Going with the food flow: The contribution of urban agriculture to a growing African city

Urban Farm DB summary

More than 700 surveys with food vendors and consumers, combined with ethnographic research with farmers, quantified and mapped the contribution of urban and peri-urban producers to fresh leafy vegetable supply in the growing city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Seventy percent of all amaranth consumed in the city was found to be produced within it, with an average farm-to-fork distance of 11 km, indicating a strongly localised foodshed for leafy vegetables. The results point to the ongoing significance of urban areas in meeting their own food demand and the need to explicitly integrate food provisioning into the planning of growing African cities.