty and regional environmental goals. In 2000, the city began mapping vacant land, zoned particular urban and peri-urban areas for the permanent inclusion of agriculture, set up a network of urban growers, provided infrastructure and financing for the creation of small processing centers, launched farmers markets and home delivery systems, started offering trainings in marketing and food safety, created a municipal land bank and began offering tax incentives to landowners who lease land to urban farmers (Dubbeling and Merzthal 2006; Ponce and Terrile 2010). Later in 2014, as part of the city’s climate action plan and concerns over the loss of the city’s horticultural greenbelt as the city expanded, the municipal government turned to peri-urban agriculture. It doubled the amount of land it protected from 400 to 800 hectares, trained farmers in agroecological practices and marketing, offered them low-interest loans for farm equipment and inputs, and established a food distribution system and purchasing agreements with area hotels and restaurants (Dubbeling and Terrile 2016).

Another example of a city that is interlinking multiple urban planning goals is Curitiba (Brazil), which has tied food waste reduction to markets for farmers, jobs for urban residents, food access, pollution reduction, and other priorities. In 1991, the city of Curitiba started the “Garbage that is Not Garbage” initiative, which gives people tokens for transportation, food and school books when they bring their sorted garbage to non-profit run collection centers (Gianfelici et al. 2016). Along with an education campaign, every 15 days, in exchange for their recyclable trash, the “green exchange” program offers households fresh produce from peri-urban farms or the opportunity to buy local produce in stores at 30% below cost. The recycled materials are then sold to factories and small cooperatives who repurpose the materials into other products, including soap, cooking fuel and cement. An evaluation in 2014 found that the program recycles 22% of the city’s waste and on a monthly basis, distributes food to over seven million residents (Gianfelici et al. 2016).

Quito similarly stands out for its efforts to think more holistically about the urban food system, using UA as a foundation. In 2002, the city launched the “Participatory Urban Agriculture” (AGRUPAR) program to address urban food insecurity, improve healthy food access, increase jobs, enhance ecosystem services, and promote community engagement (Dubbeling and Dueñas 2016). Over 380 community-based organizations participate in AGRUPAR, as do 12,000 urban and peri-urban growers, 86% of whom are women, and many of whom are recent rural migrants or unemployed (Dubbeling and Merzthal 2006). The program also supplies growers with seeds, other inputs, tools and small livestock such as chickens, guinea pigs and bees, and has helped establish “investment societies” to offer small scale businesses startup capital through a rotating fund (p. 61). Evaluations of the project in 2016 reported that over 16,000 people had been trained in agroecology methods, marketing, nutrition and food processing; over 100 microenterprises had been established; more than 2500 gardens had been supported; and 14 “bio-fairs” had launched where AGRUPAR growers sell organic produce, meats and other products (Dubbeling and Dueñas 2016).

4 The Contribution of Wider Food Systems Planning Trends to Food System Inequities

Despite the positive impact UA can have, the extent and continued rise of poverty, food insecurity, environmental precarity, and the nutritional double burdenFootnote 1 in cities all suggest that UA alone cannot resolve these multiple crises. Integrated, multi-pronged approaches such as those being implemented in Rosario, Curitiba and Quito are one way to enhance the wider effects of UA, but broader food system transformations are also needed (Dubbeling et al. 2016). As Warren et al. (2015) argue “While the existence of UA may be indicative of individual, household, or community resilience, it may also be a marker of a larger failing food distribution system which is unable to provide…all people at all times with foods that are healthy, safe, and affordable” (p. 64). Many city governments are attempting to attract supermarkets and limit informal food vendors as part of a larger agenda to drive economic growth and improve urban food access and safety. Yet as the following account of such efforts suggests, the effects may be creating more “modern” food systems at the expense of worse, not better, equitable economic and health outcomes for marginalized urban populations.

Trade liberalization and the opening of markets that accompanied structural adjustment policies in the 1980s sparked an initial rise in supermarkets, first in Latin America and Asia in the early 1990s, and by the end of the 1990s in Africa (Reardon et al. 2012). Investors and city governments often argue that supermarkets are a means to address urban food insecurity and to improve diets and health, touted for their ability to offer lower prices because of their economies of scale, greater variety of foods, and higher food quality and safety (Timmer 2009; Battersby 2012, 2019). Supermarkets are also seen as part of a wider economic growth strategy (Battersby 2019). Yet, too little is known about the extent and causes of urban food insecurity, malnutrition and obesity to know whether the rise of grocery stores will have a positive or negative effect on these pressing issues (Battersby 2012; Berger and van Helvoirt 2018). In some instances, evidence suggests that food insecurity is higher in locations where households come to rely on supermarkets (Riley and Legwegoh 2014) and that supermarkets are encouraging the consumption of highly processed foods (Demmler et al. 2017; Kelly et al. 2014). Studies have also found that supermarkets often have higher costs and cater to more well off customers who are food secure and who can buy and refrigerate larger volumes of food (Battersby 2012, 2019; Blekking et al. 2017; Berger and van Helvoirt 2018).

