Urban agriculture, urban horticulture farming or urban gardening is the practice of cultivation, processing and distributing food in or around urban areas. Worldwide, this was in response to meeting food requirements of citizens, gainful employment of urban poor, healthy hobby of urban citizens or a conscious planning by administration. With urban expansion, certain cities started expanding in all possible directions where natural barriers like ocean, mountains do not exist. With unprecedented growth of cities, increased urban population and urban migration, the traditional food supplying peri-urban agriculture areas started shrinking. This has resulted in increasing the food miles and ecological footprint.
Urban initiatives vary substantially from place to place. In recent times, in some cities, they have increased considerably as citizens started becoming health and environment conscious. Enthusiastic farming communities got interested to pick up new skills to grow food organically. This created new groups of enterpreneurs supporting such initiatives in terms of the new materials and media for plant growth, waste recycling for manure and efficient use of limited spaces available and use of vertical gardens. Also, there have been efforts made by several agencies including civil societies to revive peri urban agriculture pockets around cities/towns. Also, covid pandemic also created new producer groups as well as markets, through producer consumer linkages. New groups of enthusiastic and innovative people getting interested in farming are investing and cultivating organically in the outskirts of the cities.
In this issue we would like to include such urban and peri urban initiatives. We look forward to experiences of citizens, associations, development agencies including the process and scale of such initiatives. It could be about the forward backward linkages too with regard to alternative media, reusable media and materials. Also, it would be interesting to know the enabling environment in terms of policies and challenges faced and multistakeholder involvements in your city or around the city.
We invite articles for the March 2022 issue of LEISA India. Kindly send your experiences to the editor at leisiaindia@yahoo.co.in before 31st January 2022.
