Squeezing out poor farmers: understanding the constraints and benefits of urban proximity

What are the factors underlying current transformation in rural-urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa? How are livelihood strategies and farming systems changing under the impact of urban expansion? What are the consequences for access to such assets as land and water, education and skills, health, credit, transport and markets?

A paper from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) focuses on the ways in which rural–urban linkages underpin and affect livelihoods in five case study areas in Mali, Nigeria and Tanzania. It describes changes in farming systems under the impact of urban expansion, access to markets, the role of traders and changing patterns of income diversification and mobility. Research findings challenge the ‘virtuous circle’ model of regional development – the assumption that urban centres necessarily stimulate agricultural growth, sustainable non-farm employment and demand for new goods and services in their hinterlands.

In peri-urban areas, small farmers’ access to land is subject to new pressures as allocative procedures under customary tenure regimes give way to land purchases by urban investors and speculators. Everywhere middle and higher-income urban residents are displacing under-capitalised small farmers.

The small-farm sector is undergoing major transformations, including a switch from mixed (subsistence and cash crops) to predominantly commercial orientation, and from small-scale family farms to larger farms relying on wage labour. Small peri-urban farmers with limited skills and education are being forced to engage in precarious low-income seasonally-dependent occupations. The decline in weaving in Nigeria and in vegetable oil production in Tanzania are evidence of the impact that international trade liberalisation is having on local small-scale processing and manufacturing.

The authors also describe how:

• The family as the traditional unit of production and consumption is being replaced by more individual priorities and behaviours.
• Traditional gendered divisions of labour ensure major differences in the ways in which women and men perceive new opportunities and constraints linked to urban expansion.
• Post-liberalisation restrictions on access to credit in Tanzania and credit recovery problems and mismanagement of state owned bodies in Mali and Nigeria have increased small farmers’ vulnerability.
• Poor infrastructure and inability to reach markets impedes poor farmers: in southern Tanzania cashew growers are at the mercy of traders, while in south-eastern Nigeria when seasonal rains close feeder roads it is only the better-off who are able to hire tractors to get produce to urban customers.
• As state extension services wither, emerging informal information networks disproportionately benefit larger farmers.
• Although labour migration of young men (and increasingly of women) remains vital for many rural communities, income from remittances is declining due to urban job insecurity and spiralling living costs.

Policy-makers must:

• abandon their increasingly outdated assumption that rural households are homogenous, relatively stable units of production and consumption
• tackle the inadequacies of transport, food processing and storage facilities which depress local production and increase vulnerability to cheaper imports
• promote decentralisation to boost the capacity, and the legitimacy, of local government
• set up enforceable regulatory frameworks linked to provision of incentives to private investors to transport and process local produce
• analyse the potential role of local governments as enablers of market-led growth within the wider context of changing global trade and production patterns.

 

Source(s):
‘Changing rural–urban linkages in Mali, Nigeria and Tanzania’ by Mahmoud Bah, Salmana Cissé , Gouro Diallo, Bitrina Diyamett, Fred Lerise, David Okali, Enoch Okpara, Janice Olawoye and Cecilia Tacoli, Environment and Urbanization, Vol 15, No 1, pp13-23, April 2003 Full document.

Funded by: DFID, EC, IDRC, Sida, Danida, SDC

id21 Research Highlight: 11 March 2004

Further Information:
Cecilia Tacoli
IIED
3 Endsleigh Street
London WC1H 0DD
UK

Tel: + 44 (0) 207 388 2117
Fax: + 44 (0) 207 388 2826
Contact the contributor: cecilia.tacoli@iied.org

International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), UK

Bitrina Diyamett
Principal Scientific Officer, Tanzania Commission for Science and
Technology (COSTECH)
PO Box 4302
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania

Tel: + 255 22 2700752
Contact the contributor: bitrind@yahoo.com

Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology, COSTECH

Other related links:
'Mind the gap: bridging the urban-rural divide'

'Food security in the context of urban sub-Saharan Africa'

DFID-IUDD Infrastructure Connect