With food costs increasing and with the rising prevalence of extreme climatic events, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has recognized urban and periurban agriculture as a farming system that could bring about national food & health care safety and tasks, and enhancing urban ecology and sanitation, and thus attaining poverty alleviation, food safety and sustainable urban growth.
The FAO defines urban and peri-urban agriculture within an industry situated inside (intra-urban) or about the fringe (periurban) of a city, a town or a metropolis, that develops and increases, processes and distributes a diversity of agriculture goods, using mostly human, soil and water resources, services and products found in and around that urban area. As India is projected to include 400 million people into its metropolitan population by 2050, it’s extremely critical to the nation to tackle this matter earnestly to stay in front of the massive challenge of fulfilling the metropolitan dwellers’ nutrient safety and sanitation needs.
At the aggregate level, access to water and land may play a crucial role in reducing urban poverty and improving food and nutritional security through urban and peri-urban agriculture, particularly gardening of fruits, vegetables and flowers. There’s an increasing market for these products in towns, especially for natural products with increasing purchasing power and nutrient awareness among the inhabitants. Nevertheless, at the micro-level, those who have a property in their home premises might not have enough time, attention, or motivation to tackle farming.
In contrast, individuals who are prepared or have needed work might not have the fundamental production factors. So there’s a need to join the two classes through relevant associations. In heavily populated towns, where accessibility to land is a restriction even at the aggregate level, another approach might be required to overcome urban agriculture’s lack of urban space, such as developing technologies for farming. In Singapore, Sky Greens, a business venture of entrepreneur Jack Ng creates in its low carbon, vertical hydraulic farm 1 ton of veggies every second day and can be just five to ten times more effective than a normal farm.
The issues associated with property growth in India also affect the availability of usable land for agriculture. There’s a massive investment in plots and flats, which stay unused. A sizeable proportion of the investment is shameful cash. In cities such as Singapore, where vacant property taxation laws are strict, there’s the more effective use of the urban territory. As many big cities are already under underwater pressure, urban agriculture could raise the already worried resource base requirement. Thus, new sources of water have to be discovered.
In most towns and cities in India, wastewater and strong waste are far from satisfactory. Most water bodies from the towns are contaminated with untreated and partially treated sewage. Municipal waste such as biological waste ends up in the dirt and water bodies. An appraisal by Water Aid states that about 80 per cent of India’s surface water is contaminated. According to the Census of India 2011, just 32.7 percent of urban households are connected to a sewerage system.
The rest depend on in situ disposal methods, and it’s uncertain how the waste is further disposed of. However, if effectively intended, there may be a win-win scenario for people interested in urban agriculture and municipal water utilities. The biodegradable waste may be efficiently utilized as compost to its small scale urban farms following composting. In contrast, the wastewater could be treated to such amounts to irrigate those farms.
The chance of utilizing bioswales for treating greywater may also be researched. This article aims to reevaluate the metropolitan agriculture situation in India, identify the existing issues and limitations, and indicate a way forward according to a more comprehensive comprehension of the facets that produce urban agriculture effectively. The towns in which Urban Agriculture has been quite successful were analyzed to comprehend the elements that add to the achievement.
An effort is made to recognize the aspects that help sustain Urban Agriculture and the issues that interfere with it in various Indian cities. There’s considerable urban agricultural activity.
The future policy and institutional support demands for encouraging urban agriculture have been analyzed, and the current financial service for farming in towns. The urban population in India that stands at 377 million, is predicted to rise by 404 million by 2050 (World Urbanisation Prospects, 2014).
The nutrient requirements of the increased urban inhabitants need to be fulfilled. Additionally, with increasing affluence and increasing nutritional awareness among the city dwellers regarding nourishment, there’ll be an increased need for vegetables, eggs, fruits, meat, dairy products and even flowers. The direct use of food grains has diminished while the requirement for food goods high up in the food chain, particularly processed foods, has gone up in the past several decades.
