Provisioning Havana

Rationale
How to enable cities to feed themselves? By 2025, 65% of the world’s population will live in cities, of which 57% in Southern countries and a massive 85% in industrialised nations. For many urban dwellers already, supplies of food and water are inadequate. In recent years, urban agriculture has received increasing attention as a means to mitigate urban food insecurity, and there are an estimated 200 million urban farmers worldwide (FAO, 2015). However, whilst urban agriculture can produce vital nutrient-rich foods such as salads, horticulture, and small livestock, urban growing areas are limited and small scale. The urban hinterland – comprising a 20 to 40 km belt around the city, has historically been a major supplier of urban food needs in many parts of the world and provides the area required for the production of field-scale grains, roots and tubers, and livestock. Yet little research attention has been placed on this important belt. A literature search (31/01/15) reveals 1241 articles on ‘urban agriculture’ (340 peer reviewed), compared to only 32 articles on ‘peri-urban agriculture’ (15 peer reviewed).

Less attention, that is, apart from in Cuba, where ‘suburban agriculture’ has been a major government programme since the nation’s food crisis of the early 1990s. In the early 1990s even, Cuban researchers involved in the sector estimated that it held the potential to provide 70% of a city’s food needs (Wright, 2009). Furthermore, owing to the unavailability of imported agricultural inputs, they have had to develop cottage-scale production centres for biological fertilizer and biopesticide inputs, and to organize for the recycling of valuable urban green waste.
The Cuban Ministry of Agriculture’s Department of Urban and Suburban Agriculture works closely with the National Research Institute in Tropical Agriculture “Alejandro de Humboldt” (INIFAT) to promote, improve and monitor activities. Very little of their findings have reached international audiences or informed international discourse on urban food security (only 8 articles appear in a literature search of ‘urban agriculture’ and ‘cuba’, and none for ‘peri-urban’ and ‘cuba’(31/01/15)).

Research aims and objectives
1) Review state-of-the-art of peri-urban agriculture globally and its key constraints, highlighting the differences between the global North and South.
2) Analyse the emergence and development of peri-urban agriculture in Cuba from 1990 to the present, identifying its drivers, enablers and means by which challenges were overcome, as well as its successes in terms of food and livelihood security.
3) Map and document current trends in peri-urban agriculture in 3 zones: Havana, Isla de la Joventud, and one other, to verify secondary data and identify emergent properties as well as variances in policy impacts on the ground.
4) Discuss the achievements of Cuban peri-urban agriculture with respect to the global crisis of urban food security