Managing Threats and Opportunities of Urbanisation for Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture in Tamale, Ghana

Abstract

Urbanisation involves growth and transformation of settlements into increasingly large spatially sprawling cities. By encroaching upon agricultural land, taxing water resources and enticing rural people away from farming, urbanisation poses a threat to agriculture within both the built-up and peri-urban areas. Growing climate variability, an apparent sign of climate change, exacerbates the threat. At the same time, through an increased demand for food, the potential for affordable organic manure from urban waste and a need for efficient intensive land use urbanisation may encourage agricultural production and, thereby, enhance urban food security. Preliminary findings of an on-going inter-institutional, inter-disciplinary assessment focused on Tamale, a rapidly growing city in Ghana, show that farmers seek to manage the agricultural threats and opportunities by various ingenuous survival strategies, notably livelihoods diversification, new cultivars, and land use intensification. This paper highlights the strategies and argues that if they are nurtured and integrated into policy they would positively inform sustainable urban development planning.