Urban and Peri-urban Horticulture
In the section on meat, we argued that the arguments for "local" production of cattle or sheep are misguided. The opposite is true of fruit and vegetables. There are a number of good reasons for making fruit and vegetable production very local indeed, including in urban and peri-urban areas. These arguments include:
Climate change: in the case of meat production, most of the climate change impacts come from producing the meat. However, with many fruits and vegetables the climate "costs" of production are much lower, and more of the "cost" comes from storage, transport, refrigeration and waste. The lettuce grown in the back garden can be brought into the house, washed and eaten with no food miles, refrigeration or waste.
Resilience: fruits and vegetables are fragile and the current supermarket systems for getting them to the consumer, while highly effective in their own terms, are also highly dependent on just-in-time, rapid, refrigerated transport. Should this transport be compromised, for example by a sudden discontinuity in the availability of diesel, customers would not be able to access fresh produce.
Labour: at present one of the biggest problems for the UK horticultural industry is being able to find labour. Yet with rising unemployment, towns and cities may soon have pools of unemployed people looking for work. It makes sense to put labour-intensive food production, like fruit and vegetable production, within walking or cycling distance of people who need work.
Poverty: the flip side of the same argument is that, if people are unemployed and struggling to afford good food, one way in which they can access good food is to grow more themselves. Fruit and vegetables are the easiest category of food for own production, as there is a widespread base of skilled gardeners already in existence, and because useful amounts of food can be grown on modest amounts of land, including gardens and allotments.
In Cuba, when the oil supply was largely cut off following the collapse of the Soviet Union, exactly this explosion of informal fruit and vegetable production followed. The informal growers were able to undercut more commercial growers on price, meaning that informal, urban and peri-urban production became the main source of fresh produce. It seems entirely likely that this will happen in the UK - and indeed it should be encouraged, as it provides a more resilient food supply with a built-in mechanism to feed all sections of society, including the poorest. However, Cuba had some strengths on its side: one was a good number of highly-skilled organic agronomists; another was the willingness of the government to make land available in and around Havana for people to start their own vegetable plots.
Approaches to urban and peri-urban agriculture include
- Back-garden growing
- Allotments, including clubs where allotment holders support each other
- Community growing projects such as shared allotments
- Box schemes using urban produce such as Growing Communities.
- Peri-urban market gardening feeding into farmers' markets or box schemes.
For more information see Sustain.