Slumdog Agriculture: Feeding the Poor Billions in Third-World Megacities

Src: www.environnet.in.th

According to the United Nations, fifty percent of the world's people live in cities. This figure is expected to rise dramatically in the next forty years; in 2050,when global population reaches 9.3 billion, 67 percent of those people will be living in urban areas (UN 17). Most of these will be in the developing world—the so-called “Third World”—which hosts most of the planet's 23 megacities (cities with at least ten million inhabitants). These immense urban centers, and those following in their high- density footsteps, are increasingly unable to feed their citizens. It seems clear that the issue of urban agriculture must be examined in light of the overwhelming challenge facing residents and city planners: the production of food.

There is no one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to sustainability. Every society faces its own challenges and carries its own in situ set of beliefs and traditions. Given this fact, I have chosen to examine three cities in three different regions of the developing world—Bogotá in South America, Bangkok in Southeast Asia, and Cairo in North Africa—to get a sense of how their urban agriculture is working, and what they can tell us about the future of feeding the world's urban poor.

Bogotá, Colombia

Bogotá is commonly thought of as one of South America's megacities; its population of around 8 million (Bojacá et al. 487) is growing exponentially as masses of rural migrants, driven by Colombia's long-running civil war or displaced by unequal land access, pour into its 400 square kilometer (Rojas 27) environs. It's estimated that  93% of the displaced people in Colombia have migrated to urban areas. 98.6% of these are living below the poverty line, while 82.6% live in extreme poverty (Albuja and Ceballos 10), often unable to afford housing, massing in improvised shantytowns without access to clean water or nutritious food.

If not for two government actions—Colombia's decentralization of power in the late 1980s, and constitutional changes in 1991 which codified the right of each citizen to public space (Berney 2010)—the story of Bogotá might be a very different one. But the advent of local mayoral elections swept into power a series of independent leaders determined to demonstrate their credibility with fast, high- visibility public works projects (Berney 2008). Between 1995 and 2003, three mayoral administrations, teamed with design staff and city planners, executed a bold social experiment in the tradition of Curitiba, the city highlighted in A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil. The aim here too, was to develop what they termed a cultura ciudadana, or “citizenship culture”. In 2004, Mayor  Luis Eduardo Garzon built on this movement to inaugurate Bogotá Without Hunger, designed to improve the nutritional status of vulnerable groups by, among other initiatives, implementing an urban agriculture program to be led by the city's Jose Celestino Mutis Botanic Garden (Sánchez et al. 17).

The program's goal was to promote the growing and consumption of foods with high nutritional value or medicinal uses, focusing on the needs of the community. Implementation cost had to be low. Crops had to be food the growers would want to eat, and adaptable enough to grow in small spaces as well as in the various types of microclimates Bogotá possessed. To this end, the Botanic Garden experimented with native plants as well as “exotic” species such as lettuce, spinach, and carrots (Sánchez et al. 17), utilizing common materials as planters—rubber boots, trash bags, used plastic bottles, tires and garbage pails—and reusing wastewater, food scraps, and storm runoff to produce impressive results. They found that, using compost mixed with rice husks to improve air supply and lighten containers (Garzon 15), twelve black plastic bags tied into hanging vertical tubes could produce 190 plants on one square meter alone (Rojas 29).

Another aspect of the program focused on the urban farmers themselves, mostly taken from vulnerable populations such as women heads of household, inmates in city penitentiaries and prisons, the HIV-positive, students, older adults, former war combatants (Sánchez et al. 18), those with mental retardation and Tourette syndrome (Sánchez et al. 17), and deaf-mutes. Displaced persons from rural areas were invited to share their knowledge of traditional agriculture, making them feel valued and useful (Sánchez et al. 17). In all, over 31,000 people have been trained, including upwards of 1,000 urban farmers in the city, and more than 50 local and neighborhood exchanges have taken place.

It is said that urban agriculture contributes to community development beyond the simple mechanics of providing city dwellers access to fresh food (Coyle 289). In the last twenty years, these residents have embraced Bogotántud: the sense of pride and identity within their city and with their fellow citizens. Violence, homicide, and traffic accidents have all decreased, while life on the streets has become more vibrant and communal (Berney 2010). At the same time, more families do have access to nutritious food, as well as the income they can derive from selling their excess crops.

Challenges remain, however. Expansion of urban agriculture programs requires continued funding (Berney 2010). Officeholders retire. Public spaces require maintenance. Money, as always, is in chronic short supply. And without the impetus of continued government support, many of the rural poor who flock to Bogotá will have scant outlet for growing city food, and their traditional knowledge—along with these newly-acquired adaptations—may very well be lost.

Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, a city of one million people in 1950, now hosts a population of 12 million (Fraser 39) and growing. Once a fishing village, its location on the fertile Chao Phraya river basin ensured that for most of its history it has had an ample supply of comestibles for its inhabitants (Mateo-Babiano 454). The kingdom of Thailand itself has a rich, mostly rural, agricultural tradition: rice is not only the center of its cuisine, it's also its major crop (Suteethorn 3). But times are changing. In Bangkok's  10th National Development Plan of 2007-2011), it aimed to move its economy from one of agricultural export to “amenity services” (Mateo-Babiano 455)—tourism. Canals, or khlongs, which once provided irrigation and transportation, have largely been paved over in favor of Western-style traffic-clogged roads and manicured public spaces. Bangkok no longer feeds itself, instead importing cheap, nutrient- deficient, often unsanitary edibles (Suteethorn 4) from other regions or other countries (Chunnasit 8).

Meanwhile, the seasonal flooding which was once absorbed by khlongs and fields has nowhere to go. Bangkok, built on muddy river land, is a mere 1.5 meters above sea level, and it is sinking at a rate of about 10 centimeters per year. It is estimated that, if this continues, most of the city will lie below sea level within the next ten years (Vagneron 518). At the same time, water shortages are becoming exacerbated by population growth, and clean air and sunlight are at an increasing premium. Pollution problems are exacerbated in the dry season when water is scarcer. Bangkok is paying for its cheap food habit in pollution and malnutrition. It is paying for its new Western values in social isolation and poverty: new arrivals to the city are too busy trying to survive to have time for social interaction or community involvement (Daniere 476). Those fleeing rural poverty see the growing of food in any form as a backward step in status.

Ironically, the average Thai has historically had a rich and varied diet of fresh foods. Traditional houses, built on stilts, included pots of peppers, fruit trees, lemongrass, and herbs which could be moved from ground to balcony level to escape flooding. In the 1200s, Thailand's king sowed Bangkok's first public space with palm trees, noting their long lives and culinary uses: sugar from the palm, its fruits for desserts . One hundred years ago, King Rama V planted tamarind trees in front of the Royal Palace, its fruit to be harvested by one and all (Suteethorn 3). Beginning in 1998, King Bhumibhol, a proponent of urban agriculture, partnered with a local corporation to build an organic farm on an empty landfill beside an expressway, in the center of Bangkok. The “Lemon Farm” utilizes rice husks, straw, molasses-based compost and locally-made sprinkler systems to supply pesticide-free vegetables to stores citywide and produce shopping on site. In a nod to Western mores, it even offers a “u-pick” option. Indeed, while Western values may have been the bane of Bangkok's environment and its food supply, they may offer a partial solution, thanks to Thailand's growing civil class and the global urban agriculture movement.

Thailand's class structure is generally fluid, but its civil (or middle) class can be seen as comprised of intellectuals, white-collar managers, entrepreneurs, academia, expatriates, and the media: urbanized, educated, and moneyed enough to have time to address issues of sustainability (Buch-Hansen 144). It is they who can influence and support the work of local government to initiate urban food-growing projects. One such is the vegetable garden on the Lak Si District office rooftop (Suteethorn 5), which produces about 70 different crops per year on its 400 square meter area and runs urban agriculture workshops twice a month. Another project in partnership with Canadian NGOs saw two projects set up in poor Bangkok communities or khets, Keht Bangkapi and Keht Bangkok Noi (Fraser 41). Residents cleared the undergrowth from unused land along a canal, planting fruit trees and community gardens. The trees, besides providing food, stabilized the canal banks and prevented erosion, while the farm plots fed families and generated much-needed income for the neighborhood via roadside produce sales.

There are challenges here as well, are as old as the developing world itself: land tenure and graft. Originally, the Lak Si District garden had begun as a scraped-together nursery on a plot of barren land; when the project became a success, the owner of the property demanded a rental fee for use of his land and the project, for lack of funds, had to be scrapped. A similar situation occurred in the case of Keht Bangkok Noi, where the landowner decided to disallow the community access to their gardens without remuneration. As one source observed, “this project is about providing the urban poor with access to green space to improve the environment and to meet community needs. Consequently, communities that can obtain a guaranteed access to land may be too wealthy to fall within our mandate” (Fraser 48). And the Bangkapi project, enthusiastically supported by the director of the district, was doomed by the disapproval of his successor. While inroads have been made, there remains much to do if Bangkok's millions are to be kept fed—healthily and sustainably.

Cairo, Egypt

Cairo is notable for not only being a megacity in a developing nation, but for being the center of a revolution in January of 2011 which gave rise to what's now known as the Arab Spring.

