Urban Agriculture and Urban Food Insecurity/Poverty in Nigeria

Abstract

Urban food insecurity and poverty are fast becoming major problems in the developing world. Urban agriculture has also been variously presented as one of the options for tackling this problem. But is urban agriculture sustainable, given that only the city poor are involved? This paper presents a comparison of output and use of purchased inputs between the rural and urban farmers in Ohafia, south-east Nigeria. Although farm sizes were larger in the rural than in the urban areas, this difference was not statistically significant, apparently because many farmers in the urban areas also purchased farmland in the rural areas. The uses of all the purchased inputs except hired labour were significantly higher in the urban than in the rural areas, indicating efforts by urban farmers to retain soil nutrients in the face of continuous cropping. The use of hired labour did not differ in the two locations, mainly because the aged are involved in agriculture everywhere. Output was however significantly lower in the urban than in the rural areas, apparently because farmers in the urban areas are poor and hence undercapitalized to use adequate amounts of purchased inputs to retain soil nutrients. This observation suggests that if urban agriculture is to act as one of the options for tackling urban food insecurity, the urban poor should be sufficiently empowered financially, not only to apply purchased inputs in the right quantities, but also to adopt innovations in their farming businesses.

Keywords

urban agriculture urban poor food insecurity Nigeria

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