As governments liberalize and internationalize food retail, the high volumes, new quality standards and managerial expertise required by the growth in supermarkets affects the livelihoods of small-holder rural and peri-urban farmers and small-scale processors who supply informal markets (Vorley et al. 2016). Many city governments are also attempting to actively restrict informal market vendors (Anjaria 2006; Smit 2016). Similar to how UA is often perceived, informal markets are not part of the “modernization” and development plan of many cities (Berger and van Helvoirt 2018; Battersby 2019). The Kenyan national government’s 2030 vision, for instance, aims to attract more international investment for supermarkets while limiting the growth of informal retail as part of an overall strategy to address food insecurity and contribute to urban economic growth, based on the assumption that informal markets reduce tax revenues, discourage major retail investors, and make it difficult to enforce food safety and other health standards (Office of the Prime Minister of State for Planning 2012). This is in spite of studies that show that poorer households rely largely on street kiosks and informal markets for their shopping – particularly for fruit and vegetables (Poulsen et al. 2015). Government officials in Nairobi, Hanoi and many other cities, particularly in Africa, routinely harass street food vendors by arresting, fining, confiscating goods, forcibly evicting, or attempting to register and concentrate them in less visible areas of the city with less foot traffic (Smit 2016). This not only threatens the food security of poor households that rely on these vendors, but also disrupts customer ties and other vital social networks street food vendors depend on for their livelihoods (Huat 2016).

Rather than eliminate informal markets and transition entirely to supermarkets, scholars are calling on cities to ensure a variety of retail options to ensure food insecurity so that households have more options for finding affordable prices (Cadilhon et al. 2006; Battersby 2019), similar to how the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan have encouraged growth and competition in both the formal and informal retail sectors (Reardon and Gulati 2008). Other scholars are also advocating for increased investment in informal value chains, farmer cooperatives, and employment opportunities in post-harvest processing, distribution, food manufacturing, urban food service and retail operations (Vorley et al. 2016). Together, these types of jobs account for a significant portion of the urban workforce and could address the income insecurity that often forces households to rely on UA; if structured effectively, such jobs could also have a ripple effect on the viability of small-scale rural producers, reducing the need for rural to urban migration and the concentration of poverty in cities (Vorley et al. 2016).

5 Conclusion

As this brief account of UA trends in the Global South demonstrates, for many urban growers in low and middle income countries, UA is a lifeline – a vital source of their family’s food and income security – in a way that is not often experienced in the US. This may explain why UA’s geographic expanse in the Global South is unparalleled to the US (Thebo et al. 2014), in spite of the fact that UA in the Global South is often not formally sanctioned or is even actively suppressed by city officials. Despite the more extreme circumstances in which UA is often practiced in the Global South, urban planning scholars and practitioners in the US can draw a number of lessons about the benefits of intentionally scaling up UA, the wider lens that urban planners could be applying to address urban food system inequities, and more comprehensive research that could enhance understanding about the process and impact of UA expansion.

First, research on the impacts of UA in the Global South reinforces with even more certainty the argument that Jerry Kaufman and his colleagues initially posed (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 2000; Kaufman and Bailkey 2000), and that scholars today still reiterate (Vitiello 2024) – that urban planners should view food systems interventions, and UA in particular, as a public good that delivers on many of the goals of urban planning (Raja et al. 2023). Environmental planners in particular could learn from numerous large-scale UA operations in the Global South that divert waste from landfills, turn urban organic waste into soil amendments, and preserve farmland greenbelts to conserve water, filter contaminants, and reduce flooding. UA has even greater potential to impact food and income insecurity in the Global South because so many households spend a major portion of their income on food, particularly marginalized women, migrants, the underemployed, and people left out of the formal economy.

In this context, the economic calculus shared by many US and Global South urban planners who view UA as a temporary activity on land that will eventually have a “higher and better use” (Vitiello 2024; Pothukuchi 2024) has more dramatic ethical implications in the Global South when it leads city officials to discourage or criminalize UA. Because of the hesitancy that still exists for UA in many places, Poulsen et al. (2015) argue that only after greater capacity building, resources, and governance structures are in place to enhance and expand UA will it be clear what its potential is to contribute to multiple urban planning goals. The five cities profiled here show what it can look like when the state incentivizes and supports UA in a concerted way, from offering subsidized inputs, training, secure land, markets via public food procurement and purchasing agreements, processing centers, delivery systems, tax incentives to landowners, loans, rotating funds and more.