Cairo, home to upwards of 17 million, has been called a “typical megacity”—small and dense. In fact, one fourth of all Egyptians live in Cairo, and the city has one of the highest population densities in the world: 32,000 people per square kilometer packed into buildings an average of just six storeys tall (Gertel and Samir 209). Like present-day Bangkok, urban agriculture is hampered by a lack of space and the pervasiveness of cheap food. Here, too, some city-dwellers look at the cultivation of food as rural or backward (Knapman) which goes hand in hand with Cairo's aim to present an attractive, manicured face to the world's tourists. But Egypt is heavily dependent on food from other countries; 55% of its wheat is imported (mostly from the United States), a significant statistic given that grains and bread comprise nearly 71% of the average Egyptian's daily food intake (Gertel and Samir 210). Nearly half of the poor lacks the money to eat a well-balanced diet.

Those who can afford fresh produce have concerns of their own: contamination. Cairo's pollution problems come to rest in its soil and water. Heavy metals are of special concern – the lead levels of produce grown in Greater Cairo are 10-40 times higher than the same crops from rural areas, especially for melons and leafy greens like lettuce, watercress and parsley. On the city's outer fringes, water shortages result in farmers using untreated sewage to water their fields (Gertel and Samir 222).

Pre-Revolutionary Cairo did have some tradition of urban agriculture. Twenty years ago, in the early 1990s, Egyptian researchers began exploring the feasibility of growing organic produce on the crowded rooftops of Cairo's apartment buildings, though it wasn't until 2001 that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) became involved that the program became official. At the same time, there was a long-seated tradition of raising animals on rooftops; an estimate in the1980s noted that some 80,000 families (Castillo 341) were raising animals for home consumption, most of this poultry and by women heads of households. And of course there was the transformation of a 500 year-old rubbish pile into the beautiful Al-Azhar Park, as seen in A Garden in Cairo.

But there were problems. Land tenure issues left many of the urban poor unable to afford shelter, resorting to illegally squatting in makeshift slums (Spear and Williams 219). Seventy percent of Cairo's population still lives in these so-called “informal areas” such as the City of the Dead, whose population is estimated between 600,000 to 800,000 (La Mantia 79). The government's push to create a tourist- attractive city included a plan to turn a large piece of the City of the Dead into a new urban park. The ashwa'iyat, or landless inhabitants of the area, were to be forcibly moved to an unspecified location, just as several thousand inhabitants of downtown slums had been forcibly evicted in favor of “showcase” megaprojects in the city's core (Gertel 280). On top of the general economic, social and cultural malaise left unaddressed by the government during this time, food prices were rising and resources dwindling.

The ousting of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and his administration after the Revolution was an opportunity to readdress these crucial issues and reorient public policy. Activists who were solely focused on the political have now begun to look at the big picture: the future depends on human justice, sustainability, and collaboration. Groups such as The Egyptian Food Sovereignty Project and The Peace and Plenty Association tout the advantages of urban gardening through blogs and social media, urging citizens to “wage the environment war from your roof” (Sarant); others are working with neighborhoods and individuals to develop locally sourced hydroponic roof gardens so that Cairo's poorest can grow cheap, healthy produce for the families, while deriving income from the excess (Laylin 2012). And, in the City of the Dead, an NGO called  Liveinslums is helping the ashwa'iyat grow food in microjardins – soilless minigardens which are easy to assemble, portable enough to transport in case of eviction, and which even fertilize the sand.

Cairo and its people have a long way to go. Change doesn't happen overnight. The Revolution drove away tourists, who have yet to return in large numbers. IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks, affiliated with the United Nations) notes that the price of gas has gone up considerably, and with it the cost of produce like lemons, eggplants, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and squash has tripled. Meat, dairy and lentils are too expensive for most to afford, and there have been several recent bread shortages (IRIN 2011). Indeed, “increasing poverty .. has had two effects: new cases of malnutrition have emerged, and families already dealing with malnutrition are facing more pressure to feed properly” (IRIN 2012). Cairo, too, has a long way to go in the fight against urban hunger.

Food security has been defined as availability of, and access to, sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets people's dietary needs. More people than ever in our planet's history have no food security. More poor people than ever are flooding into megacities across the developing world; more and more are being born in them. As the populations of these megacities grow, and as the price of transporting food rises, the problem of feeding these masses – of giving them food security - is enormous. One way this  challenge can be met is through urban agriculture; providing city-dwellers with the knowledge and resources to produce their own food. Of course, every city is different and faces its own set of impediments: funding, climate change, revolution, even indifference. The important lesson is that “slumdog” farming or gardening can work. It may, in fact, need to be the future of urban food.

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© Shaii Stone 2016