The 15th “Eschborner Fachtage”, which Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) runs once a year early in the summer, centred on “The city as a global player – driving transformation” in June 2012. In the course of the meeting, the GIZ Division Rural Development and Agriculture discussed the role of urban agriculture with around 100 participants.

At the opening of the 15th Eschborn Dialogue, held at the GIZ facilities in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, Germany, Chairman of the Management Board Dr. Bernd Eisenblätter pointed to the rapidly growing significance of cities in the global development process. Already in 2007, more people had been living in cities than in rural regions. Cities had always been the nuclei of transformation processes and radical changes, Eisenblätter stressed. With a view to the forthcoming Rio+20 Sustainability Conference, the GIZ official reminded the roughly 400 participants that while cities only covered two percent of the Earth’s surface, they were contributing around 75 percent of world-wide CO2 emissions. This was also presenting a huge challenge for development cooperation, for most of the megacities could be found in developing countries and emerging economies.
 
Discussion forum on urban agriculture
 
How can sufficient supplies of food be secured for everyone living in megacities, regardless of whether they are rich or poor? Are there forward-looking solutions to this problem? These were questions that the GIZ Division Rural Development and Agriculture addressed in its discussion forum.
 
Food security in major urban agglomerations is often particularly difficult for the poorer sections of the population because they lack the financial means to simply do the shopping at the nearby supermarket. Providing food supplies for cities with tens of millions of inhabitants means an optimum of logistics and an enormous transportation effort, which is reflected in the prices. The consequence is a steady increase in the share of income for food purchasing. Just how critical this development can be became apparent during the food crisis in 2008, when the rural poor were only capable of providing themselves with bare essentials, which also resulted in children and women in particular suffering from malnutrition.
 
In Germany and Europe, too, the urban population were hit by hunger following wars and crises in the 19th and 20th centuries. These were the times in which allotment gardening developed in Germany and the famous country cottages of Russia and the Soviet Union were started. In these gardens, fruit, vegetables and potatoes were grown above all, with even the smallest space being made use of. A country cottage, in particular, would also have a cow and poultry. Of course, garden plots and microfarming in backyards and stairwells and on the roofs of houses are part of the everyday picture in almost every major city of Africa, Asia or Latin America. Immigrants contribute their experience in agriculture, and in even the smallest spaces, they grow vegetables for their own use as well as for the market. Backyard small animal husbandry is especially profitable, particularly for women.
 
These topics were dealt with in the first part of the symposium, which was backed by short films and accounts of case studies on the role of urban gardening in Berlin/Germany, Lima/Peru, New York and Detroit/USA, Qatar and Tokyo/Japan.
 
Vertical agriculture and sky farming
 
What will urban gardening look like in the future? How can enough food be produced for the growing agglomerations in the cities, each with its ten million people? The organisers of the Eschborn meeting presented two examples: vertical agriculture and sky farming. As was soon recognised during the presentations by Elena Endres, Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental Safety and Energy Technology, Oberhausen, Germany, and Professor Volkard Asch, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany, both examples are based on an ingenious technology employing hydroponic systems. In simple terms, this means that the plants are growing on water and not on soil, and that they are supplied with nutrients via the water. Both experts presented models of houses in which vertical agriculture could be practised, but they conceded that many questions still remained unanswered, such as the provision of sunlight, without which no plant can grow. It is doubtful whether the use of LED lamps can be an alternative.
 
A simplified form of sky farming can already be seen in some large cities and is increasingly being adopted by architects in their plans. It incorporates greenhouses on roofs and large verandas. While they are not supplying millions of people with sufficient amounts of food, they can certainly make a fair contribution.
 
Angelika Wilcke, Rural 21