Second, the passive role that many urban planners are playing in the Global South as peri-urban agricultural land is lost to city growth and the unintended effects of advocating for supermarket growth and informal food retail contraction should force urban planners in the US to consider if they too are failing to apply a wider lens to address urban food inequities. Despite the fact that a disproportionate amount of prime agricultural land surrounds US cities (Gottlieb 2015), urban planners are doing too little to prevent farmland loss to urbanization (Gottlieb 2015; Horst and Gwin 2018; Fang et al. 2019). Compared to large-scale commodity farms, peri-urban farms are more likely to be small scaled, diversified vegetable farms that are owned by women and people of color (Ayazi and Elsheikh 2015; Francis et al. 2012; Minkoff-Zern 2018). Simply put, preserving farmland from continued urban sprawl would not only contribute to regional food security but also equitable economic development goals.

From a food retail perspective, national surveys of urban planners have shown that they often leave grocery store and other retail development to the private sector (Pothukuchi 2005), though this may be changing (Pothukuchi 2009). Fair Food Financing initiatives funded in part via the 2018 US Farm Bill have expanded efforts to reach underserved communities as have a variety of informal, innovative food distribution models (Brinkley 2013). These opportunities could be leveraged to achieve equitable food access and economic development agendas, but what remains unclear is the degree to which urban planners – as opposed to the private sector and nonprofits – are taking a lead on these initiatives or at least lowering land-use regulation barriers that often prevent them from flourishing (Brinkley 2013). Many urban planners and local governments also seem to missing an opportunity to harness the public benefits, and potential food access and economic equity effects, of food hubs in the US that are attempting to re-localize food system aggregation, distribution and processing (Jones et al. 2018; Hoey et al. 2018).

One final insight that emerges from this chapter is the need for more research to understand the advocacy it took to get UA on so many government agendas in the Global South – as evidenced by numerous city-led initiatives, national policies, and MUFPP declarations. Understanding the capacity building and institutional dynamics that must be negotiated to successfully implement lofty UA and food systems plans and the wider political, social, and economic factors that allow particular UA models and food systems initiatives to flourish or flounder is also needed. These are all topics that MUFPP organizers say are challenges for member cities (Giordano et al. 2018) and are issues related to policy science that are generally understudied in food systems research (Hoey and Pelletier 2011; Raja et al. 2014; Blesh et al. 2019), yet such understanding would equip food systems and UA advocates in the US and elsewhere with more effective policy advocacy and implementation tools.

More comparable, rigorous research is also needed to quell concerns that much of the early UA literature in the Global South was led by an advocacy agenda (Hamilton et al. 2014; Warren et al. 2015; Poulsen et al. 2015). Methodologically, UA studies often use inconsistent definitions and measurement approaches (e.g. related to “food security,” “urban,” and even what to include in “agriculture”), include few details about the methods or the study population (e.g., how long participants have been involved in UA), or use weak research designs that tend to use small sample sizes and no comparison groups, run simple correlations, and fail to control for confounding variables (Reardon and Gulati 2008). Furthermore, research on UA in the Global South has largely concentrated on African countries (Poulsen et al. 2015), where UA has tended to be restricted more actively by local governments than in Asia or Latin America (Smit et al. 2001; Gore 2018). Ultimately, current research on UA in the Global South may not be revealing the full range of emerging innovations, government-led interventions and impacts UA can have, as suggested by some of the cases showcased here.

Despite the continued narrative of “modernization” that is spurring many cities in the Global South to suppress UA along with parallel efforts to expand supermarkets and undermine informal food markets, increasingly, cities around the world are setting a new course for UA and wider food systems planning. As some of the examples outlined here show, cities are creating collaborative institutional arrangements and alliances with diverse actors to develop innovative and equity-oriented food policy, engaging in ambitious metropolitan-wide UA and food systems strategies, creating stronger rural-urban linkages, and tying food production and nutrition initiatives with job creation, public engagement, migration, climate change adaptation, food waste mitigation and other urgent matters (Dubbeling et al. 2016; Giordano et al. 2018). The MUFPP in particular is an encouraging development to watch as it offers a forum for cities around the world, including many in the US, to learn from one another’s efforts and become inspired by the possibilities presented by UA and wider food systems planning strategies for enhancing environmental and economic resilience, public health, and public inclusion.