Browsing by Subject "Cape Town"

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It is not about spinach : a food justice perspective on urban agriculture in Cape Town and Maputo
(2021) Paganini, Nicole Maria; Sousa-Poza, Alfonso
The world’s rapid urbanisation has presented multiple challenges to societies and the environment and strained the sustainability and equity of urban food systems. In discussions on the future of the world’s cities and their food security, urban agriculture has gained attention for its potential to contribute to food supply and dietary diversity, generate income for urban producers, and provide various multifunctional benefits such as environmental services, education, and community building. The dissertation followed a conceptual approach that applies a food systems perspective on urban agriculture and uses urban agriculture as a means to identify food justice patterns. In addition, this thesis contributes to participatory action research methodology by shifting focus to the concept of democratisation processes in research. Co-research is a more radical and inclusive form of participatory action research that involves actors and groups from marginalised communities in all research steps. Communities are involved in the study design, problem posing, decision-making around methodology, data collection, analysis and triangulation, and scaling of activities. This process fosters ownership of the gathered results through mutual and transformative learning, and hence, could become more valuable than the results themselves. The food system in Cape Town is highly segregated, as is the city itself: the legacy of apartheid-era planning left an affluent and prosperous city centre surrounded by lower-income areas populated largely by People of Colour who face daily challenges in accessing food. Urban agriculture is practised in the townships of Cape Town by hundreds of farmers—most of them People of Colour, unemployed, elderly, female home growers—and thousands of backyard growers who cultivate a variety of vegetables mostly on small plots. The food gardens are either on public or private land: land is leased for short periods from public institutions such as schools or clinics or leased from municipalities, which is a lengthy and—for many farmers—opaque process. NGOs, with support from the Municipality, introduced urban agriculture as a poverty alleviation strategy to combat high rates of food security in the marginalised parts of the city. Decades of support have hampered the establishment of community-driven food solutions and led to dependencies on NGOs for inputs, marketing, and acquisition of new knowledge. These farming activities play an insignificant role when it comes to household contribution. Food is produced in highly confined and troubled spaces in informal settlements, almost exclusively for a niche market of middle/upper class consumers in the wealthier city centre. Maputo’s food system is strongly influenced by food imports from neighbouring South Africa, by its rapid growth, and by migration from the rural areas of the country where selfsustaining family farming is a primary livelihood strategy. In the urban and peri-urban area of Mozambique’s capital, the zonas verdes (green zones) were established to combat the city’s severe food insecurity crisis after the colonial era. These horticultural production sites have remained vibrant production areas. Urban agriculture is largely commercialised and plays a key role supplying the city with specific horticultural products, mainly cabbage and lettuce. Informal traders buy crops directly from the fields and sell them in Maputo’s local markets and street stands. Four of five farming families indicate that the income they generate in this activity is their main source of revenue. Another estimated 40,000 people earn their livings by supporting urban agriculture through activities such as trading, selling, pesticide application, and transportation. Like Cape Town, it is mainly women who are involved in urban agriculture in Maputo’s fields. Understanding urban agriculture through a food systems lens was crucial in examining the potentials and challenges of urban agriculture. Applying a co-research approach in Cape Town allowed investigations that fostered participating farmers’ agency over the findings and led to the creation of a strong network that carried the research beyond the scope of this project. The mutual contextualisation of the results gathered in an inclusive research process into food justice theory revealed farmers’ in-depth understanding of structural inequalities within food systems in cities. Food justice theory is mainly applied in case studies in the North and looks at historical context and trauma, systemic challenges, and marginalisation in ethnicity, class, place, time, and gender. These research findings from two case studies in the South add to our understanding of marginalisation in urban agriculture in Cape Town and Maputo and shed light on the importance of intersectionality as a contextual component of food justice.