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Focus
on urban and peri-urban agriculture during CGIAR
Annual Meeting in Nairobi
The
Annual General Meeting of the CGIAR in Nairobi in
October 2003 presented an excellent opportunity to
hear not only from the scientists involved in
research for critical agricultural issues, but also
from the other “experts” - crop and livestock
farmers and market traders who face daily challenges
and seek out opportunities while trying to maintain
or improve their and their families livelihoods.
This year, urban and peri-urban agriculture was one
of the critical agricultural themes brought into
focus at the meeting with an Urban Harvest Lunch
Review organized as part of the Special Events
program, after a day of field visits entitled
"Survival in the City: Urban and Peri-Urban
Agriculture".
Three buses took visitors on different transect
drives through the city, from the central markets
and roadside plant and vegetable nurseries, past
intensive vegetable and fodder farms fed by waste
water ditches, rivers and run-off from roads, to
peri-urban dairy farms and milk marketing locations.
Participants had the opportunity to speak to slum
dwellers keeping livestock and growing crops in
these conditions about their farming systems and
inputs that include urban wastes, and with peri-urban
dairy farmers and milk marketers to understand the
constraints to small scale production and research
impacts.
The field trips involved close cooperation between
Urban Harvest and ILRI’s Market Oriented Small
Scale Dairy Project personnel, which contributed to
greater understanding of the close links between
research questions and research agenda’s of the
two programs.
Feedback from the trip was extremely positive and
was enhanced at the Lunch Review the next day when
visitors listened to the Deputy Mayor of Nairobi
speaking of the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture’s
priority to link policy making and research to
address the conditions of their small-scale
producers and traders for better urban public health
and food safety.
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