Dear friends of iZindaba Zokudla. Please join us for our first workshop of the year. I will be introducing the course: Nxazonke: Urban Agriculture Enterprise Development. This year, 2025, we will be piloting the course, and I need this year to optimise the course for the formal launch of the Short Learning Programme in 2026.
We will meet in B3, UJ Soweto Campus, at 9 am for 930 am. Please bring an ID, passport or birth certificate to gain access to campus.
In this workshop I will introduce the course and conduct a market opportunity analysis for urban agriculture. I am foregrounding this market analysis, as urban agriculture should be approached as a commercial market opportunity. Urban farmers are often the focus of funders and donors, but these stakeholders do not contemplate the position of urban agriculture in food systems and in markets. We have to be able to adapt our prescriptions for urban agriculture by reference to the “smallness” of the enterprises, the very pertinent market opportunities they can satisfy, and then adapt prescriptions for production systems, retail and technology to the market opportunities urban agriculture faces.
The first port of call should be a market analysis. Every farmer should be clear what it is that they can deliver, and what the very specific advantages are that they hold. The enterprise should be built on these key competitive advantages urban agriculture holds, and this will be due to the very specific nature of the enterprises, and the very specific nature of the customers that are served.
I have gained a lot of experience from urban farmers. The key challenge I see is that urban farmers are not able to sell effectively, and this indicates a focus on retail and effective selling. We also need to transform how a welfarist perspective sees urban agriculture. Often urban agriculture is promoted as it can mobilise and deliver a kind of food justice. This position neglects the need of the farmer to gain an economic advantage and livelihood, and it is this economic incentive that can perpetuate the welfare effects that may indeed transpire. My recommendation is to operationalise these welfare effects as a customer led waste harvesting and farmer-based food for waste exchange system. In this way customers can reduce the prices of their own purchases, and this transforms the welfare impacts into a net positive value creation. This makes the intersection with welfare productive, and gives the customer agency so this welfare effect can be upheld by the customer. Relying on “social capital” or “sentiment” to uphold these welfare effects creates opportunities for nefarious agents to opportunistically use these relationships for ends we do not know of.
We have to build urban agricultural enterprises as social institutions that reorganise customer and farmer behaviour into a net positive value creating arrangement. By building viable enterprises, this value creating institutional structure can be upheld and this will enable long term sustainability of the sector.
I look forward to hosting you next week in Soweto.
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