"To Subsidise My Income": Urban Farming in an East African Town (review)

With growing consciousness of the complicated rural-urban connections within the worldwide urban demographic explosion, 2006 has seen a similar explosion of publishing on urban farming—until recently considered by many as a lunatic fringe concern. Probably the best of all the 2006 releases, this comprehensive academic study of a single town—Nakuru, in Kenya—continues (and improves upon) the style of the 1990s studies of East African towns that first brought the subject to worldwide attention. Its painstaking presentation and its examination of original empirical data accurately portray how such an urban center feeds itself.

As the title suggests, urban farmers try to save money by producing some of their own food. This is not news in itself: many other studies confirm this, and the growth of urban farming in response to Structural Adjustment policies and the general lack of employment are well known. However, with recent studies such as this volume, the phenomenon can now be much better understood in its complexity. We know there is a relationship between urban farming and poverty, but what is it? Foeken (and his colleagues Sam Owour and others who contributed to different chapters) show that proportionately more rich people than poor people farm; they also benefit more from farming than the poor do because they have more secure access to land, while the poor, who need to farm more, benefit less.

Farming families are larger than nonfarming families (they farm because they need to feed more hungry mouths), and they are also healthier, with their children growing better. Extension help is shown to improve productivity and incomes, yet most such assistance goes to cattle farmers with secure farm plots in their backyards. Do poor families get the benefits they need? The book shows they can and do, yet their access is more limited than for their better-off neighbors, and women-headed households who are poor suffer most. Most of the town's poor—those who need food and would farm if they could—do not in fact do so. Urban agriculture contributes 22 percent of the basic food intake of farming households and 8 percent of the overall needs of the town. The figures could be higher if the poor farmers (the majority) were helped instead of hindered, which is what is happening at present, as the book clearly shows.

Despite Nakuru's being singled out as a "Local Agenda 21" town and the scene of numerous studies and assistance programs that emphasize the benefits of urban farming, class differences in the town lead to discrimination against the poor. The book touches on the legal situation several times, but it does not fully make it clear that it is the interpretation of the law, which lies in the hands of those in power, that is the operative mechanism for the discrimination. Despite various assertions by this book to the effect that "the laws discriminate but the local authorities tolerate" urban farming, in my experience the reverse is closer to the truth. Public officials interpret the law and use its loose provisions on nuisance and the powers of the Medical Officer of Health to control urban farming in Kenya as they wish. We have to wait for a political science study of urban agriculture to really examine that question.