Food Production in Urban Areas; A Study of Urban Agriculture in Accra, Ghana

THERE ARE NOT that many books on urban agriculture in Africa, so this one on urban agriculture in the capital of Ghana is a welcome addition to the literature. The book consists of ten chapters. Chapter 2 is a review of the literature, where the author introduces the so-called “cultural lag model”, which means that a person’s decision to practice urban farming can, at least partly, be explained by his/her cultural background which, in sub-Saharan Africa, is almost always rural. Chapter 4 is an historical account of the emergence of contemporary urban agriculture in Ghana. Chapter 5 deals with the often neglected issue of the policy-makers’ and administrators’ attitudes toward urban agriculture. In Chapters 6 to 9 the results of a study among 200 urban farmers in Accra are presented. Chapter 7 is on the influence of social inequality on urban agriculture and Chapter 8 on the effects of social networks on urban agriculture. Two social categories are used as the basis for the analysis: lower-class and middle/upper-class. A geographical categorization is also used based on the location of the plots: “open space cultivation” (at some distance from the home, on land belonging to someone else) and “enclosed cultivation” (in one’s own compound), reflecting the way of sampling in the field.

This helps highlight one of the major social problems in contemporary urban Africa, namely, that there exists a large and growing group of people with a relatively high level of education who cannot find employment in the formal sector. They are forced to make a living in the informal sector, urban farming being one of the activities they may undertake. The point here is that educational level is not a reliable indicator of social class in present-day Africa.