The
Issue: urbanization and poverty growth in a deteriorating environment
Half the world’s
population now lives in towns or cities and by 2020, this is expected to
rise to 60%. The developing world will absorb most of these extra 1.5
billion urban dwellers. The urban population in Latin America will rise to
82% by 2020 and to nearly 50% in Africa and Asia. This will have
disastrous implications for the situation of food security, poverty, and
unemployment in these regions, which typically lack infrastructure and
experience economic and political instability (click
here to read more).
The
Response: an integrated agricultural research response
The need is to pool
research knowledge and resources at national and international levels to
be able to better understand and address the complex interplay of food
security, income needs, and the ecological, social, and institutional
particularities of towns and cities. The Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a unique
global partnership for agriculture that has a clear comparative advantage
to address this need, through the 15 food and environmental research
centers around the world which it supports, known as Future Harvest.
Several Future
Harvest research centers have already implemented research projects in
urban and peri-urban agriculture. However, this work has mostly been
carried out by individual centers together with traditional national
partners and has lacked the resources and skills to fully engage with the
complexity of the urban environment.
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About
Urban Harvest
In late 1999 the CGIAR
launched a system-wide initiative to direct and coordinate the collective
knowledge and technologies of the Future Harvest Centers towards
strengthening urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA). The Initiative,
formerly known by its acronym SIUPA, and now renamed Urban Harvest,
helps Centers link together their own efforts and become partners with
many national and international efforts. The goals of Urban Harvest are
to:
-
Contribute to
enhanced food security, improved nutrition and higher incomes for poor
urban and peri-urban families
-
Reduce the negative
environmental impact of UPA and enhance its positive potential
-
Establish the
perception of UPA as a productive, essential component of sustainable
cities
Research
Framework
Urban
Harvest has been involved in a participatory process with many national and international
partners in urban and peri-urban agriculture to jointly come up with an
adequate framework to study
the complex, dynamic, and multi-sectoral reality of the urban environment.
This framework focuses on three essential
themes in UPA (see diagram below) which provide the
basis for guiding activities at the practical level of
research and development projects in regional settings, as well as in
alliance-building initiatives at global and regional level.
Research
Framework Diagram
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