Urban Farming: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities

by Peter Rosset

"Urban farming is helping lift hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty and is improving health and nutrition of city-dwellers across the globe."

- United Nations Development Program, February 13, 1996

California - In its report, Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) documents the global explosion of urban farming. According to UNDP, fully one-seventh of the planet's food supply is now grown in cities by some 800 million urban farmers. In Havana, 26,000 thousand hectares are currently being cultivated within the city limits, part of Cuba's miraculous recovery from a food crisis.

Recognizing the potential of this trend to help resolve problems of urban hunger and unemployment, the UNDP and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs have have jointly funded the Global Facility for Urban Agriculture. Housed at the International Development Research Center in Canada, the facility will fund research on and promotion of urban agriculture worldwide.

In the US the movement towards community food security includes urban farming, community supported agriculture (CSAs), farmers' markets and local food security councils. In the San Francisco Bay Area, urban gardening organizations like SLUG (San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners) and school, youth, seniors, homeless and recovery programs are all involved in turning vacant urban lots into verdant farming plots.

While most of California's agricultural economy is stagnant, there are two remarkable exceptions. Organic farming is growing at 20 percent per year and urban farming (which, so far, is unrecorded by statisticians) is undergoing similar growth.

Farms in Berkeley?

These trends underlie a radical grassroots proposal to turn the an abandoned three-acre plot of land owned by the University of California at Berkeley into a Center for Urban Agriculture (CUA).

The Gill Tract contains the last, largest piece of farmland in the urban Bay Area. Even more remarkable, the tract has been farmed organically for the last 20 years. The Gill Tract has many serviceable buildings, greenhouses and laboratories, as well as a wooded parkland. The growing urban farming movement needs a center to give it coherence and the Gill Tract would be a perfect match.

But, because of the estimated $10 million value of the land alone, the temptation for the fiscally-strapped university to sell it for development is enormous. According to the local press, the Safeway supermarket chain has offered to buy the Gill Tract. Meanwhile, sources inside the University report that molecular biologists on the faculty want to turn it into a biotechnology center. Under this plan, the plot would be used to field-test genetically engineered crops.

This would sets up a classic confrontation between alternative visions of our food system. Do we want it to be dominated by giant supermarket chains selling the genetically altered crops and livestock? Or do we want to produce and consume locally grown and healthy foods, while providing jobs and an improving the urban landscape in the process? The principles of farmland preservation compel us to try to save it.

The Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), recently formed by more than 30 local community groups (including Earth Island Institute) and coordinated by Food First, is pressuring the University to convert this prime piece of urban farmland into California's first Center for Urban Agricculture.

The Gill Tract for years housed the world-famous Division of Biological Control (DBC). The DBC pioneered the field of biological control, using natural enemies instead of insecticides to control crop pests. Now, at least partially because of fiscal cutbacks, the University has closed the DBC, putting the future of the Gill Tract in doubt.

BACUA believes that the explosion in urban farming taking place throughout the world is a positive development - people taking control of the resources that they need for their own livelihoods.

In this era of privatizaton, the University's Agricultural Research Stations are casting about for a new research mission. It is becoming increasingly common throughout the world for public institutions (and universities in particular) to form partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to share resources and promote common survival. Such a partnership at the Gill Tract, would involve university professors, researchers and students with committed NGOs, working together in a new and rapidly expanding field. (Something similar already exists at the UC Santa Cruz Agroecology Program, but this program doesn't serve an urban region anything like the Bay Area.)

We can imagine a working community farm that would provide good jobs to local youth and quality organic food to local residents. The farm would simultaneously serve as a demonstration training site for young farmers and as a research site for the University. The farm's greenhouses could support research directed at improving urban farming technologies while the vacant buildings could become offices shared by NGOs (ranging from urban gardening, school, and community groups, to food policy and education organizations and advocacy groups) and by university professors studying the economic, agronomic, nutritional, ecological and sociological aspects of urban agriculture.

If the potential is unlimited, the alternative is appalling. The loss of this precious of urban farmland would forfeit a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create something new, something where the total would clearly be bigger than the sum of the parts.

The creation of a unique working farm/research station would be true to the legacy of the Division of Biological Control, which over the last two decades fought the long good fight against the state's dominant agribusiness interests and the agrochemical industry.

Peter Rosset is the Executive Director of Food First.

The Urban Agriculture Network, 1711 Lamont St., NW, Washington, DC, 20010 USA