Growing Food in Cities

This report shows, through analysis and a wide variety of case studies, that urban agriculture can, in a very practical way, yield a range of benefits.
These include:
- Community development: by reaffirming community identity, promoting active citizenship, combating age, gender and ethnic discrimination, preventing crime and rehabilitating offenders
- Economic development: by providing skills training, creating local goods and services, and building an alternative economy
- Education: by furthering formal learning at school, non-formal education in the community and helping people with special needs
- Environmental improvement: by increasing biodiversity, tackling waste and reducing transport
- Health: by improving people's diets, encouraging physical activity and promoting mental health
- Leisure: by stimulating voluntary action, generating sustainable tourism and developing arts and crafts
- Sustainable neighbourhoods: by reviving allotments and parks, and regenerating housing developments
Urban food growing projects can face difficulties with access to land, water, money, equipment, knowledge and skills. The report therefore makes a number of recommendations (a summary of these is attached) to policy makers to help ease these problems and, more positively, to encourage and support urban food growing initiatives.
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Europe
Europe is the world's second-smallest continent by surface area, covering just over 10 million square kilometres or 6.8% of the global land area, but it is the third-most populous continent after Asia and Africa, with a population of around 740 million people or about 11% of the world's population. Its climate is heavily affected by warm Atlantic currents that temper winters and summers on much of the continent. In the European Union, farmers represent only 4.7% of the working population, yet manage nearly half of its land area.
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- The Local Food Programme- Assessing the return on investment of Local Food
- Book: Food Utopias- Reimagining citizenship, ethics and community
- UNEP’s 10 Year Framework of Programs on Sustainable Consumption and Production
- Three calls for proposals from Defra
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