Space, land-use planning and the household economy: The role of urban agriculture in the Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana

The implementation of the Structural Adjustment Program have brought untold hardship to millions of urban residents in Ghana to the point of undermining their social safety nets. In response to growing economic hardship, an increasing number of residents in Accra are resorting to urban cultivation as a means of meeting their household needs. Information obtained from a field survey reveals that urban cultivation in Accra contributes, significantly, to the household economy of the practitioners in the form of providing food, generating income, reducing household budget, recycling household wastes, and abating floods. The research also demonstrates that the extent to which urban cultivation is beneficial to urban farmers differs on the basis of gender, household income, garden location and land security.;The study identifies critical variables in Accra that have influenced the evolution of farming in the metropolis over the years. Such variables could be described as either prohibitive, discouraging or encouraging to urban agriculture. In addition, the research identifies various institutional constraints on urban agriculture and how they have hindered the swift growth of urban cultivation in the Accra Metropolitan Area (AMA). But the good news is that, urban agriculture in Accra is a mobile activity, and has evolved a series of adaptive responses to these threats. The research finds that variations in land value, distance of urban gardens from the CBD and land tenure arrangement go a long way to influence a gardener decisions on what to produce, where to produce, who produces, when to produce and why to produce.;This research has also demonstrated that urban cultivation in Accra is not a temporary, stop-gap measure to combat food scarcity, but a permanent initiative on the part of the urban poor to improve their standard of living; in other words, urban agriculture in Accra is a long-term phenomenon which reflects a transformation of the urban landscape to the realities of urban needs and priorities. To promote urban cultivation in Accra, the author suggests means of incorporating urban agriculture into the urban management of Accra through policy formulation, land-use zoning, institutional regulations and infrastructural development.