On the flip side, about 65.5 million people reside in urban slums and sprawl, resulting in intragenerational nutritional inequality. As pointed out from the”Report on the condition of food security in urban India” from the M. S. Swaminathan study base that the situation in metropolitan areas is frequently overlooked during talks on nutrition and food security. There’s ample food and nutritional deficiencies in the urban areas, the problem being worse in smaller cities.
Particularly vulnerable are women and kids; roughly 50 per cent of those girls are anaemic, and undernourishment leading to severe energy deficiency is rampant among girls (MSSRF, 2010). Moreover, individuals living in urban areas have much less control over the source and quality of the food that they eat compared to the rural inhabitants.
The food costs, particularly those of fruits, vegetables and legumes, which greatly influence the quantum of the ingestion, tend to be subject to enormous fluctuations due to a lot of aspects which range from the vagaries of the monsoon to spread diseases to the fluctuations in the cost of crude oil at the global four marketplace and into the changes in policies regulating export and import of agricultural products.
They also don’t control the usage of pesticides and other substances used in generating the food, which has serious consequences for nutrient value and security of the food consumed. Instances where farmers grow organic food for their consumption and insecticide, has laden create available are reported. It reaches the urban customer that the food won’t be fresh and possibly refrigerated or ripened.
The use of substances to improve the shelf life of this product can also be widespread. The incidence of cancer in India is forecast to grow from an estimated 3.9 million in 2015 to an estimated 7.1 million people by 2020 (Ernst and Young LLP, 2015). Urban agriculture will go a long way in addressing these issues to a great extent. It can offer fresh produce to city dwellers with no requirement for resource-intensive transport, refrigeration and storage facilities by reducing the time and space from farm to fork. Being labour intensive will also offer jobs and develop into a source of revenue and contribute to poverty alleviation.
Urban farming was proven to be especially valuable for poor girls in urban and peri-urban areas. It offers a way to fulfil their families’ nutritional requirements and acquire some income since they operate close to their houses, concurrently caring for their households. Urban Agriculture has a substantial role in urban environmental control since it could battle urban heat island impacts and be urban agriculture and provide the visual allure. The Food and Agricultural Organization has long since established Urban Agriculture as a vital component in food security plans.
Yet formal recognition of Urban Agriculture and its integration into the urban planning procedure is vital for success. In India, urban agriculture has been carried out in several cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai under government, private agencies, and people.
An important component that must be mentioned in this context is untreated or treated wastewater in agriculture. In cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad, indirect and direct utilization of wastewater from urban and peri-urban agriculture is more prevalent. While using untreated wastewater for irrigation isn’t permitted for public health reasons, it’s used in many areas for the need of access to new water. It’s also demonstrated that yields are greater with the use of untreated domestic wastewater for irrigation due to the existence of nitrates.
You will find recent initiatives to market treated wastewater to Delhi, Noida, Hyderabad and Chennai. Treated sewage comes in Chennai, and there’s a growing need for the same. The Noida authority utilizes treated wastewater to rinse a few green straps and have strategies to undertake tertiary therapy to deal with wastewater to potable standards. In Hyderabad, farmers lift national effluent in the Musi River for irrigation purposes.
Using wastewater from urban agriculture reduces the requirement for new water. It will help close the loop from urban water management, given the wastewater is treated, to secure criteria for preventing environmental contamination. Organic waste in the city could be composted and used in urban agriculture with the extra benefit of decreasing waste that’s dumped on the property.
FAO reports that farming in Havana resulted in the near elimination of neighbourhood refuse dumps for household waste. Five, there’s also tremendous interest in organic farming in several quarters. However, the scale of these Urban Agriculture attempts hasn’t been enough to generate a significant difference in nutritional and food security in the metropolitan regions.
Therefore, there’s a need to tackle planning towards accomplishing this objective. Critical to this is that the study based knowledge on the conditions under which urban agriculture becomes more workable.
Reference:- http://irapindia.org/