What Constraints the Expansion of Urban Agriculture in Benin?

Abstract

Propelled by rapid urbanization, city administrations in low- and middle-income countries face a raft of challenges to secure food and nutrition for its poor urban dwellers. Urban agriculture (UA) seems a viable intervention to address urban food insecurity, however, experience has shown that urban gardens do not expand at the expected rate. Tackling this issue requires a deeper understanding of the main constraints that block UA expansion. Benin is not an exception; the country witnesses a breathtaking growth of its main cities that is in synchronization with a mounting food insecurity. Our research aims, therefore, to identify the main constraints for the expansion of UA in Benin, and adopt a three-pronged approach combined with a systematic literature review, a survey held among experienced urban gardeners, and in-depth interviews with stakeholders. Altogether, the synthesis shows a predominance of five main constraints: lack of land and tenure insecurity, insufficient government support, restricted market access, limited access to productive factors, and inequality issues. Specifically, while the review showed that most barriers are linked and could be tackled together, the survey indicated a political unwillingness which in our in-depth interviews is explained by the unperceived benefits of investing in UA and the lack of enforcement of urban development plans. We suggest that Beninese authorities and academics move in synchronization where the former coordinates the planning of urban gardens and the latter provides evidence to trigger public and private investments in UA. The findings could be the basis for further research on UA in West Africa and the wider continent.

Introduction to the Special Issue “A Systemic Perspective on Urban Food Supply: Assessing Different Types of Urban Agriculture”

“…In fact, this study was the only one in this Special Issue implementing a transnational case study while focusing on Germany and New Zealand [25]. The significance of a lack of government support constraining the expansion and maintenance of UA was confirmed by Houessou et al [36] and Muñoz-Rodríguez et al [42]. In the case study of Houessou et al [36] in Benin, the authors highlight that in addition to an insecure access to urban land, restricted marked access and inequality issues, insufficient government support is hindering the expansion of UA in Benin [36].…”

“…The significance of a lack of government support constraining the expansion and maintenance of UA was confirmed by Houessou et al [36] and Muñoz-Rodríguez et al [42]. In the case study of Houessou et al [36] in Benin, the authors highlight that in addition to an insecure access to urban land, restricted marked access and inequality issues, insufficient government support is hindering the expansion of UA in Benin [36]. The authors suggest that the assessment of the benefits provided by UA (such as conducted by [29,32,33,35,37,39,40], see Section 2.2) can strengthen the political will to consider UA as an important part of an ecologically, economically, and socially sound urban development.…”

“…Looking at this broad picture of potential measurements of UA impacts and implementation, there is further no clear preference for either quantitative or qualitative methods (see Figure 2). While two studies relied on pure qualitative analysis [25,34] and five on quantitative analysis [30,31,35,40,41], the majority of eight studies used mixed-methods approaches and combined qualitative methods (e.g., focus group discussions, stakeholder workshops, on-site visits, or expert interviews) with quantitative methods (e.g., online questionnaires or on-site surveys) [29,32,33,[36][37][38][39]42]. Given the multidimensional impacts of UA and its general multifunctionality [2,43], a mixed-methods approach often seems to be an advisable choice to tackle the different dimensions.…”

“…It contains contributions on sociocultural [25,[29][30][31][32], commercial [33][34][35] and self-supply [36,37] UA types, along with studies focusing on either varying or mixed UA types [38][39][40][41]. Comparing the scope of the studies in terms of focusing on technology-or nature-based UA, the majority of the papers deal with nature-based forms of UA [25,[29][30][31]36,39,40,42], while only three papers investigate technology-oriented types of UA [33,35,37] (see Figure 1). All in all, the case studies cover towns and cities all over the world and address a wide range of various types of UA, its impact and implementation dimensions, research objectives, and methodologies reflecting the interdisciplinarity and international research of UA.…”

“…In total, seven papers in this Special Issue deal with drivers and constraints for implementing various types of UA. Hereby, the focus of three papers is on the social dimension [30,31,34]; two papers take into account a multidimensional [25,36], one a political [42], and a conceptual paper a systemic perspective [38].…”